Discipline, Dissent, and the September Six

The CES Letter presents six people disciplined in 1993 — in Jeremy’s words, “allegedly for publishing scholarly work on Mormonism or critiquing Church doctrine or leadership” — as proof that the Church fears the life of the mind. The documented record supports a narrower and more honest reading, and the difference between the two is the whole argument.

The Claim

The CES Letter’s Argument

The CES Letter points to the September 1993 excommunication or disfellowshipment of six LDS scholars and intellectuals, and to the Strengthening Church Members Committee — which keeps files on members and forwards concerns about them to local leaders — as evidence that the Church is fundamentally anti-intellectual and intolerant of honest inquiry.

The Fork Jeremy Chose

Every claim in this section turns on one connective word: for. Jeremy writes that the September Six were disciplined “allegedly for publishing scholarly work on Mormonism or critiquing Church doctrine or leadership.” His own sentence already braids together two very different things — publishing scholarly work and critiquing Church doctrine or leadership — and treats them as one interchangeable offense. But the case rises or falls on which strand the councils actually acted against, and that word for quietly asserts a cause. It forces a choice between two readings of the same events.

The simpler path — the one Jeremy took: These people were scholars. They were disciplined. Therefore they were disciplined because they were scholars, and the Church punishes inquiry itself. Clean, memorable, and it produces six martyrs of the mind.

The harder path — the one the record actually supports: Being a scholar and being disciplined are two true facts that do not, by themselves, establish a cause. The disciplinary councils — each convened by a local bishop or stake president, not by a general officer — addressed specific, documented, and public conduct: organized public advocacy against defined covenant commitments, undertaken after leaders had asked the individuals to step back. In those very same years, the Church was pouring resources into serious scholarship on the hardest topics in its own history.

Jeremy’s second strand — “critiquing Church doctrine or leadership” — deserves a direct answer, because it is the stronger half of his phrase and it points at something real. But it is far too wide a net. Private disagreement, published scholarship, and honest questions about doctrine are not disciplinable, and the record shows they were not disciplined: hundreds of Latter-day Saint historians and writers critiqued, revised, and complicated the tradition in print throughout these same years and kept their membership. What the councils addressed was the narrow tip of that category — sustained, organized, public opposition to ordained leaders and covenants, continued after repeated pastoral requests to step back. Folding that slice into “critiquing leadership” makes the objection sound sweeping while the actual conduct was specific.

The nuanced reading is better supported for a reason Jeremy’s framing never reckons with: it explains all the evidence, including the parts that embarrass the simple version — the local councils, the reinstatements, and the enormous academic apparatus the Church funds. The simple version has to look away from those. Jeremy chose the reading that required looking away from more.

The Strongest Version of the Objection

A serious critic does not stop at “they were scholars.” The strongest form of this argument points to something specific and real. Four months before the September councils, Elder Boyd K. Packer addressed the All-Church Coordinating Council (May 18, 1993) and named three sources of danger to the Church:

Elder Boyd K. Packer, 1993

“The dangers I speak of come from the gay-lesbian movement, the feminist movement (both of which are relatively new), and the ever-present challenge from the so-called scholars or intellectuals.”

This is the version worth answering. An Apostle names intellectuals as a danger, and within months a cluster of intellectuals and feminists is disciplined. That is not nothing, and a faithful answer that pretends the talk does not exist is not worth reading. So take it head-on.

First, read what Elder Packer actually said. He did not name scholarship; he named the “so-called scholars or intellectuals” — a deliberate phrase distinguishing advocacy that borrows the prestige of scholarship from the genuine article. His stated worry was that three movements could be used to unsettle the faith of the Saints, and that “our local leaders must deal with all three.” That is a pastoral warning about activism aimed at the Church, not a decree that studying history is sinful.

Second, look at the mechanism. If this had been a top-down purge, the discipline would have flowed from Salt Lake. It did not. Each of the six faced a council of local leaders acting under their own stewardship — different cities, different dates spread across a single month, different specific charges. The Church’s consistent practice, before and since, is that membership councils are local, weighing conduct the individual’s own bishop or stake president can see. Timing that looks coordinated on a calendar dissolves into six separate local judgments once you read the cases.

Third, and decisively: an anti-intellectual institution does not fund the intellect. In these exact years the Church was building the scholarly infrastructure examined below. You cannot simultaneously be waging war on scholarship and staffing a historians’ project to publish your own founder’s most difficult papers. The Church’s conviction that honest inquiry and faith belong together is argued at length on our companion site — Does the Church Suppress Truth-Seeking?

Response

1. What the Six Were Actually Disciplined For

Five were excommunicated and one (Lynne Whitesides) was disfellowshipped, across September 1993. The word “for” matters, so here is what the councils addressed in each case:

  • Lavina Fielding Anderson — had published, and continued to publish after being asked to stop, a running public catalogue accusing named local leaders of ecclesiastical “abuse.” The issue was the ongoing public accusation, not the writing of history.
  • Paul Toscano — disciplined after a public address that leaders read as an open repudiation of prophetic authority and a call to resist it.
  • Maxine Hanks — publicly organized and edited a volume advocating female ordination as an active cause. (Rebaptized in 2012.)
  • Lynne Kanavel Whitesides — then president of the Mormon Women’s Forum, disfellowshipped in connection with sustained public advocacy, including feminist teaching on Heavenly Mother pressed publicly against leaders’ counsel.
  • Avraham Gileadi — the most ambiguous case, involving his Isaiah interpretation; he reconciled quietly and was rebaptized with full blessings in 1996.
  • D. Michael Quinn — a genuine and gifted historian, disciplined in the context of what leaders regarded as a sustained public campaign against institutional authority.

Quinn is the case a fair critic presses hardest, and it should be met plainly: he did serious, lasting historical work, and reasonable people can question whether his council reached the right result. But notice what that concession is — a question about one application, not proof of a policy against scholarship. And notice the pattern in the rest: public advocacy, public organizing, and continued public accusation after being asked to desist. That is the line the councils were drawing, and it is not the line Jeremy drew.

The reinstatements are the tell. Gileadi returned in 1996 with priesthood and temple blessings restored; Hanks was rebaptized in 2012. A church that excommunicated people for being scholars would have no path back for a scholar. That several found one shows the door was never closed on inquiry — only on public campaigning against the covenant from inside it.

2. Inquiry Is Free; Covenant Membership Has Terms

The CES Letter blurs two different things. Academic freedom protects a scholar’s right to research and publish; the Church runs no tribunal over a member’s work at a secular university. Covenant membership is a voluntary belonging to a community defined by specific commitments, including sustaining ordained leadership. Every covenant community keeps some terms of membership — that is what makes it a covenant rather than a mailing list.

This is not a Mormon peculiarity but the ordinary logic of any body with a shared, revealed order — a point developed in Why an Organized Church Matters. A church organized by revelation necessarily has an inside and an outside; membership means something precisely because it can, in principle, be forfeited. The honest question is never “may a covenant community set terms?” — every one does — but “were the terms here reasonable, and applied justly in a given case?” That is a real question about particular councils. It is not evidence of a structural fear of thought.

3. The Strengthening Church Members Committee

Here the honest answer must give a critic his due: the committee is real, it does keep records, and information from it has reached local leaders. None of that is denied — and, tellingly, none of it was ever secret in the way the word “surveillance” implies. When the committee’s existence became a public question in 1992, the First Presidency did not deny it. It issued a public statement (August 22, 1992) confirming the committee and grounding it in a scriptural charge to gather and preserve records (D&C 123). An operation that answers a reporter’s question with an on-the-record statement is not a secret police.

What the committee does is review public material — published articles, recorded speeches, media appearances — and forward it to the local leaders responsible for the members named. It does not wiretap, follow people, or open private mail. This is the ordinary practice of any large institution that tracks what its prominent members say in public: a corporation notes when an officer contradicts policy; a university notes when a professor publicly urges illegality. Calling a clipping-and-routing function “espionage” inflates it well past what the record shows.

This is also the point at which the “local, not top-down” answer has to meet its hardest objection head-on: if the committee forwards a file and a local council then acts, isn’t that central targeting wearing a local mask? The record does not support that read. Forwarding a folder of already-public speeches and articles is not the same as directing a verdict — the committee gathered nothing a local leader could not have read for himself, and it issued no charge, convened no council, and rendered no judgment. Those steps remained with the bishop or stake president, under his own stewardship, which is exactly why the outcomes diverged: one disfellowshipment rather than excommunication, several later reinstatements, and cases that turned on conduct in the member’s own ward. A genuine top-down purge would have produced uniform results on a single date; six differing local judgments are what actually happened.

It is fair to find the idea of a file uncomfortable. That discomfort is legitimate and we will not wave it away — but discomfort with the monitoring of public statements is a very different thing from the invasive surveillance the CES Letter conjures.

4. “Anti-Intellectual” Collapses Against the Record

The charge of fundamental anti-intellectualism cannot survive the institution’s own investments:

  • The Church runs one of the largest private university systems in the United States — Brigham Young University (Provo), BYU–Idaho, BYU–Hawaii, and Ensign College.
  • The Joseph Smith Papers Project employed professional historians to publish the founder’s documents in full — including the difficult ones — to scholarly editorial standards.
  • The Neal A. Maxwell Institute and BYU Studies Quarterly have published peer-reviewed work for decades on textual criticism, ancient languages, evolution, and historical method.
  • Scripture makes learning a commandment: “Seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith” (D&C 88:118). And the measure of God’s own glory is stated as knowledge: “The glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth” (D&C 93:36).

A faith whose scripture makes intelligence the very glory of God, and which builds universities and historians’ projects to match, is not at war with the mind. It asks something narrower: that inquiry be pursued within, not weaponized against, the covenant that binds the community together.

5. The Same Line Every Tradition Draws

The tension between an institution’s teaching authority and a member’s public dissent is not a Mormon anomaly. Rome disciplined the theologians Hans Küng and Charles Curran for public positions against magisterial teaching. Evangelical bodies have removed pastors who publicly abandoned foundational commitments. Jewish communities placed dissenters in cherem — most famously Spinoza. A church that never drew such a line would be the true outlier. The just question is always about the specific case, never about whether the line may exist at all.

There is one further thread worth naming. Part of what fueled the 1990s tension was a sense that the Church’s harder history was hidden — a charge answered separately in Church History and Selective Disclosure, which shows how much of that material was in fact published and available in the pre-2013 record. The disclosure question and the discipline question are often merged; they are not the same, and neither one carries the weight Jeremy hangs on it.

Verdict

Resolved. The headline claim — excommunicated for scholarship — does not hold. The councils were local, the charges were specific acts of public advocacy and organized opposition, and the reinstatements of Gileadi and Hanks prove the door was never shut on inquiry. The Church’s vast investment in scholarship, and scripture that crowns intelligence as God’s glory, sink the “anti-intellectual” charge. Even the SCMC, far from a secret police, was confirmed in an on-the-record First Presidency statement. On the core accusation, Jeremy took the simpler path when the better-supported one lay in plain view.

Genuinely — and only mildly — open. Whether every one of the six councils reached the right result on its own facts is a fair question; the Quinn case in particular can be debated in good faith. And thoughtful members may still feel unease that a committee keeps records of public statements at all. These are honest, bounded questions about wisdom and tone in particular cases. They are a very long way from the sweeping charge that the Church fears the truth — a charge the record simply will not bear.

Further Study