Excerpts of Noted historian still believes in Mormonism, but now as an outsider by Peggy Fletcher Stack, Salt Lake Tribune
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D. Michael Quinn is the kind of researcher whose obsessive interest in the Mormon past compelled him to read every church authority's journal, to scour the country's libraries and private collections for LDS documents and to analyze every anti-Mormon pamphlet he could find, hunting for ways to justify contradictions between simplified official accounts and messy human history.
The accomplished scholar and lifelong believer naively assumed that these two halves of his personality were complementary, that he would use them to build up the faith he loved.
In reality, Quinn's twin passions were on an inexorable collision course from his teen years in the 1960s until September 1993, when the Yale-trained historian was drummed out of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for apostasy.
That same month, four other writers and feminists were excommunicated and one was disfellowshipped. Together, they became known as the "September Six."
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D. Michael Quinn is the kind of researcher whose obsessive interest in the Mormon past compelled him to read every church authority's journal, to scour the country's libraries and private collections for LDS documents and to analyze every anti-Mormon pamphlet he could find, hunting for ways to justify contradictions between simplified official accounts and messy human history.
The accomplished scholar and lifelong believer naively assumed that these two halves of his personality were complementary, that he would use them to build up the faith he loved.
In reality, Quinn's twin passions were on an inexorable collision course from his teen years in the 1960s until September 1993, when the Yale-trained historian was drummed out of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for apostasy.
That same month, four other writers and feminists were excommunicated and one was disfellowshipped. Together, they became known as the "September Six."
