What happened when Michael Quinn challenged the history of the church he loved.
One Sunday in February of 1993, Michael Quinn was home sick with a fever when his doorbell rang. Wearing a bathrobe, he answered after several rings and found three men in suits and ties on his doorstep. The Mormon church is organized into congregations called wards; a group of these is called a stake. The men at his door were the local stake president and his two counselors, the men responsible for overseeing all the congregations in the area. The stake president, a man named Paul Hanks, tried to step into the apartment as he said hello, Quinn recalls. It struck him as an old missionary’s trick.
Quinn had been avoiding this confrontation for nearly five years. In 1988 he resigned his position at Brigham Young University, the private college owned and operated by the Mormon church, having decided that his interest in the “problem areas” of the religion’s past jeopardized not only his position on the history faculty but his membership in the church itself. He took a fellowship at the Huntington Library, near his hometown of Pasadena, Calif., and began indexing his enormous collection of notes on old Mormon documents, in preparation for his next book. After 18 months, he moved to New Orleans, where it was less expensive to live. There, he tried other kinds of writing, thinking maybe he’d put Mormon history behind him.
In California, Quinn had picked up his mail at a P.O. Box 15 miles from where he was staying, and in New Orleans he had it delivered to a receiving center a little ways from his apartment. The modern Mormon church has become a fairly top-down organization, but most responsibility for attending to its members still resides in local lay leaders. Quinn’s religious status would—officially, at least—be decided by his own stake president, not by the higher-ups in Salt Lake City. If those top leaders did not know where he lived, then they could not assign him to a particular stake, and his church membership could not be threatened. That, in any case, was his thinking. Quinn had spent three years in the military in the late ’60s, working in counterintelligence. “I know how to avoid people I didn’t want to be in contact with,” he says. Though he maintained a solemn belief in the Mormon gospel and in the sacrament partaken of by the faithful at Sunday services, he stopped attending church altogether.
But by the fall of ’92 he had to return to Salt Lake City to finish research on the book, and he had grown tired of hiding from church authorities. He moved back to Utah and began receiving mail at his actual address. The book he was finishing, which would be published in 1994, was called The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power. When the men from the stake presidency came to his door in February, Quinn was living three blocks from the Salt Lake Temple and the worldwide headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
A box of old photos belonging to Michael Quinn at his home.
Daryl Peveto/Luceo
One Sunday in February of 1993, Michael Quinn was home sick with a fever when his doorbell rang. Wearing a bathrobe, he answered after several rings and found three men in suits and ties on his doorstep. The Mormon church is organized into congregations called wards; a group of these is called a stake. The men at his door were the local stake president and his two counselors, the men responsible for overseeing all the congregations in the area. The stake president, a man named Paul Hanks, tried to step into the apartment as he said hello, Quinn recalls. It struck him as an old missionary’s trick.
Quinn had been avoiding this confrontation for nearly five years. In 1988 he resigned his position at Brigham Young University, the private college owned and operated by the Mormon church, having decided that his interest in the “problem areas” of the religion’s past jeopardized not only his position on the history faculty but his membership in the church itself. He took a fellowship at the Huntington Library, near his hometown of Pasadena, Calif., and began indexing his enormous collection of notes on old Mormon documents, in preparation for his next book. After 18 months, he moved to New Orleans, where it was less expensive to live. There, he tried other kinds of writing, thinking maybe he’d put Mormon history behind him.
In California, Quinn had picked up his mail at a P.O. Box 15 miles from where he was staying, and in New Orleans he had it delivered to a receiving center a little ways from his apartment. The modern Mormon church has become a fairly top-down organization, but most responsibility for attending to its members still resides in local lay leaders. Quinn’s religious status would—officially, at least—be decided by his own stake president, not by the higher-ups in Salt Lake City. If those top leaders did not know where he lived, then they could not assign him to a particular stake, and his church membership could not be threatened. That, in any case, was his thinking. Quinn had spent three years in the military in the late ’60s, working in counterintelligence. “I know how to avoid people I didn’t want to be in contact with,” he says. Though he maintained a solemn belief in the Mormon gospel and in the sacrament partaken of by the faithful at Sunday services, he stopped attending church altogether.
But by the fall of ’92 he had to return to Salt Lake City to finish research on the book, and he had grown tired of hiding from church authorities. He moved back to Utah and began receiving mail at his actual address. The book he was finishing, which would be published in 1994, was called The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power. When the men from the stake presidency came to his door in February, Quinn was living three blocks from the Salt Lake Temple and the worldwide headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
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