D. Michael Quinn: Mormon HistorianDNA Mormon: Perspectives on the Legacy of Historian D. Michael Quinn
2024; Volume: 11; Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/21568030.11.24
ISSN2156-8030
Autores Tópico(s)American Constitutional Law and Politics
Resumowith these two titles, signature books is doing what publishers do in a world where you can buy, and therefore sell, anything for money: turning the death of their most famous author into new commercial opportunities. Gary Topping's D. Michael Quinn: Mormon Historian (begun, in fairness, before Quinn's death) was written for a newly launched series of short biographies on Mormon historical figures; other titles in the series are about Virginia Sorensen and Harold B. Lee, among others.1DNA Mormon contains papers from a symposium held in Quinn's honor at the University of Utah the year after he died, organized by Benjamin E. Park, the collection's editor. At the time these two titles went on sale, Signature was preparing a third book, scheduled for release in summer 2023: a never-before-published Quinn autobiography.The tone of Topping's biography is what one would expect from the sometimes-combative press that published most of Quinn's monographs and on whose board of editors Quinn once sat. Topping is not fawning—he offers criticisms of Quinn's work—but he ultimately paints Quinn as heroic, someone who told historical truth with "absolute integrity" and was "savagely punished." Topping hails Quinn as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' "arguably most courageously honest historian," whose reputation as a "maverick" is an "indictment" of other Latter-day Saint historians, who "fall short of where they should be" (126–28).Topping recycles the narrative of Quinn's life laid out in an earlier Signature publication: Lavina Fielding Anderson's biographical essay "DNA Mormon: D. Michael Quinn," from the 2002 anthology Mormon Mavericks.2 Topping structures his book similarly to Anderson's essay, combining biographical narrative with one-by-one reviews of Quinn's monographs. Topping also reduces Quinn's life to the same "story arc" as Anderson. Consequently, while Topping provides considerably more detail than Anderson did about Quinn's life leading up to his 1993 excommunication, he does very little to update the story past where Anderson left off in 2002. After taking three chapters to recount the first three decades of Quinn's life, Topping dedicates a mere four pages to narrating the three decades after Quinn's excommunication, because for Topping, as in Anderson's essay, the story arc ends with the excommunication: Quinn's whole life after that is epilogue.It should be noted that Quinn helped produce Anderson's and Topping's tellings of his life. In Quinn's 1981 speech, "On Being a Mormon Historian"—his rebuttal to Latter-day Saint apostle Boyd K. Packer's rebuke of the New Mormon History, which brought Quinn into the national media spotlight—Quinn included an autobiographical sketch that became part of the story told by Anderson and Topping. When the speech was later published (by Signature), Quinn added a lengthy afterword telling his version of the events leading to his resignation from BYU—the same story retold by Anderson and Topping—and casting himself as a champion for "freedom of inquiry and expression without fear, obstruction, or intimidation."3 Furthermore, Quinn himself was Anderson's and Topping's primary source for information about the first half of his life (before he became famous), in the form of his published and unpublished writings and public and personal interviews. This is all to say that Topping's biography is Quinn's life as told by an admirer who is largely retelling Quinn's own telling of his life—which you will also very soon be able to buy.In the introduction to DNA Mormon (the 2022 collection, not Anderson's 2002 essay), Benjamin Park echoes Topping's heroic, exemplary portrayal when Park lauds Quinn for "providing the tools, demonstrating the bravery, and pointing the way for the world of Mormonism in general, and Mormon studies in particular" (xi). However, DNA Mormon aims to expand beyond Topping's (and Anderson's, and Quinn's) narrative of intellectual heroism to contribute new perspectives on Quinn's life and work. The offerings are eclectic. Neil J. Young contextualizes Quinn's clashes with LDS Church leaders in a larger American cultural struggle between anti-authoritarian trends of the 1960s and a conservative backlash in the 1980s. Fellow "September Sixer" Maxine Hanks paints Quinn as someone who followed her back into the LDS Church, albeit symbolically or in spirit only. Patrick Q. Mason and Hovan Lawton argue that despite his revisionist reputation, Quinn had a "conservative" conviction that LDS Church leaders are divinely led. Ian Barber observes that despite the controversy generated by Quinn's Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, the LDS Church has adopted an understanding akin to Quinn's view that Joseph Smith Jr.'s magical beliefs and practices contributed to the restoration, in place of a rival apologetic approach that separates Smith's magical past from the restoration. There are contributors to this book who refer to Quinn as "queer" and as "Chicano." I am not aware that Quinn claimed either those labels or the cultural politics associated with them, but posthumously baptizing him with those labels highlights elements of his identity not foregrounded in the "intellectual hero" narrative and thus offers additional ways for progressive Latter-day Saints today to identify with Quinn.The three contributors to DNA Mormon who are most critical—I mean that word in multiple senses—are Sujey Vega, K. Morhman, and Sara M. Patterson. Vega criticizes Quinn personally: she faults him for not embracing the Chicano politics that she regards as normative for someone with Mexican ancestry. Mohrman criticizes the theoretical simplicity of Quinn's work on same-sex dynamics, though she is grateful for his documenting of sources, and she proposes more sophisticated ways for Mormon studies scholars generally to approach sexuality and gender. Patterson criticizes the way that Quinn's admirers—including Anderson, Topping, and Park—have customarily narrated his life. It is with Patterson's analysis that I will engage for the remainder of this review.Patterson identifies two framing narratives typical of Quinn's admirers: a "martyr narrative," in which Quinn suffers for a meaningful cause, and an "exaltative narrative," which defines Quinn's suffering as his failure to achieve "production, reproduction, and exaltation" (38)—that is, the loss of his career, his marriage, and his church membership. Patterson seeks to liberate Quinn from what she calls the "straightjacket"4 of these narratives by challenging the heteronormative and capitalist values underlying them. Why is it a bad thing that Quinn abandoned conventional employment, heterosexual marriage, and the LDS Church? Instead of casting Quinn as a suffering martyr, Patterson proposes that we reframe his story as one of queer liberation, in which Quinn breaks free of the church and his marriage to find happiness as an independent researcher embraced by a new gay Mormon community.Patterson's deconstructive analysis is astute. I share her dismay at how the martyr narrative devalues Quinn's life after excommunication, as we see in Topping's biography. I am tempted by her liberatory counternarrative because it would help me feel less devastated about Quinn's fate. I am tempted, but I have not bitten. I do not believe Patterson's liberatory counternarrative does justice to Quinn's own experiences of loss, as documented in the autobiographical sources on which Anderson and Topping rely. Patterson's counternarrative does not tell us how driven Quinn was as a young adult to prepare himself to become LDS Church historian, nor does it tell us how he "hungered for," but did not find, "a relationship, a partnership" following his divorce and coming out, to quote the impression that Sujey Vega takes from Quinn's unpublished autobiographical writings, as she reports it in her contribution to DNA Mormon (54). Speaking anecdotally, as someone who participated in the gay Mormon organization Affirmation during the period Patterson discusses, I think she misperceives how much community Quinn found there: a fan base, yes; a community . . . I don't know. Perhaps I will judge differently once I can read Quinn's forthcoming memoir. (It does not appear Patterson had read that text either when she wrote her essay; she does not cite any unpublished Quinn writings, unlike some other DNA Mormon contributors.) But I am loath to portray Quinn as more happily liberated than he perceived himself to be; that would not be historically honest.Furthermore, if we lay aside the martyr narrative, Quinn's own significance as a historical figure is diminished. The martyr narrative is integral to Quinn's personal brand. He himself cultivated it; it is what brought him national media attention; and I think it is safe to say that outside Mormon studies, academicians who know anything about Quinn know him for the role he plays in the martyr narrative—that he was a Mormon historian who lost his job and was excommunicated because church leaders opposed his work. Take away the charisma of martyrdom, and what remains to serve as the "legacy of historian D. Michael Quinn" trumpeted in DNA Mormon's subtitle? The answer, of course, is his historical writing. But when you turn from the image of Quinn as heroic truth-teller to look more closely at the content of his work, his image dulls.In the introduction to DNA Mormon, Park claims that Quinn's books "became immediate classics in the field and remain immensely influential today" (ix). That statement is true if by "the field," you mean Latter-day Saint scholars who admire Quinn for breaking church-imposed taboos or for showing, in Park's words, "that you could pledge allegiance" to "faith as well as secular academic disciplines" (viii). But those projects are not relevant to Mormon studies as conducted outside spaces where Latter-day Saints talk to each other about their history. For Mormon studies as a broader academic endeavor, Quinn's work is not "immensely influential." None of Quinn's monographs is as influential as Jan Shipps's Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition was in its day, or Kathleen Flake's The Politics of American Religious Identity, or as I believe W. Paul Reeve's Religion of a Different Color or Amanda Hendrix-Komoto's Imperial Zions will prove to be.5 Quinn's work is not in the same class as those titles because—with the exception of Same-Sex Dynamics among Nineteenth-Century Americans, Quinn's only university press publication outside BYU6—Quinn did not engage in broader academic conversations. Quinn's books belong to the same class as titles such as Todd Compton's In Sacred Loneliness or George D. Smith's Nauvoo Polygamy, two other Signature publications that, like Quinn's, are impressively researched and valuable as sources of data but of relatively narrow interest, which is why they were published by a regional press.7Despite his PhD in history from Yale, Quinn did not, as a rule, write American history or the kind of historical work done under the rubric of religious studies. Quinn wrote church history—counterhegemonic church history, which may therefore have great significance for some of that church's insiders. But Quinn did not write books that change how American religious historians think about Mormon history or that point scholars in new historiographical directions. As Topping's biography acknowledges in a critical moment: there is no "Quinn thesis," and therefore subsequent scholars have used Quinn's books for "limited, piece-meal citations of his research on specific topics rather than under a grand interpretive blanket" (66). Quinn did the kind of work that scholars draw on, not the kind that scholars build on.DNA Mormon unintentionally makes apparent the limited academic value of Quinn's work when the collection includes three papers by current or recent students that are meant to show, in Park's words, how "young scholars . . . are building on Quinn's scholarly legacy" (x–xi). Each of these student papers addresses a topic on which Quinn also wrote: folk magic in Mormonism, conflicts between LDS Church leaders and intellectuals, and queer Mormons. But Quinn is discussed only briefly in each paper, in single paragraphs that look like they were added in order to fit the call for papers for Park's symposium. Two of the three students name Quinn but do not cite any of his works. These papers can only loosely be said to be "building on Quinn's scholarly legacy"—but that is because Quinn did not leave a stronger academic legacy to build on. His strongest legacy, the most compelling reason for someone to admire him, is not his scholarship but his courage in standing up to Boyd K. Packer when his livelihood was on the line. For that reason, I balk at following Patterson in knocking the martyr's crown from Quinn's head. If not for that crown, I doubt that Quinn would be perceived as important enough to become the subject of a collection like DNA Mormon.I say that with grief and disillusionment. There was a time in my life when I was starstruck by Mike, and I liked him when I got to know him. My outrage at his excommunication was one of the factors that pushed me out of the LDS Church. I rooted for him to obtain a new professorship; I was incensed by efforts to exclude him from Mormon studies spaces. I also saw clearly Mike's scholarly limitations when I attended, in 2004, his lackluster job talk at the University of Utah. Still, I applaud Mike's courage, a quality I do not see in Latter-day Saint scholars who profess to admire him while they take care to safeguard their own careers and church membership—I'm with Topping on that one. Then again, like Patterson, I am too deconstructive by training to take comfort in the martyr narrative, but neither am I persuaded by Patterson's counternarrative of Mike as gaily excommunicated, unemployed, and single. So I am left with a D. Michael Quinn whose story ends on a note that is just blisteringly sad: not a martyr, not a foundational scholar, just a passionate religious intellectual who was robbed of his dream career by small-minded men wielding power they should never have had; who was admired by many, yet whose death was so solitary that we cannot even date it without a qualifying footnote.8
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