D. Michael Quinn, an award-winning historian who wrote 10 books about the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but whose career stoked controversy within the church, died Wednesday, April 21, 2021 in Rancho Cucamonga, California. He was 77.
“A rich and meaningful life has left the world,” his children wrote in Quinn’s obituary, noting that they knew him differently than the public.
Quinn worked for the church in the 1970s as a research and writing assistant to Church Historian and Recorder Leonard J. Arrington, and taught history on the faculty at Brigham Young University for a dozen years. He was excommunicated from the church in September 1993.
“Michael Quinn was one of a kind,” said Elder Marlin K. Jensen, who served as Church Historian and Recorder from 2005-12. “He had a keen mind and amazingly retentive memory, and he was pathbreaking in his research and writing in many ways. He had a strong influence on the so-called ‘new Mormon history,’ the more candid approach to revealing the church’s past. He will remain somewhat of a tragic figure because of his loss of church membership and the question of what might have been.”
Born in Pasadena, California, and raised as a Latter-day Saint by his mother in nearby Glendale, Quinn became interested in the church’s history as a teenager. After earning a degree in English literature at Brigham Young University, he served in the U.S. Army for three years during the Vietnam War, some of it as an intelligence officer.
Accepted to a graduate program in English at Duke University, Quinn decided instead while in the Army to become a historian. He changed course and earned a master’s degree in history at the University of Utah and a Ph.D. at Yale.
Quinn joined the BYU faculty in 1976 as a history professor and researcher. However, he resigned in 1988, he told Slate, because he knew his interest in subjects that brought him into conflict with the church would jeopardize both his faculty position and his church membership.
Quinn’s marriage ended in 1985 after he came out as gay. He eventually published a book about same-sex friendships and romances in 19th-century Mormonism.
He and his ex-wife had four children.
“Our dad was as deep in thought as he was in sensitivity and care,” his obituary said. “He was complex, and he was imperfect. He wasn’t always the parent we needed. But he was authentic. He had integrity and a reservoir of compassion. He struggled, and he helped us in our struggles. He could share his vulnerability with us in profound ways. He loved us tremendously. We remember and honor him, now and always, as a man of great feeling and meaningful striving. We miss him deeply.
Quinn published “The Mormon Succession Crisis of 1844” in BYU Studies in 1976. The article referred to the possibility that Joseph Smith had blessed his son Joseph Smith III to be his successor at the head of the church. The work apparently motivated convicted murderer Mark Hofmann to commit one of his forgeries before his bombing spree.
Quinn knew Hofmann and took precautions to protect himself during Hofmann’s bombings in 1985. Hofmann produced a forged copy of the alleged blessing after he approached Quinn in the church archives and asked about the succession and the article, according to Slate.
On the day Hofmann murdered two people with pipe bombs, many people connected to Latter-day Saint history and memorabilia worried for their lives. Quinn stayed with a friend for several days rather than return home, he told Slate.
Scholars and historians lauded Quinn’s biography of the late Latter-day Saint leader J. Reuben Clark and other books. In 2016, the Mormon History Association presented Quinn its annual Leonard J. Arrington Award, bestowed annually for distinguished and outstanding service to Mormon history.
In September 1993, Quinn became part of the so-called September Six because he along with five others — Lavina Fielding Anderson, Maxine Hanks, Paul Toscano, Avraham Gileadi and Lynn Whitesides — were excommunicated or disfellowshipped that month for criticizing church leaders or doctrine or history.
He said the local leader who informed him of his excommunication gave him a letter that stated it was based on his works about women in the church and his public criticism of the church for limiting dissent.
Quinn later received a two-year appointment at the University of Southern California and a one-year appointment at Yale but never landed another permanent academic position. Instead, he worked as an independent scholar publishing books.
“At this point, I’m unhireable,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 2006.
He struggled financially, living for a time in his mother’s basement, but he continued to publish books. In 2019, the church’s Newsroom website quoted him and linked to his 2017 book on the history of church finances; he said his findings were “an enormously faith-promoting story.”
“If Latter-day Saints could see ‘the larger picture,’” they would “breathe a sigh of relief and see the church is not a profit-making business.”
Quinn continued to be what he called an ancestral Mormon, maintaining a private faith similar to but separate from Latter-day Saints.
“I’m a seventh-generation Mormon. Nothing can take that away from me,” he once said.
from Deseret News https://ift.tt/3sQxQc2
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