Review
———
Title: Lighthouse: Jerald & Sandra Tanner, Despised and Beloved Critics of Mormonism
Author: Ronald V. Huggins
Publisher: Signature Books
Genre: Biography
Date: 2022
Pages: 365 (Bibliography begins on p. 333; index begins on p. 353.)
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-56085-454-8
Price: (paperback): $24.95
Reviewed by Julie J. Nichols for the Association for Mormon Letters
Lighthouse: Jerald & Sandra Tanner, Despised and Beloved Critics of Mormonism is an exhaustively-researched, minutely-detailed record of the activities, interactions, publications, and turmoil that swirled around Jerald and Sandra Tanner from their marriage in 1959 to the present day. Exhaustive—and exhausting. It’s not light reading. To make your way through it requires familiarity with Mormon history and early documents, as well as with national and regional events of the past seventy years, including the Hoffman forgeries and Watergate. Every chapter unleashes a landslide of information about the Tanners’ investigations into issues and controversies around nearly every aspect of church history and policy. Be prepared to slog a bit. The Tanners leave no stone unturned, and neither does Ronald V. Huggins.
Huggins believes the Tanners “[represent]an important…force contributing to the direction of Mormon historical studies throughout the second half of the twentieth century and into the present one.” In his lengthy introduction, he asserts that he was probably “the obvious person” to write this biography. He makes this claim because in their heyday, and even now (as Sandra has appeared in the 2021 Netflix movie “Murder Among the Mormons”), the Tanners have incited strong reactions along a black-and-white spectrum: if their work came within your orbit, you either rejected their dogged criticisms of Mormonism outright, or you jumped into their camp and saw Mormonism as a locus of deception, coverup, and misdirection. You hated or loved them, pretty much as you clung fiercely to the Church or wished to debunk it thoroughly.
But Huggins believes that “a credible [biographer] of the Tanners” must not hate or love them. Instead, he must seek to “[depict] what the world looks like from the perspective of the subjects themselves and how that vision moved them to think and act as they did.” This conviction drives Huggins’s efforts; he labors hard to, above all, be true to the motives that drove the Tanners themselves.
Those motives begin, in his reckoning, with the desire to put Christ first. Not the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which, in the Tanners’ view, is a Joseph Smith-driven institution rather than a Christ-driven one. In early chapters, Huggins lays down the genealogy of the couple’s questioning. Both were raised in fairly orthodox Mormon homes. (Their literal genealogies take up many pages.) But when they met, Jerald had already come to know Pauline Hancock, a leader of an FLDS spinoff group that believed that Joseph Smith had been called to bring forth the Book of Mormon but not to set up his own church.
Sandra, a descendant of Brigham Young, was taken by Jerald’s clarity of purpose. Convinced by Hancock’s logic and also by what he perceived as her genuinely Christian-loving outreach, Jerald persuaded Sandra to agree with Hancock and himself that the key to salvation was Christ—not Joseph. Along with Hancock, he became friends with James D. Wardle, whose barbershop at 424 South State Street housed “secret documents” and welcomed discussions regarding a Mormon past not nearly as straightforward as the official one taught from the General Conference pulpit and the General Handbook.
Lighthouse charts Jerald and Sandra’s journey as, aided by Wardle and an ever-growing crowd of friendly “true Christians” also in search of truth, they expanded their investigations. A selection of chapter titles indicates their progression: “The Struggle to Reprint the Book of Commandments,” “The First Vision Revisited,” “The Book of Abraham and the Egyptian Alphabet,” “Watergate and Wiretapping,” “Race and Priesthood,” “Documents and Forgeries’; and over a dozen more.
Each chapter releases an avalanche of names, dates, discoveries, and correspondences with people who pointed the Tanners to areas of controversy, as well as people who thwarted the Tanners’ efforts to solve them. Huggins records the angry dismay of General Authorities such as LeGrand Richards and the vigorous efforts of the Church History Department to deny the Tanners access to original documents. But he also recounts in excruciating, often (for me) confusing, detail the deceptions that derailed the Tanners themselves, such as the David Whitmer and Egyptian alphabet documents.
He exonerates the Tanners, though, by referencing newspaper clippings, articles, letters, interviews, and other source material indicating the trustworthiness of Jerald’s motives. Repeatedly he characterizes Jerald as “intense” and “meticulous,” with a strong “need to refute falsehood wherever he found it” (xi). This description of their first of over fifty books (self-published by their Utah Lighthouse Ministry press) encapsulates Huggins’s conclusions:
[Mormonism: Shadow or Reality? (1963)] had all the hallmarks of what would become recognizable in Tanner publications: a homemade appearance; an overuse of underlining; all-capital letters, and tediously long quotations; and an overtly evangelical Christian perspective. It also delved into topics sacred, even taboo, to Mormons, such as the temple ceremony. Nevertheless, it brought forward mountains of new evidence with an eye for accuracy. Plenty of Mormons dismissed the book as a pack of lies, but in hindsight, there is little in the book in terms of bare facts that faithful Mormon historians have not subsequently acknowledged. Believers may insist some of the claims are sensationalized, or they may disagree with Jerald and Sandra’s conclusions about what the evidence means for the church, but they cannot say that Shadow or Reality? made up any sources or facts. (105) (Italics in original; boldface added.)
To put it squarely, Huggins consistently manages to do exactly what he set out to do, that is, to “depict what the world [looked] like” to Jerald and Sandra Tanner, and to demonstrate “how that vision moved them to think and act as they did.” A desire to spread the gospel of Christ and to require the integrity of church leaders and historians motivated them from the first; the world looked like nothing more than a clear calling from God to make sure that happened.
Lighthouse could have used more careful editing. I found typos in every chapter, and often wished for a timeline or other visual simplification of the many convoluted controversies the Tanners were involved in. Nevertheless, readers will find much emotionally-charged history to mull over in this rich compilation of the numerous significant events influenced by the Tanners’ probing. For those interested in Mormon historiography, this volume more than adequately explains why their “Lighthouse Ministry” (see https://utlm.org/) continues to affect perceptions of Mormonism to this day.