Review
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Title: The September Six and the Struggle for the Soul of Mormonism
Author: Sara M. Patterson
Publisher: Signature Books
Genre: Religious Non-fiction, History
Year Published: 2023
Number of Pages: 374
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-56085-466-1
Price: $29.95
Reviewed by Conor Hilton for the Association of Mormon Letters
Sara M. Patterson’s The September Six and the Struggle for the Soul of Mormonism is a deeply researched, expansive account of a dark moment in Mormon history. The book is structured in two halves, “The Purity System” and “Dissenting Voices”. The first half offers a unifying theory for the discipline that the ‘September Six’ and many others faced, as well as what Patterson sees as the related doctrinal and cultural ideas and changes.
For those with outside knowledge about some of the shifts and changes in the 70s-mid-2000s, some of this first section may feel redundant. However, Patterson doesn’t simply recount the story the way it’s been told elsewhere. She instead builds on the work of others, weaving in details, insights, quotes, and other pieces of information from the Six and Patterson’s own interviews and conversations with them. These personal flourishes help ground Patterson’s arguments about the purity system in the humanity of those impacted by it.
I’ll confess that I am not totally persuaded by the ‘purity system’ over-arching critique. Patterson draws on the work of Marcus Borg in her analysis, but for me, the reason(s) we should accept Borg’s ideas about a ‘purity system’ being applied to Mormonism in these decades wasn’t totally persuasive. This is perhaps because of particular baggage or connotations that I carry with me surrounding the language of “purity” that feel loaded and specific in a way that I can’t quite accommodate all the material that Patterson fits under the umbrella.
Even with some of my reservations as to identifying ‘purity culture’ as the single most important common factor in the church discipline enacted against the Six and others, and all the pieces of culture and doctrine that led to those decisions, I am fully persuaded by Patterson’s assertions that the September Six were not an anomaly, but rather representative of larger trends and anxieties in the Church at large.
Patterson’s work really shines through in the “Dissenting Voices” half of the book. Here you see her careful and loving attention to the lives of these dissenters, an attention that by contrast reveals the real, human cost of church discipline. Patterson walks carefully through the lives of these dissenters, giving them full humanity beyond their discipline. In doing so, Patterson joins others who have recently challenged the narrative of D. Michael Quinn’s life post-excommunication being one of loneliness, sorrow, etc. Patterson humanizes these figures, really drawing out their experiences and how their church discipline functioned as an inflection point in their lives.
I wish that Patterson had also worked to highlight some of the ‘right-wing’ or ‘fundamentalist’ dissenters that she discusses in the first part of the book, to really flesh out the full-scale of what she sees as the ‘purity system’ at work. But, I understand the reservations around doing that, as well as the difficulty of fitting that into the book as it is put together.
The September Six and the Struggle for the Soul of Mormonism is insightful, infuriating, and deeply moving. Patterson’s thorough research, into both primary and secondary sources, enriches the book, offering a thoughtful and engaging account of this event in Mormon history, that continues to loom over much of the broader Mormon intellectual world. I hope to draw strength from the deeply human stories of these dissenters, who in many ways resist neat categorization, thankful to Patterson for telling their stories in their complexity.