Review
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Title: D. Michael Quinn: Mormon Historian
Author: Gary Topping
Publisher: Signature Books
Genre: Biography
Year Published: 2022
Number of Pages: 133
Binding: Paperback
ISBN13: 9781560854449
Price: $9.95
Reviewed by Cheryl Bruno for the Association for Mormon Letters
“Can an excommunicated member of the [LDS] church . . . write an unbiased book about church members and church policy?”[1] Gary Topping, the author of the short biography D. Michael Quinn: Mormon Historian, responds to this question about his subject with another: “Can a tithe-paying, priesthood-holding temple worker write an unbiased book about church members and church policy?” “The answer to both questions,” he says, “is yes” (85).
Topping has written a short, readable, yet thoughtful biography of the controversial historian D. Michael Quinn by centering his writing around the above topic. A prologue situates Quinn as a writer of Mormon history beginning in the 1970s when sensitive church documents were beginning to become available to researchers. Chapter 1 outlines his childhood and adolescence, during which he experienced ambiguities concerning his ethnic, social, religious, and sexual identities. These shaped him and would affect his later work. Chapter 2 portrays Quinn as a maturing adult as he serves a mission during a particularly fascinating time in the wake of the “baseball baptism” era. Tragically, he was assigned to “clean up” the church rolls which had been swollen by young people who had been baptized without a complete understanding of the ordinance. “’I was twenty years old,’ he lamented, ‘and excommunicated three times the number of my convert baptisms.’ . . . ‘I remember those months in 1964 as the darkest period of my LDS church experience’” (19). During this period, Quinn also graduated from BYU, married a woman in a mixed-orientation marriage, and served in the military in Germany. Finally, Chapter 3 summarizes Quinn’s employment with Church Historian Leonard Arrington, graduate studies at Yale University, and employment with BYU.
At this point, Topping “interrupt[s] the chronological narrative of Quinn’s life” and inserts “four chapters offering a critical consideration of each of the book-length works for which he is best known” (43). He will return to the biographical information, which includes Quinn’s excommunication from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in the final Chapter 8.
These four chapters were my favorite part of the biography. I have read all of Quinn’s books, as many of the readers of Topping’s biography will have done. Topping not only summarizes each book but offers interesting background, insightful analysis, and thought-provoking commentary.
Recently, I spoke to a younger colleague who had just read Quinn’s Early Mormonism and the Magic World View. I rhapsodized at how the book had changed my entire conception, not only of Mormonism but of life itself. My friend fairly yawned. The book had presented him with nothing new. I mulled over this for a long time and realized that in the years since the book was published in 1987, Quinn’s ideas have thoroughly saturated Mormon culture to the point where they don’t seem that unusual. In the late eighties, these ideas were truly original. Joseph Smith’s early involvement with magic was barely known and little understood. The idea that earlier United States Americans held such a radically different world view with regards to religion was new to me. I suddenly saw my paradigm as just that—a construct that wasn’t necessarily “true.” Topping’s opinion is my own when he writes that this book is “one of the most creative, original, and fundamental works in the literature of Mormon history.” Furthermore, “although Quinn’s field is Mormon history and the book’s focus, as the title indicates, is on that history, in fact, the book struck reverberations that resounded throughout the larger field of general United States and even European history” (43).
I enjoyed reading some of the background behind the writing of Early Mormonism and the Magic World View. From stories such as then church Patriarch Eldred G. Smith’s showing Quinn some of the Smith family papers, “including documentation of the family’s folk-magical practices,” (43) to Mark Hofmann’s forgery of the “Salamander Letter,” to a CES memorandum mentioning “ample evidence” of magical influence on Joseph Smith that had not been accessed by historians. Topping astutely observes that, at the time, “literature on the history of magic and the occult. . . had permeated. . . mainstream cultural history only very little because many practitioners in the field typically regarded such things as beneath serious intellectual consideration” (45). One intellectual argument that Quinn faced was the difficulty of distinguishing occult or magical practices from religion. One standard of distinction, Topping explains, is that the nature of magic is coercive while religion is focused on supplication. Recognizing that Moses’s parting of the Red Sea or Jesus’s turning water into wine tends to disprove this standard, Quinn takes a different approach: “A more useful distinction is centered in ethics and personal conduct. Religion prescribes ethics of daily conduct for all its adherents, not simply its officiators. The ethical emphasis of magic tends to be limited to ritual purification necessary for the successful performance of its ceremonies” (47-48). By this standard, Quinn categorizes Mormonism as a religion. This discussion had me chasing the squirrel of my disagreement with Quinn’s characterization of magic practitioners’ motivations. But I love books that make me think!
In this chapter, Topping also reflects on Quinn’s declaration of his own beliefs as part of the writing of this manuscript. This leads to the question of whether historians can write unbiased histories, regardless of their standpoint. The jury’s probably still out on that one. But, as the biography demonstrates, a person like Mike Quinn—an outsider with an insider’s faith and belief and with his varied life experiences—probably has a pretty good shot at writing in a balanced and impartial way.
I’ll leave you to discover the additional insights Topping provides about Quinn’s voluminous oeuvre. Reader, you are in for a treat. This petite, vibrant biography probes Quinn’s life and work with an astute and affectionate hand.
[1] Alfred L. Pace III, “Unfair Book Trumpeted,” Salt Lake Tribune, April 18, 1996.