Why top Mormon leaders’ private writings may never become public

In the 1980s, assistant church historian Richard E. Turley explains, the Utah-based faith began requiring all Mormon general authorities to sign an agreement, pledging that any “work product” — including their “journals, speeches, photographs and other records of enduring value” — belongs to the church’s history department “for long-term preservation.”

The Church History Library, he says, “seeks to make as much information as it can publicly available from these records within legal, ethical, and religious boundaries and practical resource constraints.”

The agreement is fairly common among large organizations and research libraries, Turley says, but Mormonism has unique concerns, namely, “to protect church members in their confidential communications and discussions, and to preserve the sanctity of ceremonies and blessings.”

Thanks for your kind response. In thinking about institutional leadership choices transparency/opacity isn’t, of course, a binary choice but more of a continuous one. I would tend to think of things as “more/less opaque/transparent” then one or the other. Clearly, almost no organization strives for perfect transparency. The church and its leaders have every right to not say have all their internal deliberations live streamed :) On a continuum I think we have to say our church even when compared to other churches is currently on the high end of opacity. Particularly relevant to this discussion the church has even gone so far as to extend this opacity to future historical work by demanding its top leaders no longer keep journals. So we won’t even benefit the way we have in the past from say David O McKay’s journals, much of the JS papers etc. That to me along with the church’s incredibly opaque financial system are to me the most striking examples of the organizations choices along this continuum. I continue to believe that in the long run such extreme opacity breeds dysfunction, weakness and creates more problems than it solves. I hope that maybe the transparency bug in the history department might spread more broadly. I think we would be a stronger people and church for it. But these clearly aren’t my choices to make :)

I would disagree with your assertion that the internet makes “any hint of disagreement public”. I think the church is incredibly good at shielding even very close church watchers from much of internal disagreement and deliberations of the organization. We only see hints of things spilling out and must speculate on most of it. Some very, very connected people see more but it is hard to disentangle hearsay from such leaks. I think the internet has mostly increased speculation order of magnitude more it has increased available information on the discussions going on at the COB or among the Brethren.

Are the “Brethren” susceptible to dogmatism? Ahh, yes, as many of them define it. It is a mark of a healthy culture to be able to confront and critique dogmatism, even at the highest levels. History also shows that this is very hard to do.

Again, I plan to write another post at a later time. Right now I need to make the most of my time in the archives…

I tend to see Arrington as more “innocent” than “naive.” He expected that having the official backing of the First Presidency for his agenda (which the Presidency approved), the rest of the Church hierarchy would fall in line to support it. This turned out not to be the case. For their own compelling reasons, certain members of the hierarchy not only questioned Arrington’s approach but worked actively and publicly to undermine it, which they saw as both a challenge to the faith of Church members and as a refutation of the previously received “official” version of Church history. Arrington could never understand why those members of the hierarchy and others who had concerns didn’t first extend to him the courtesy of a private meeting to express those concerns. Especially painful to him were the actions of some members of the Church Historical Department (not the Church History Division) who periodically undertook end-runs around their own immediate supervisors to secretly report on the History Division’s activities. Arrington may not have understood how the Church bureaucracy functioned, in all its occasional byzantine glory, but it’s difficult for me to understand how anyone else in his position could have responded differently.

Arrington’s diaries definitely present Arrington’s own point of view. I write in the editor’s preface to the diaries: “As with all autobiographical texts, Arrington’s diary is a construction of self. In Arrington’s case, the author’s self-awareness may be more intentional than in many other such efforts. Arrington appreciated the historical and political value of maintaining a diary and addressed readers accordingly. That said, Arrington as a diarist typically writes more as a historian seeking balance and understanding than as, say, an attorney arguing a client’s case regardless of the merits of the opponent’s allegations. While Arrington is certain to record his version of events, he does not shy away from offering judgments of others as well as of himself. In fact, Arrington’s occasional self-criticism serves as a tonic to help render more balanced and nuanced the reader’s own judgments of Arrington especially. Arrington may be his own most articulate defender, but he is also his own most knowledgeable critic. His sometimes clinical self-awareness endows his diary with a heightened degree of honesty.”

It would be a mistake to heroize Arrington. I suspect he would be the first to shun such a label. At the same time, I believe that it would not be an exaggeration to suggest that the strides towards openness and accessibility made in recent years by the LDS Church History Library owe much to the groundwork laid in the 1970s by Arrington and the members of his Church History Division.