Part I of the Sunstone Classics series.
Leonard Arrington served as the Church Historian beginning in 1972, establishing an unprecedented era of historical openness. In 1982, he was unceremoniously replaced and sent to BYU. He gave a speech at Sunstone in 1985, which is excerpted here. His whole speech can be found on page 36 of issue 45.
Some of you know that I have spent the past five years working on a biography of Brigham Young. You may not know that Brigham saw and read the Book of Mormon in 1830, when he was twenty-nine. Why then did he wait almost two years before joining the infant Church of Christ, as it was then called? When asked to explain this, he replied that he wanted time to observe the character of those who were leading the movement. “I watched,” he said, “to see whether good common sense was manifest.” After twenty-two months of observation and investigation, he decided that the movement did indeed manifest “good sense.” He joined in 1832 and spent the rest of his life laboring on its behalf.
My examination of Mormon cultural institutions did not begin until 1942, when I was twenty-four and in my third year of graduate work. This study was the result of a surprise discovery I made at that time that there was a historically based Mormon culture. I had grown up on a farm in a non-Mormon community in southwestern Idaho, the son of parents who had grown up in North Carolina, Tennessee, southern Indiana, and Oklahoma. Neither had had any experience with the Mormon way of life. There were no Mormon schoolteachers or administrators in our school system, and none of our close neighbors was a Mormon.
Then I went to the University of Idaho, where there were few Mormons in attendance. (At that time most Idaho Mormons went to byu or to Utah State University in Logan.) After four years in Moscow, Idaho, I went to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill where I was the only Latter-day Saint in the university and in the community. So all these years I was outside the Mormon cultural community.
My major at the University of North Carolina was economic theory. While doing some teaching at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, I took a minor in agricultural economics and rural sociology. One day, as I was perusing some books for a class, I happened to come across a description of the Mormon village in a new book on The Sociology of Rural Life by the young rural sociologist T. Lynn Smith. I did not know at the time that T. Lynn was a Latter-day Saint and a graduate of byu, but I was absolutely fascinated with his pages on the Mormon village—something I had never heard of before. I hunted for discussions on the subject in other texts and was delighted to find that Mormon rural life was of great interest to sociologists.
About the same time, partly as the result of the curiosity aroused by the discovery that there was a recognized Mormon rural life pattern, I ran across an article by Bernard DeVoto in Harper’s Magazine which was about his grandfather, a Mormon farmer who had lived at Uinta, southeast of Ogden; and also two articles by Juanita Brooks, about whom I had never heard before, that were also in Harper’s: “The Water’s In,” and “A Close-up of Polygamy.” These introduced me to the literature on Mormon culture—something I had not been aware of because I had not grown up in Utah or in a Mormon village. Basically, I have spent the rest of my life trying to keep abreast of this literature and trying to make some contributions myself to that body of writing.
My study of this literature very quickly told me that Mormon culture was praiseworthy—that my people did indeed believe in education and were willing to sacrifice to put their children through college; that Mormon educators were remarkably loyal to the Church, were well respected, and sought to preserve the best values of the culture; that the people were not provincial but, partly because of missionary contacts, had an interest in the peoples of the world; and among the influential leaders of the faith were a number of impressive intellectuals. This was a great church, I came to believe. It perpetuated fine ideals of home, school, and community life; its approach and philosophy enabled its members to reconcile religion with science and higher learning; its emphasis on free agency encouraged individual freedom and responsibility; its strong social tradition taught its members to be caring and compassionate; and its strong organizational capability empowered its people to build better communities. As Brigham Young said, a central doctrine of Mormonism is that God’s primary work is through people, and so our principal concern was with the here and now.
In short, it was a religion and a church worth working for. I went into the American armed services soon after reaching these conclusions, and upon my return at the termination of World War II, I expected to live in a Mormon village to rear my children and to perform my life’s labor.
After three years overseas in North Africa and Italy, I did return, obtained a job at Utah State University in the Mormon village of Logan, and remained there to rear our family in what Grace and I always regarded as sacred space, because there is where we actually experienced the way of life we had read and dreamed about. Except for three sabbaticals, we did not leave our beloved Cache Valley until I was called to be Church Historian in 1972. Although now released from that position, I am still devoted to carrying out responsibilities which I trust continue to be helpful in building the Kingdom of God on earth. Spiritual experiences I have had, and my intensive study of Church history has validated for me, intellectually and emotionally, this decision to serve the faith. “Blessed is he who has found his work,” wrote Thomas Carlyle, “he needs to ask no other blessedness.”