Those of us at the Juvenile Instructor, like so many other in the Mormon academic community, are very sad to hear of the passing of D. Michael Quinn, and want to take a moment to honor his legacy as one of the most important historians of Mormonism. Our own Ben Park put together an excellent summation of Quinn life on this Twitter chain, but we’d also like to take a moment here to celebrate Quinn’s tremendous contribution to Mormon history.
For me, what stands out most about Quinn’s scholarship are controversy and indefatigable research. Controversy in Mormon history had been with the movement since the beginning with scholarship on Mormonism often dividing between believers and non-believers. Quinn was somewhat pioneering in tackling controversial topics as both a believer and an “insider” in his work at the church archives and at BYU. Scholars like Marvin Hill had been edgy, but Quinn fully embraced the most controversial topics and even held a kind of press conference to refute Boyd K. Packer’s 1981 “The Mantle is Far, Far Greater than the Intellect.”
With what I and many others consider to be Quinn’s masterpiece, his 1987 Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, Quinn found himself on the outs at BYU, leading to his resignation. Quinn was excommunicated with the September Six in 1993. While feeling unwelcome at BYU after Magic World View was an expected outcome, Quinn’s work nonetheless forced a myriad of important questions: are there ways for the faithful to tackle such topics? Do those who make such attempts invariably face reprisals? And what is the legacy of the institutional church’s reaction to Quinn?
As I argue in this retrospective review of Magic World View from 10 years ago, that book very much demonstrates Quinn’s special gift of indefatigable research. Tackling head on a subject that believers had long been unsure of what to do with, Quinn’s research was exhaustive in both the cultural background and the local data on all things related to Joseph Smith’s links to anything considered magic. Quinn’s research laid the groundwork for many other studies into these cultural aspects of American history.
Quinn’s tendencies of controversy and tenacious research could sometimes feel overdone at times: many reviewers commented that Quinn’s Mormon Hierarchy volumes read like a catalogue of the church’s transgressions while the timelines Quinn added to both volumes were dizzying in their minutiae. We all have our quirks and if Quinn sometimes took his tenacity beyond moderation, the field of Mormon history and the the Mormon community as a whole owes a tremendous debt of gratitude to Quinn for his commitment to the exploration of the Mormon past.
I unfortunately only managed to shake Quinn’s hand once at a Mormon History Association meeting a few years back, but I hold his Magic World View as one the very most important for topics that I research. What are your memories, impressions, and evaluations of Quinn and his work?
Even though his views on many subjects were very unorthodox, I love the way he remained a believer in God, Joseph Smith, the golden plates, the Book of Mormon, and much more.
Comment by Mark Ashurst-McGee — April 26, 2021 @ 9:28 am
My neighbor is an adjunct professor of biomedical statistics at Duke University. He’s currently a professor of statistics at BYU and an Insurance Actuary. I was visiting with him one day and asked if he believed magic to be a thing. His response was an immediate and an unequivical, “Yes”. I then asked him about “black magic“, again his response was, “ Yes, but we will not talk about it.”
Comment by James Hamilton — April 29, 2021 @ 2:31 pm
I read the first edition of Early Mormonism and the Magical World View shortly after it was published. My takeaway from the book was that it helped me to understand one of the reasons God chose Joseph Smith, Jr. to be his Prophet — i.e., that he and his family believed in the possibility that extra-physical, metaphysical, or supernatural things and events were possible. He posited this paraphrased question: If you were God and needed to chose a Prophet to restore your Gospel to the earth, would you choose someone who could believe in extra physical things and events, or would you choose someone who thought anything metaphysical or supernatural couldn’t happen or exist. Of course, the answer — for me — would be the former — rather than the latter. At that point, any question about the propriety of Joseph and his family’s experiences with the “occult” made sense to me, and that concern immediately fled from my spiritual concerns! I did find that Quinn really got into the “weeds” about his subject by the end of that book, but the book in general strengthened my faith in Joseph Smith and the Restoration rather than weakening it.
Comment by Chrystine Reynolds — April 29, 2021 @ 3:34 pm