Couple snippets:
Half a dozen Mormon scholars — among them Arrington protégés and colleagues D. Michael Quinn, Lavina Fielding Anderson and Maxine Hanks — were either excommunicated or disfellowshipped for work deemed critical of church doctrine or leadership.
“These excommunications are the worst examples of blaming the messenger for the message,” Arrington wrote Oct. 1, 1993. “What a perversion of apostasy, to regard as apostates individuals who are … loyal and believing.”
“One or two members” of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles indicated the apostles had “perused [the book] ‘The Story of the Latter-day Saints’ and did not like it,” Arrington recorded Aug. 18, 1976. They criticized it for “the absence of inspiration — descriptions of occurrences in church history without attributing their cause to God or to his direction and inspiration.” This, in turn, resulted in Benson ordering up a written critique by the same people who had complained. “Again,” the historian noted, “the principal criticism was the lack of divinity in each episode of church history described.” One example involved the sea gulls eating crickets [in Utah’s early pioneer days] “without saying the Lord caused the sea gulls to come and eat the crickets.”
“It is clear that President Benson will not stand for our ‘real’ history. And since he is next in line, and president of the Twelve, we are in a powerless position, and no one wishes to consider our own rationale,” Arrington wrote Sept. 6, 1976. “ ... The question for me is shall I retain the job ... and try to write history which will be approved by [the church’s] Correlation [Department] or shall I resign and continue to write ‘real history.’”
• On Sept. 22, 1976, Arrington wrote that “Elders Benson and [Mark E. Petersen] … want glorious stories of the Restoration [of the gospel], unsullied by discussion of practical problems and controversial evidence. They want prophets without warts, revelation direct from high in pure vessels. The want faith-promoting stories and moral homilies. They feel strongly and will oppose all our books, written as we understand history.”
Should be good overall.