The LDS Church once instituted an organization ““ more of a practice, really ““ called the “Strengthening the Church Members Committee” which it publicly billed as a newspaper clipping service[ii] but which in reality was a spy organization that encouraged members to report to their priesthood authorities the activities of members“who, however well-meaning, may hinder the progress of the church through public criticism.” It monitored, therefore, what the Church would regard as suspicious speeches and writings of its own members.
(Such practices had gone on for years before the formation of this committee. When I was researching to write the first edition of this book, before I was excommunicated from the LDS Church, a man named Stephen Mayfield who was employed at the LDS Church Office Building assumed an alias, and wrote letters to me pretending to be an ex-Mormon so he could “spy” on me because he learned I was writing a book detailing my experiences in Mormonism.)
Such “spying” only annoyed me, but it was devastating and disorienting to the dismayed scholars and teachers still active in Mormonism who regarded themselves as intellectually honest and yet lovers of their Church. An example of this was Dr. D. Michael Quinn, one of the “September Six.” This author and scholar (his PhD in history was from Yale University, and he was an enormously popular professor of American Social History at BYU), still believed that Joseph Smith and Ezra Taft Benson (the LDS president when Quinn was excommunicated) were true prophets even when the Church booted him out. (However, he stated, “I vowed I would never again participate in a process which was designed to punish me for being the messenger of unwanted historical evidence and to intimidate me from further work in Mormon history.”)
For more information, see The Mormon Mirage 3rd Edition: A Former Member Looks at the Mormon Church Today (Zondervan, 2009). Also available as an audiobook and as an expanded-text E-book for Nook, Kindle and other reading devices.
