One man's critique of Quinn, pre-Ex

[Archaea]

Note the redefinition of objectivity by D. Michael Quinn and how it depends upon an assumed standard of professionalism, "Editor's Introduction," The New Mormon History: Revisionist Essays on the Past (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992), vii-xix. It is also useful to examine the very glowing and uncritical terms in which Quinn deals with professionalism in "On Being a Mormon Historian (and Its Aftermath)," Faithful History, 69-111. But the most revealing is Quinn's letter to SUNSTONE (16 [March 1993]: 4-5), in which he assails the critics of new Mormon history for dichotomous reasoning and falsely stigmatizing the writers of new Mormon accounts. It is troubling, indeed, that Quinn does not seem to grasp in even the most elementary way what the discussion is about. It has nothing to do with saving the Church from embarrassment or sanitizing its past. It has to do rather with deep and complex issues that Quinn has never confronted. It explores the way historians use language to constitute the past and the limit of the claims that can be made for their accounts. Above all it opposes revisionism which for us is the recasting of the Restoration in language that explains the sacred in naturalistic terms, making genuine belief impossible. Revisionism is not simply "getting the details straight," or "the facts right." Actually, every generation of Mormons will necessarily "represent" their common past differently than those who went before. They will struggle with different issues and different questions; they will in some measure write a different script. But it will, nevertheless, work within the shared conviction that the Church was restored by God's power. But in a larger sense, we find it difficult to understand why it should bother Quinn that we explore unexamined assumptions? Why should he be disturbed that we investigate the various vocabularies at work in the scripting of the Mormon past and expose how they belong to given traditions of understanding whose metaphysical foundations are generally hidden from view. Does not honest scholarship require this? Would we not all benefit from the greater circumspection, humility, and charity that recognizing limits necessitates?
Finally, the accusation of dichotomous reasoning makes very clear Quinn's failure to read carefully, if at all, essays critical of revisionist history. While it may be politically useful to represent one's opponents as a mere caricature, the practice makes genuine dialogue impossible. For example, many have recognized that the sacred/secular distinction was only nominal and not absolute. Language is necessarily ambiguous and does not yield absolute or objective distinctions. Certainly any essay should leave little doubt where we stand on the issue. It is rather the present generation of professional historians who advance such air-tight distinctions, believing as they do that scientific rationalism-and in particular that variant found in the social sciences-has given us a mode of discourse-a new meta-language-that can assure neutral and objective historical accounts. It is revisionist historians and their friends who have scoffed at treatments of our past worked out in believing langage. It is they who label it "bolstering, uncritical, and pollyannaish." It is they who have found Hugh Nibley and others "outrageous" because these writers did not shrink from framing the Mormon past in faithful terms.