Sunstone: Paying the Price of Intellectualism

I was among the young, idealistic Mormon students who launched Sunstone magazine during the halcyon days of the late 1970s.

Our generation of Latter-day Saints came of age when the beatific David O. McKay was "prophet, seer and revelator," Sunday schools hosted lively discussions of serious religious issues, Mormon study groups were rampant and LDS historian Leonard J. Arrington threw open the church's archives to serious scholars.

In a time of social reform, we confronted the role of the military in the wake of Vietnam, women's rights, drugs, suicide, teen pregnancy and sexual identity.

So, true to our faith's impulse to organize, we created a magazine to explore the "intellectual and spiritual life of our times."

We heeded LDS Apostle Hugh B. Brown, a Democrat and liberal thinker, who told students at church-owned Brigham Young University in the 1960s: "Your thoughts and expressions must meet competition in the marketplace of thoughts, and in that competition truth will emerge triumphant. Only error needs to fear freedom of expression."

With the sublime confidence of the young, we tackled broad social questions and looked within our tradition at polygamy, early communitarian experiments, confession, "closet doubters," the notion of a Mother in Heaven and the value of temple rites.

We took a dialectical approach. If one author argued that excommunication demoralized and demonized families, another would counter that it freed excommunicants from lifelong guilt and let them forgive themselves. When I was editor/publisher from 1980 to 1986, it was an exciting time to be a Mormon intellectual. But our springtime of inquiry was about to take on a decided chill.

Continued on page 2: 25 years after Sunstone's founding, I am still in the church but less naive... »