The feckless prophets and conspiring intellectuals of the Heartlanders

Today’s brief blog post brings you yet another example of how the Heartland cult is destroying faith in living prophets and apostles and leading the movement inexorably toward a break from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Hannah Stoddard (center) and James Stoddard (right), alongside Rod Meldrum (left)

Heartlanders Hannah and James Stoddard have published several books and numerous articles presenting their views on Church history and doctrine. As a father-and-daughter team, the Stoddards have become quite prominent within the Heartland movement.

Among their recent publications are the two-volume book series Faith Crisis (vol. 1 | vol. 2). In these books, the Stoddards attempt to resolve the concerns of modern Latter-day Saints about difficult issues in Church history by doubling down on the traditional narratives and (of course) claiming that there’s a massive conspiracy at the highest levels of Church bureaucracy.

Note the implications of this description of volume one:

Unbeknownst to the general Church membership, the 20th century would witness an organized effort to rewrite Latter-day Saint history from within its own ranks. In a head-to-head, behind-the-scenes-battle, traditional leaders resisted intellectual progressives working in the Church History Department and at BYU, who claimed some forty years ago that it would take a generation to re-educate the Church membership. Where are we in this attempted re-education? What is the New Mormon History, and how does it personally affect you and your family?

This “rewriting” of Church history involves the teaching that Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon using a seer stone that he placed in a hat—something the Stoddards, like Jonathan Neville, deny. (They even wrote a book about it.)

If the Stoddards are to be believed, “traditional leaders” of the Church in the twentieth century battled “intellectual progressives working within the Church History Department and at BYU”—and lost. Since Church leaders and Church publications now openly teach that Joseph Smith did, in fact, use a seer stone to produce the Book of Mormon, the clear implication of the Stoddards’ book is that modern Church leaders have surrendered to the “intellectual progressives” or are simply not aware of what’s going on.

How can the Stoddards make such an argument and not realize they are (perhaps unconsciously) implying that current Church leaders are not “traditional” and are allowing Church history to be defiled? They’re either completely lacking in self-awareness or they’re part of a deliberate effort to start a fundamentalist offshoot that teaches the Church is “out of the way.”

The truth is there have been a number of different currents in Latter-day Saint historical writing over the last sixty years. Some of them were good; some were well-meaning-but-not-so-good reactionary attempts to defend traditional understandings that were not correct. Alongside flawed efforts to portray foundational revelations with psychological or secular explanations, there has been some very good research that has clarified our history with better information and new discoveries and placed things in a better context.

In other words, when we talk about “new Mormon history,” we are not talking about one monolithic thing. But, alas, with the Stoddards, there is no nuance; everything is a simplistic, black-and-white, good-versus-evil” approach. It’s the intellectuals, the scholars—as if all historians were on one side and all Church leaders were on the other. It’s a very unchristian and uncharitable approach.

—Peter Pan