Web research creates fissures of doubt for some Mormons

Laurie Goodstein, New York Times News Service

Friday, July 26, 2013 | 2 a.m.

In the small but cohesive Mormon community where he grew up, Hans Mattsson was a solid believer and a pillar of the church. He followed his father and grandfather into church leadership and finally became an “area authority” overseeing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints throughout Europe.

When fellow believers in Sweden first began coming to him with information from the Internet that contradicted the church’s history and teachings, he dismissed it as “anti-Mormon propaganda,” the whisperings of Lucifer. He asked his superiors for help in responding to the members’ doubts, and when they seemed to only sidestep the questions, Mattsson began his own investigation.

But when he discovered credible evidence that the church’s founder and prophet, Joseph Smith, was a polygamist, and that the Book of Mormon and other canonical scriptures were rife with historical anomalies, Mattsson said he felt that the foundation on which he had built his life began to crumble.

Around the world and in the United States, where the faith was founded, the Mormon Church is grappling with a wave of doubt and disillusionment among members who encountered information on the Internet that sabotaged what they were taught about their faith, according to interviews with dozens of Mormons and those who study the church.

“I felt like I had an earthquake under my feet,” said Mattsson, now an emeritus area authority. “Everything I’d been taught, everything I’d been proud to preach about and witness about, just crumbled under my feet. It was such a terrible psychological and nearly physical disturbance.”

Mattsson’s decision to go public with his disaffection, in a church whose top leaders commonly deliberate in private, is a sign that the church faces serious challenges not just from outside but also from skeptics inside.

Greg Prince, a Mormon historian and businessman in Washington who has held local leadership positions in the church, shares Mattsson’s doubts. “Consider a Catholic cardinal suddenly going to the media and saying about his own church, ‘I don’t buy a lot of this stuff,’ ” Prince said. “That’s the level we’re talking about here.”

He said of Mattsson, “He is, as far as I know, the highest-ranking church official who has gone public with deep concerns, who has had a faith crisis and come forward to say he’s going to talk about it because maybe that will help us all to resolve it.”

Every faith has its skeptics and detractors, but the Mormon Church’s history creates special challenges. The church was born in America only 183 years ago, and its founder and prophet, Joseph Smith, and his disciples left behind reams of papers that still exist, documenting their work, exposing their warts and sometimes contradicting one another.

Some church leaders are well aware of the doubters in their midst. Elder Jeffrey Holland, who serves in the church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles (the governing body just below the three-member First Presidency), said in April while addressing the church’s semiannual general conference in Salt Lake City: “Please don’t hyperventilate if from time to time issues arise that need to be examined, understood and resolved. They do and they will.”

The first doubts filtered up to Mattsson from members who had turned to the Internet to research a Sunday school talk at their church. There are dozens of websites other than the Mormons’ own that present critical views of the faith.

Mattsson said he sought the help of the church’s highest authorities. He said a senior apostle came to Sweden at his request and told a meeting of Mormons that he had a manuscript in his briefcase that, once it was published, would prove all the doubters wrong. But Mattsson said the promised text never appeared, and when he asked the apostle about it, he was told it was impertinent to ask.

That encounter is what really set off Mattsson’s doubts. He began reading everything he could. He listened to the podcasts on the “Mormon Stories” website. And he read “Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling,” a biography by Richard Lyman Bushman, a historian at Columbia University and a prominent Mormon.

Bushman said in a telephone interview: “You would be amazed at the number of Mormons who don’t think Joseph Smith practiced polygamy. It just wasn’t talked about. It was never mentioned in church periodicals. That was policy.”

In the past 10 or 15 years, he said, “the church has come to realize that transparency and candor and historical accuracy are really the only way to go.” The church has released seven volumes of the papers of Joseph Smith, and published an essay on one of the most shameful events in church history, the Mountain Meadows massacre, in which church leaders plotted the ambush and slaughter of people in a wagon train in 1857.

But the church has not actively disseminated most of these documents, so when members come across them on websites or in books, Bushman said, “it’s just excruciating.”

“Sometimes people are furious because they feel they haven’t been told the truth growing up,” he said. “They feel like they were tricked or betrayed.”

Mattsson said that when he started sharing what he had learned with other Mormons in Sweden, the stake president (who oversees a cluster of congregations) told him not to talk about it to any members, even his wife and children. He did not obey: “I said to them, why are you afraid for the truth?”

He organized a discussion group in Sweden and more than 600 participated, he said. In 2010, the church sent two of its top historians, Elder Marlin K. Jensen and Richard E. Turley Jr., to allay the Swedes’ concerns. They had a remarkably frank and sometimes testy exchange, especially about Smith and polygamy.

“I don’t want to hurt the church,” Mattsson said. “I just want the truth.”