The institution
The September Six
Six scholars, one month, and a leadership talk that named the threats: feminists, gays, and intellectuals.
The point in one sentence
In September 1993, six Latter-day Saint scholars and writers were excommunicated or disfellowshipped within days of each other, months after Elder Boyd K. Packer publicly named "the gay-lesbian movement, the feminist movement... and the ever-present challenge from the so-called scholars or intellectuals" as the Church's three greatest threats.
What happened
The six were Lavina Fielding Anderson, Avraham Gileadi, Maxine Hanks, D. Michael Quinn, Paul Toscano, and Lynne Kanavel Whitesides. Their offenses were publishing: on the documented history of post-Manifesto polygamy, on women and priesthood, on Heavenly Mother, on the Church's disciplinary culture itself. Quinn was one of the most respected documentary historians the Church had produced. Dialogue's retrospective and a 30-year assessment trace what followed: a generation of Mormon studies scholars who learned to publish carefully or not at all.
The Packer quote is from his May 18, 1993 address to the All-Church Coordinating Council. The date matters, and so does the form: it was a talk to a leadership council, not a handbook entry, and it should not be read as an official policy statement.
What is true on the other side
- Church discipline is formally local. FAIR's position is that these were six separate stake-level councils acting on individual conduct, not a coordinated purge, and no document proving central coordination has surfaced. That is worth holding before weighing what the timing suggests.
- Any organization may define its boundaries. A church excommunicating people who publicly reject its teachings is not by itself sinister; that is what membership means.
- Gileadi's excommunication was later reversed and Hanks was rebaptized. The record is not one-directional.
What is left after all of that
The pattern is the problem. The people disciplined were not teaching that the Church was true but its history embarrassing; they were publishing accurate history from the Church's own archives. Quinn's post-Manifesto polygamy research was not wrong; it is now the accepted account, and the Gospel Topics essays quietly confirm much of what cost people their membership in 1993.
An institution confident in its truth claims does not need to discipline its historians. The September Six mattered less for the six individuals than for the message every believing scholar received, and the thirty years of self-censorship that followed.
The facts those six published are now on the Church’s own website, unattributed, decades after the people who published them lost their memberships for it.
Quinn’s post-Manifesto polygamy research was not wrong. It is now the accepted account.
Why this should make you question
Ask one question of any organization: what happens to the people who tell the truth about it from the inside? Then notice that the people who told it here were not outsiders. They were believing members working in the Church’s own archives.