Interview with Sandra Tanner Mormonism Shadow or Reality Part 1

If the LDS Church is not true, which church is?

Didn't the Bible predict the apostasy of the Christian faith? These and 34 other questions often posed by Latter-day Saints are addressed in Answering Mormon's Questions, published by Kregel. Written by MRMs Bill McKeever and Eric Johnson, Answering Mormon's Questions includes a glossary of Mormon terms and questions for group discussions. Answering Mormon's Questions can be ordered online at MRM.org or at your favorite Christian bookstore.

Be ready to give an answer! Viewpoint on Mormonism, the program that examines the teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from a biblical perspective. Viewpoint on Mormonism is sponsored by Mormonism Research Ministry. Since 1979, Mormonism Research Ministry has been dedicated to equipping the body of Christ with answers regarding the Christian faith in a manner that expresses gentleness and respect. And now your host for today's Viewpoint on Mormonism. Mormonism, is it a shadow or reality? Welcome to this edition of Viewpoint on Mormonism. I'm your host, Bill McKeever, founder and director of Mormonism Research Ministry, and with me today is Eric Johnson, my colleague at MRM. But we also have with us a very special friend, Sandra Tanner, who is with the Utah Lighthouse Ministry. We've had Sandra on the show in the past, and it's good to have you back, Sandra. Welcome.

Right. Hello. We're going to be talking about your book, Mormonism Shadow or Reality, a book that you and Gerald put together back in the early 1960s. Would you say that this is your, well, the Latin phrase magnum opus means great work. Would this be your magnum opus?

Yes, I think it would. I do remember reading Shadow or Reality when I first became interested in Mormonism many years ago, and I think the last time we had you on the show, I mentioned that. But we want to talk specifically about this book because Mormonism Shadow or Reality has certainly affected not only the personal lives of many Mormons, non-Mormons, ex-Mormons who have read it, but I would say that probably just about everybody who has done any serious research into the study of Mormonism has used your book as a text because you cover so many areas. We want to talk about the history of this, and I don't think a lot of people realize just how young you were when you first started researching Mormonism, and you were talking to Eric and I off-air about this, and I'm going to turn you loose on this. How young were you when you first started realizing there were problems in Mormonism? Well, when I first was confronted with problems of Mormonism would have been when I was 16 and my mother was having questions about Mormonism that she brought up to me, but I didn't start personally looking into it myself until I met Gerald when I was 18. And he was, well, 20 at the time I met him, and he had already been studying Mormonism for the last two years trying to resolve his own faith crisis, and then he started bringing up all these different problems with early Mormonism to me. And after a whirlwind romance, we got married and together facing our faith crisis, we started studying all the early sources that we could come across on Mormonism, trying to resolve the question, was Joseph Smith ever called of God? Could he have been called of God to just bring out the Book of Mormon?

Is it just that we need to jettison everything after the Book of Mormon but maybe keep that as a scripture? And so when we got married, Gerald was 21, I was 18, and we had come to faith in Christ, but we're still hanging on to the Book of Mormon at that point. And so one of the first things we printed was we went and bought a little mimeograph machine, which is a crude form of duplication that they had back in the 50s. And we bought a little mimeograph machine and printed out a little two-page thing where I told about my conversion to Christ, and that launched our publishing career. And so over the next year, while we lived in California, we did a number of little pamphlets that just had little research on a given topic. Like we might have two, three pages on problems with polygamy, then we might do two or three pages on problems with the changes in the Doctrine and Covenants, or changes in the Book of Mormon, or problems with the First Vision. We were pretty dumb, naive young kids, but we were trying to resolve the truth questions of the faith we had been raised in. All our family goes clear back to the early 1830s in Mormonism, so this was our personal quest to determine what was true and what wasn't. That launched our printing career, and then we went on to study it more in depth the whole rest of our lives. Now, Shadow of Reality comes out in 1963, so you're in your early 20s. Yeah. That is just fascinating to me because, you know, most people in their late teens, early 20s, the last thing they're really thinking about is doing an in-depth critique of a pretty large religion in the United States, even at that time.

As you mentioned, you're both very young. If you had only a minute to give a synopsis of this book, including its purpose, how would you describe that? Oh, the purpose of the book was to show people that Mormonism was not based on a true calling of God, that the whole history of Mormonism shows that it was Joseph Smith's deception, and that he presented a different gospel. And our desire was that the Mormon people would be able to see the evidence and make a decision on their own whether they could still endorse Mormonism. Our hope was that they would determine that it can't be defended and that they would come away from it and go on to biblical Christianity. So we saw it as a move that was honoring to God and trying to establish truth.

People can make their own decisions whether we're right or wrong, but we felt the evidence showed Joseph Smith invented it all. Sandra, in 1963, when you first came out with this book, it was titled Mormonism, a Study of History and Doctrine. Do you remember how many pages were in that book?

And explain a little bit about how this became Mormonism Shadow Reality and grew to the size it is today. Well, like I mentioned, we were putting out these little mimeographed pamphlets at first and several of those little two or three page pamphlets became chapters when we did the book in 1963. So you look at the table of contents and you'll see this is many times the same title that was on a little flyer we had done earlier and we just expanded it.

So it was a matter of growing the book from pamphlets to chapters that we then collated together to make a whole book. And later the title was turned to Mormonism Shadow Reality. Tell us specifically what you meant by that title and why you made that change from a study of history and doctrine. Well, I can't remember exactly how Gerald came up with that, but I think he was trying to find, well, he wanted a new title because it was enlarged and he didn't want people to think it was just still the same old book.

And he wanted something that was a little more catchy. Mormonism, a study of Mormon history and doctrine sounds kind of dry, so he changed it to Mormonism Shadow Reality that he hoped would make people curious of, okay, is it really reality? And would they pick it up and look at the book more with that title than the other? And how many editions have there been of this book over the past six decades? And when was your latest edition?

We created five editions and the last one was in 1987, which pretty much set the book as far as the contents. We later retyped the whole thing to put it into a digital format so that we could make it easier to read, a better type, better photographs. And we took out most of all of the capitalization and underlining that everyone thought looked very amateurish and I'll grant you that it did. But back when we were typing stuff, if you wanted to emphasize something, there weren't very many ways on a typewriter to emphasize other than capitals or underlining. I think that's something that's lost on a lot of our younger people is that have been raised in home publishing. I mean, it's been around now for quite a few years, but back when you're doing this, that's not even available.

There aren't any computers. There's no way of doing boldface type. There's no way of doing italics. What was it? The IBM Selectric typewriter may have been one of the first where you had to change the little ball, remember? I had one of those.

Oh, I'm glad those days are over. But see, people have to realize that when we started researching, most libraries didn't even have a photocopy machine. I mean, you got a big card catalog where you went and looked up titles of stuff and then had to turn a call number into a librarian who had to go in the back of the building to get an out of print book. So it was very cumbersome to do research. And when you can't just make a photocopy of a page, that means you have to sit there and hand write it out to take it home to later type to put it into the book.

So it was very labor intensive. I'm kind of fascinated to know how you were able to distribute this book. This was not a published work by a recognized publisher. You are putting this thing together and you are going to distribute that.

How did you do that? Well, in the early 60s, when we were just doing the little pamphlets, we were just giving them away. At that point, we weren't even charging for them. And a man that had a used bookstore here in town, Mr. Wilson at Wilson's Book, and he said, if you would put a little charge on those, I could put them in my bookstore. And I think you'd sell some of your material and you'd reach a larger audience. And we thought about that. Well, we never even thought about selling our research.

We never thought anyone would pay to get it. Anyway, so we put a little charge like 50 cents or a dollar on these different pamphlets we would do. So Mr. Wilson was our launching pad for getting our books out to the public. Back in the early 60s, there were people individually that were looking into different aspects of Mormon history. You had the polygamous fundamentalist groups around here in Salt Lake. And a lot of them were into research because they believed the old doctrines under Brigham Young.

The polygamous still believed Adam God and blood atonement and Old Rite, Temple Rite and polygamy and all these things. And so they had little pamphlets that they were writing up as well for their position. And so at the different few bookstores in Salt Lake, you would find, if you knew where to look, a back corner of the bookstore that would have controversial material. We've been talking with Sandra Tanner. She's the head of Utah Lighthouse Ministry and she's the co-author of a book, Mormonism Shadow or Reality, which has been out for decades. And so we're learning a little bit of the history behind that book as well as a little bit of the history behind Sandra Tanner herself. Tomorrow we're going to continue this conversation with Sandra Tanner.

Thank you for listening. If you would like more information regarding Mormonism Research Ministry, we encourage you to visit our website at www.mrm.org where you can request our free newsletter, Mormonism Researched. We hope you will join us again as we look at another viewpoint on Mormonism. Looking for a book on Mormonism from a Christian perspective, or do you have questions about the history or doctrines of the LDS church? Bill McKeever and Eric Johnson are once again volunteering at the Utah Lighthouse Bookstore and would be glad to speak to you on Saturdays from 1 to 5 p.m. The Utah Lighthouse Bookstore is located right there at 1358 South on West Temple Street in Salt Lake City. Be sure to come by any Saturday from 1 to 5 p.m. and say hi to Bill or Eric.