Interview with Sandra Tanner Mormonism: Shadow or Reality

Unprepared to engage Mormon missionaries when they knock on your door? Perhaps the mind, 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. So glad you could be with us for 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 again Sandra Tanner. She is the head of the Utah Lighthouse Ministry, runs a bookstore at 1358 West Temple across from the ballpark. But we were talking about what we determined yesterday is definitely Sandra and Gerald Tanner's magnum opus, a book that they both wrote together titled Mormonism Shadow or Reality.

And I was mentioning yesterday how much this book meant to me when I was first studying the history and theology of the LDS Church. A topic that we ended in yesterday's show, Sandra, is the fact that this was not a published work by a recognized commercial publishing company. This was something that you and Gerald put together and distributed yourself. When it first came out in the early 1960s, who would have even known that this thing existed? And now so many years later, I need to ask you, how many copies of this book do you know of have been distributed over the last six decades? Well, I tried to figure that out in the last few days. And with my staff, we've concluded it has to be over 60,000, but there are some years where we don't have records. And so we're not really sure.

If Gerald were around, he probably could tell us, but it has to be over 60,000. But as far as how people know about it, well, back in the 60s, there was an underground information. Anyone seeking stuff about Mormonism would go to one of the bookstores and ask, you know, hey, what's the latest? And they might direct you to the place under the stairwell where they kept all the controversial stuff on Mormonism. And then you would encounter our research and our booklets. Sandra, this is not an easy book just to read all the way through. It's 586 pages of your 2008 edition. A lot of quotes. It's not written the way a lot of books would be on Mormonism that are going to be typeset in a way that would be easier to read.

This is photocopied, 8.5 by 11, two columns back and front. This book could be intimidating to somebody who doesn't know what it is, especially with back to back, back to front pages. Why do you think this book that is so big is selling tens of thousands of copies?

Well, it's like buying an encyclopedia. It pulls together chapters on all of the main doctrinal and historical problem areas of Mormonism. And someone going through a faith crisis may have questions about a number of the items in our table of contents, but they didn't even know they had, we're going to have problems or questions with a lot of other stuff that they see in the list. So it has a broad appeal to people because whatever your questions were, we probably got a chapter on it.

I think we should talk about that because it is a huge volume. What I actually liked about it was you had so many quotes in it. I wanted to know what did these men actually teach?

What was expected of Latter-day Saints to believe? And I think he did a good job in putting a lot of quotes in there. And that's what impressed me. It's not that I don't like your commentary. I do love your commentary, but I was looking at it primarily for the quotes, but let's just go over this.

This is just amazing. I'm just going to read a few of them. If anybody has never read this book before, this is what you can find in it. You have a whole section on change, censorship, and suppression, talking about changing doctrines, the censorship of their teachings itself. And a person might ask, well, why would a religious organization, especially one that claims to be the only true church on the face of the earth, why would they want to censor any materials of their past?

Why not get it all out there and let people decide? You talk about changes in revelations that Joseph Smith had. And I remember being fascinated, noticing, yeah, he claimed to say one thing and then later on words are added to his revelations. And his revelations always seem to be so precise.

How can he remember all of these things years afterwards and such? Joseph Smith and money-digging, an aspect of Joseph Smith's history that I find that even some Mormons today don't want to even admit that that was a part of his life. Then you have, of course, a big section on the Book of Mormon, archeology in the Book of Mormon, changes in Joseph Smith's history, a whole section on the First Vision, then the LDS Godhood. Without going through all of them, I think one thing we can take away is you covered, I would say, all of the basics.

Talk about that a little bit. Why these subjects? Well, in our own personal search, those are the most fundamental claims of Mormonism, the areas that if they're true, we all should know it. And if they're not true, we ought to know it.

And they're the basic claims. Did Joseph have a first vision? Were there really gold plates?

Does the Book of Abraham really translate? What about out here in Utah? What was it like living here? Was there blood atonement? Did Brigham Young teach Adam God? How many wives did Joseph Smith have?

How did the Mormons handle their finances? I mean, they are all just the basic questions that if you're trying to determine its truth claims, that would come up. And what's amazing is a lot of those topics are still perplexing Mormons to this very day. You've responded to all this years ago, and yet we still come across many Latter-day Saints that are believing a type of Mormonism, that the Church now has pretty much admitted a lot of these things. They've been compelled to do so. But we still find, sadly, that there is a lot of—and I hate to use the word ignorance because that's such a pejorative term, but I mean it in the true sense—a lot of Latter-day Saints are honestly ignorant about a lot of their history because the missionaries, being teenagers themselves in our early 20s, they don't usually know a lot of this information either.

And if they don't know the information, how can they pass it on to potential converts? And so this book, I think, has done an excellent job in covering a lot of the basics here. And Bill, I like what she said using the word encyclopedia, because while you might not read this all the way through, these different sections are important. If you're studying that particular issue, and if you're going to have one book on Mormonism from a Christian perspective, this is the book to have because it's a great resource book, an encyclopedia as Sandra has put it. In fact, it's such an important book that there was a gentleman by the name of Kurt Bench, and he's the one who owns Benchmark Books in Utah. And he put Mormonism Shadow Reality as one of the top 50 books written between 1830 and 1980.

He did this in a Sunstone article back in 1990. Now that's an incredible accomplishment when your book, Sandra, is right along with the seven-volume set of History of the Church, Orson Pratt's a series of pamphlets, Lucy Mack Smith's biological sketches of Joseph Smith, the prophet. Why do you think that Kurt Bench placed your book in the top 50? Because we pulled together all of the important topics and put it into one volume in a straightforward manner that appealed to people. People that were questioning Mormonism were tired of reading Mormon apologetics that seemed to just do a spin on the topics and not just laying out the facts. So they hate to admit that we had an impact because it's such an amateurish published document.

But when we started writing, we knew no one would believe what we said. If we just made a commentary on how Mormonism came about, no one's going to listen to us two dumb kids. So we had to give five, 10, 15 quotes on a given topic so that people would understand, no, this is the really the way it happened. It isn't just something we're pontificating on. And so the popularity of the book came from the fact that people could see all those quotes and they could see that we had built a case that would stand up to the historical record.

And that's the thing today. They come into our bookstore because they're counting on us, giving them all the reference material to back up our claim that Mormonism in fact is not true. Now Bench called that book Mormonism Shout a Reality, an anti-Mormon book.

Do you take that as a compliment or a criticism? Well, coming from a Mormon, I am not surprised that he would categorize it that way. It's the same with Fawn Brody's book No Man Knows My History, The Life of Joseph Smith.

Mormons would call that an anti-Mormon book, but I consider her book to be a very valid historical look at Joseph Smith's life. And so I don't like the term anti-Mormon because it implies I'm opposed to the people, which I'm not. I'm opposed to the Mormon church claims.

So, you know, it is what it is. The Mormons like to throw out anti-Mormon, which I think is pretty funny because nowadays they don't even want us to use the name Mormon for them. So I don't know how I'm anti-Mormon. There's no Mormons. Now Sandra, you wrote a book called The Changing World of Mormonism. It was printed by Moody Press in 1980. Is this a condensed Mormonism Shout a Reality?

Yes. And that's what's funny is people at the time we did the book, people would say, oh, well, that's too big. I didn't want something that big to read. I'm thinking, oh, well, you probably wouldn't be interested in shadow then because this is only a third of the material that's in our full size book.

And I want to point out that it is 587 pages, about the same size, but as far as paper, it's about half the size of what your eight and a half by 11 book is. Well, in this book that you wrote, The Changing World of Mormonism, in the introduction, this is what your friend Wesley Walters wrote. And I thought this was impressive what he wrote. He says, oh, this stuff is dynamite, exclaimed a prestigious director of a Mormon Institute of Religion. I tell you though, you may not believe it.

I have seen people get utterly crushed, almost devastated with some of the material that the Tanners have reproduced. I will tell you, he continues, there was an institute teacher here not long ago who lost his testimony and went out of the church on the basis of this stuff. That description of the effects of Gerald and Sandra's publishing efforts on mass Mormonism is hardly an overstatement. That's an incredible statement.

I would agree with that. I have to ask you though, Sandra, when Wes Walters wrote that, you had to feel pretty good. I mean, Wes Walters was an amazing researcher in and of himself. He discovered some things that really became very important when it comes to the origins of Mormonism, especially Joseph Smith's history, I should say.

I want to continue with what Wes Walters had to say, but we're not going to have time to do it today. So we're going to continue our talk with Sandra Tanner, the author of Mormonism Shadow or Reality. And if you've ever read Mormonism Shadow or Reality, you know it is quite a work that covers a lot of important information regarding the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

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.