For Ruffled Believers

Unquestioning belief rather than critical self-examination has always been the Mormon style. Breaking with this tradition, a group of young Mormon intellectuals, all of whom went to either Harvard or Stanford, have brought out Dialogue, a learned quarterly dedicated to the proposition that the faith of the Latter-day Saints is compatible with reasoned inquiry.

The first unabashedly highbrow publication in Mormon history, Dialogue* gets no financial support from the church, is designed to keep intelligent, educated Mormons who might otherwise fall by the wayside within the community of Saints. Its tone contrasts sharply with that of the vast array of official Mormon publications--ranging from Salt Lake City's daily Deseret News to the Relief Society Magazine, a women's monthly--which read like house organs and propagate what one Dialogue editor calls "the myth of the unruffled Mormon," impervious to doubt. In reality, argues Dialogue's book-review editor, Richard L. Bushman, a history professor at Brigham Young University, plenty of young Mormons "have become estranged from the church for intellectual reasons."

Back from the Abyss. Dialogue has opened its pages to criticism from nonbelievers. In the first issue, Presbyterian Theologian Robert McAfee Brown politely suggested that Mormons seem more interested in conversion than in genuine dialogue with other Christians, while Roman Catholic Mario S. De Pillis argued that Mormon histories of their church have been less than thorough in explaining its origins. In the 145-page second issue, published this month, Political Science Professor Louis Midgley of Brigham Young University presents a surprisingly sympathetic Mormon criticism of the late Paul Tillich's vision of a nonpersonal God. In another article, Political Scientist J. D. Williams candidly reports that the Mormon hierarchy appeared ready to endorse the John Birch Society earlier this year, but after pressure from one group of church elders, "stepped back from the abyss." In an implicit criticism of the church's policy of barring Negroes from its priesthood, Mormon Karl Keller describes the profound spirituality of the American Negro in an essay on a civil rights project in Tennessee.

Cautious as such criticism is, it represents something so unusual in Mormonism that one church leader has ominously declared: "Dialogue can't help but hurt the church." Nonetheless, Dialogue's growing subscription list now stands at more than 3,000, and its editors insist that Mormonism has nothing to fear from self-appraisal. Says Managing Editor Eugene England: "A man need not relinquish his faith to be intellectually respectable, nor his intellect to be faithful."

*Not to be confused with Dialog, a theological journal of the American Lutheran Church.

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