September Six

In Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History, the “September Six” name the 1993 high-profile excommunications that bookend the era the book chronicles. The biography frames them as the culmination of a decade-long battle between the LDS hierarchy and Mormon intellectuals: after the 1974 “Camelot” peak of the professionalized Historical Department, storm clouds gathered, the professionalization ended by 1982, and the conflict “culminated in the high-profile excommunication of the ‘September Six’ in 1993.” Within nineteen days, the group — a name already in use by the media — faced church discipline: Lynne Kanavel Whitesides was disfellowshipped, while Lavina Fielding Anderson, Avraham Gileadi, Maxine Hanks, D. Michael Quinn, and Paul J. Toscano were excommunicated. The book connects this episode to an older lineage of intellectual-vs-hierarchy clashes (e.g., the 1869 Godbe-Harrison excommunications) and to the policing of Mormon feminism around the same period (Sonia Johnson, the BYU veto of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich).

Context: The “September Six” were six members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints disciplined in September 1993 — five excommunicated, one disfellowshipped — most of them writers and scholars whose work or activism was seen as challenging church authority. The episode is widely cited as a turning point in the relationship between the LDS Church and its intellectual community.

Where this appears

• Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History — the 1993 excommunications named as the culmination of the hierarchy-vs-intellectuals battle that bookends Arrington’s era.