This is one of my favorite topics, even though I'll never know if I'm heading down the right path when I think about him, his drives/motivations and his fears. I readily admit that not being gay possibly blinds me to some of what he thinks, does and doesn't do, but I kind of believe that I'm on the right track.
I've read a lot about him, and recently from two interviews:
http://www.pbs.org/mormons/interviews/quinn.html &
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/faithbased/2012/11/d_michael_quinn_and_mormon_excommunication_the_complicated_life_of_a_mormon.html These two articles provide the quoted material, infra.
When he was 17, in 1961 (I was 16 then, and while I can't confirm what year he graduated from high school, there is a good chance we graduated the same year, 1962. But he probably went into the mission field 'on time', 1963, while I had to wait, due to some very enjoyable sinning, and didn't leave until 1965...)
Let me start over: In 1961, when he was 17, he was shown a tract that declared the mormon church was not what it claimed to be. He immediately dismissed this as folderol. But he subsequently found out that there was a good deal of truth to the tract's claim that there had been numerous changes to the original BofM. So he did some research and concluded that only 16 of the changes were 'important.' (And the White & Delightsome change had yet to be made!)
I find it interesting that he did not mention what these 16 'important' changes were, nor did he mention how he 'absolved' the church and continued to believe. But some clues come later.
During this same period, he was told about BY's Adam-God theory, didn't believe it, but then had no trouble confirming these notions in BY's journals and statements. But again, he does not specify why this didn't add to his discomfiture with the church. Instead, he goes off to college and then gets his mission call, to England. But I think the answer becomes obvious regarding how and why these items were 'shelved.'
(I have a question about this. It has been pointed out here that England seems to be the destination of choice for young men seen to have a 'future' in the church. Was his call to England random, or had he been recognized, despite his 'impure' blood [given that his father, Daniel Peña, was a Mexican and never had anything to do with the church], as being something special? He gives no hints to answering this question.)
He does state that his testimony of the truth of the gospel was based on being "...an ardent believer since childhood, (with) many metaphysical experiences, healing experiences..." Viewing this record dispassionately, one wonders how much his ultra-orthodox maternal grandmother had to do with these mystical experiences. Was he repeating behavior he had learned from her?
He remarked that this grandmother had made it a point to continually express to young Quinn, that he was destined to be an apostle. It makes sense to me that in order for these predictions to be given credence, the two of them, grandmother and grandson, likely conspired to have him experience events that he could view as being religiously uplifting and thus raising him above the crowd, the parvenu of mormonism.
So he gets to the mission field, England, mid-1960s, just as the effects of years of 'baseball baptisms' have created records of heavily populated wards and branches, where weekly attendance is a mockery of said membership numbers. He mentions a branch with 125 members of record, with only three or four active members.
Notice of such disparities reached SLC and Mark E. Peterson was sent over to set things straight. He was given all of England, and parts of France, Belgium and the Netherlands to fix. Elder Quinn found himself posted up as a Branch President, with the mandate of either activating or excommunicating the names on this long list. He says, "I was facing the prospect of excommunicating more than 100 people from the LDS Church, and I'd only baptized four."
I think most of us apostates, as missionaries, wouldn't have given it much thought. I would have shrugged my shoulders, said naughty words aimed at the feckless reprobate Elders who'd created the situation, and then handled it. Elder Quinn says it sent him into an existential overload, and "I ended up in a spiritual crisis. ... I lost my faith. ..."
He recounts that the memories of his "childhood metaphysical experiences" no longer mattered to him, because he was now plagued by "...massive doubt. I just didn't believe in anything at that point, and I knew that I could not stay as a missionary. ... I gave myself a few weeks, and that if I didn't resolve it and regain my testimony in a few weeks, then I was going to tell the mission president I had to go home, which in the Mormon culture is a huge humiliation, to leave your mission early. And what could I say to people? ..."
Surprise!! He "...regained those spiritual feelings, that burning within that [St.] Bernard [of] Clairvaux, as a medieval mystic, had described, and faith returned. ... I knew again ... that God lived."
Later, when he'd advanced to AP, Elder Quinn says that doubting Elders would come to him for counsel and he says he told them, "I don't know the answer for you. All I can tell you is that I think faith is a gift, and I've had it most of my life." And the bedrock of his faith?: His metaphysical experiences, given to him as special witness! He had this gift, from ghawd, but the other missionaries, try though they might, couldn't have it.
Regarding when and how he acquired this faith: "Well, from childhood, whenever I would think about God or pray, I would feel this burning feeling and a sensation within me. No one had ever told me about it." (I call BS and selective memory!!)
He mentions being stunned when he learned that this burning sensation was mentioned in scripture and that others had experienced it. Again, special much? The temptation to not think himself so special might have surfaced, but I think he battled it and won.
He says, "But for me, I can't point to an earliest point in my life where I knew God. I have always known him as a friend, as a companion. In my prayers I talked with him as if he were my father." Which was handy, given that his father, never a mormon, was gone from Quinn's life after a divorce, when Quinn was four.
Quinn recounts an event from when he was nine years old. He was with his family, touring a cave. When it came time to turn out the lights, so that the members of the tour could experience total darkness, Quinn had fallen behind the group. The lights went out as Quinn decided to catch up. He could hear the tour guide talking and aimed himself towards that voice. As he was walking, he heard a voice say "Stop!" So he stopped. But since he still hadn't caught up to the group, and felt he was going in the right direction, he decided to ignore the voice and began to take a step. But the voice, stronger this time, said, "Stop, my son!" And he did. When the lights came on, he was at the edge of a precipice, because the echoing of the tour guides voice had made it seem to come from where young Quinn was headed, and not where the tour guide actually was. Ghawd had reached out to young Quinn and prevented serious injury or death.
So this became a lynch pin in his testimony, both as to the existence of ghawd, and his own special relationship with ghawd, since very few other people reported such events in their lives.
He also believes that ghawd intervened on his behalf in healing him and in preserving him from death in various accidents he was in. But he acknowledges that the cave experience was the pivotal one.
So D. Michael Quinn, a gay man (and he says he knew it from his teen years) came home from his mission and tried to follow the usual path forward: marriage and kids, except that he avoided the Draft by volunteering and serving three years in the Army. He did marry and have children, but that part of his life has been kept private. He is divorced.
When it came time to chose a career path, he couldn't help but follow his passion, uncovering the mysteries of history. He'd been an English major at the Y, but when it came time to go back to college after the Army, he switched to history.
Here it gets tricky. Studying history covers the whole damn world!! So why pick mormonism? And why work so hard at coming up with, as BKP said, truths that weren't useful? And which finally resulted in his excommunication!!
Because of his experiences, he believes in ghawd and feels himself to be 'special' in the eyes of said ghawd. But he has to be, at some level, aware that the mormon church, as it is run by the current hierarchy, is NOT the church JS was told to found, meaning it is not his ghawd's church now. Personally, vile apostate that I am, I think it is exactly the church that JS intended, but believers in the Divine cannot allow themselves to agree with me.
So to wind this up, I think that D. Michael Quinn is intelligent, driven and tremendously unhappy, because he thought that ghawd had a plan for him and now the days of his life are in short supply; he has done yeoman's work in uncovering and collating data but it has neither made him happy nor advanced his standing with the one organization in which he wants to matter.
And there seems to be no way he can divest himself of his belief in the Divine, because to do so would leave him counting his life as nothing, compared to what he wanted it to be. So he vocally confirms his belief in the JS restoration story, and the relationship ghawd has with this restored gospel, and with himself.
To bad he can't sit down and ponder the concept that there are kids in every religion in the world who have had the same 'mystical experiences' that he had and used them to confirm the truth of each particular gospel. Like so many who felt that destiny called, but never delivered, he is likely to go to his grave wondering, what the hell happened!
The End
ETA a final proofing and to agree with ALifeExamined that the SWK blessing, that he'd become an apostle, contributed to the feelings of divine selection and destiny. Too bad Spencer didn't just use the patriarchal blessing generality of 'you will be a special instrument in the hands of the lord in building and guiding the church.' But it wouldn't have mattered. And who knows if that's what SWK said? But I don't it's what Quinn believes he heard.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/08/2017 08:37PM by elderolddog.