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Sterling M. McMurrin was a well-known intellectual and professor at the University of Utah from the 1940’s to the 1980’s. He served as U.S. Commissioner of Education under President John F. Kennedy. In his work with the Aspen Institute of the Humanities, he came to know many of the pillars of the political and cultural establishment of the United States. Yet for all of his eminence in the secular world, McMurrin will probably be remembered for his writing and influence on the Mormon Church. He described himself as a "loyal heretic:" he openly expressed his disbelief in many fundamental doctrines of Mormonism. But he really never left Utah and was always sympathetic to the church when contacted for comment by the national media.
“Matters of Conscience: Conversations with Sterling M. McMurrin” is a transcript of interviews with the man, conducted over almost a decade by L. Jackson Newell (a former co-editor of “Dialogue” and also a professor at the University of Utah.) This book also serves as a sort of autobiography of McMurrin. In the interviews, it appears that McMurrin (perhaps unconsciously) modeled his style of spaking after that of the late U.S. President Harry S. Truman
We get the same pungent tone of “plain speaking”–he is usually tactful but seldom pulls his punches where candor is concerned. He cherished his Western roots; in his spare time he raised horses, wore string ties, and was very conservative in his personal life.
The most compelling chapters of the book are those that outline McMurrin’s encounters with LDS General Authorities. D. Michael Quinn has demonstrated that the LDS hierarchy can in some ways be thought of as a large, extended family. McMurrin was a grandson of a general authority and grew up knowing many of the others. Because of these personal relationships
(and his lack of rancor), he was allowed to freely speak his mind.
After one meeting with Elders Harold B. Lee and Joseph Fielding Smith, during which they discussed McMurrin’s dissenting opinions, Elder Smith told McMurrin, “in spite of your telling us of your disbeliefs and heresies, we want you to know that you have the Holy Ghost” (page 194).
An effort was apparently made in the mid-50’s to excommunicate McMurrin, but it was spiked by church president David O. McKay.
The president told the professor that he would be the first witness in McMurrin’s defense at any church court. He also told McMurrin that the LDS ban on black males holding the priesthood (a major bone of contention with conservative church leaders) was a “practice”, not a doctrine, and would someday be changed. Ironically, this attempt to purge McMurrin became one of the church’s finest hours in the delicate matter of toleration of individual conscience.
McMurrin remembered having strong religious feelings in his childhood, but he dismissed them as “emotion.” He became in adulthood a convert to the great 20th century idea of naturalism, rather like Fawn Brodie. Unlike Brodie, however, he still saw great value in the church. There was an ambivalence about his religious stirrings; he wanted to believe, but he saw the prevaling secular philosophies of midcentury western culture as forbidding it. In a twist of fate, purely materialist systems (like Marxism) have now fallen into intellectual disrepute. One wonders how a young McMurrin would react to the changing zeitgeist if he were just starting out now.
There are at least a couple of ways of viewing McMurrin’s life: one is to consider him as an example of what BYU professor Louis Midgely calls “the acids of modernity”–that is, what can happen to a person’s religious faith when it is subjected to the relentless skepticism of modernism. The critic Midge Decter wrote a book in the 70’s titled “Liberal Parents, Radical Children.” Her point was that liberalism in one generation frequently leads to radicalism (or in the case of religion, unbelief) in the next. It is understandable that church leaders would fear that, after McMurrin, other heretics would appear that would be far less “loyal.”
On the other hand, Todd Compton writes of “non-hierarchical revelation.” Taking the example of the blacks and the priesthood,
perhaps the Lord was using McMurrin’s dissent as a tool to remove encrustations of superstition and culturally-induced “practices” from the pure gospel of Christ. Eugene England has suggested that one reason blacks hadn’t received the priesthood by 1978 wasn’t that they were unworthy, but that
we weren’t ready for them to have it because of our racism. In an interview with “Time” magazine at the time of the priesthood revelation, McMurrin said “the young people of the church wouldn’t stand for it (the ban) anymore.” Perhaps it was the function of McMurrin, Lowell L. Bennion, and others like them to alter the environment of the church in order to make change possible. In any event, “Matters of Conscience” is a very interesting history of one Mormon’s life during the turbulent 20th century.
