{"id":8095,"date":"2026-05-13T15:26:44","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T22:26:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/?p=8095"},"modified":"2026-05-13T15:26:44","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T22:26:44","slug":"conscience-documents-and-the-long-memory-of-zion-gary-james-bergera-and-the-quiet-reformation-of-lds-historiography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/2026\/05\/13\/conscience-documents-and-the-long-memory-of-zion-gary-james-bergera-and-the-quiet-reformation-of-lds-historiography\/","title":{"rendered":"Conscience, Documents, and the Long Memory of Zion: Gary James Bergera and the Quiet Reformation of LDS Historiography"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Footnoter of Zion: How a BYU-Trained Editor Reframed<\/em>
\nMormonism’s Conversation With Its Own Past<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2726 \u2726 \u2726<\/span><\/p>\n

But first on the agenda:<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>This is a\u00a0Mormon Stories Podcast\u00a0interview<\/strong><\/a> hosted by John Dehlin, featuring\u00a0Gary James Bergera\u00a0\u2014 longtime director of Signature Books and the Smith Pettit Foundation \u2014 discussing his newly edited book,\u00a0Educating Zion: The Diaries of BYU President Ernest L. Wilkinson<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, 1952\u20131971. Below is a structured summary of the interview’s main themes.<\/p>\n

\nHere is<\/span> a summary of the\u00a0transcript<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0[Click HERE to close<\/span>]<\/strong><\/span><\/summary>\n

–<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

<\/a> Guest and Book Introduction<\/h2>\n

Gary James Bergera is introduced as a legendary figure in Mormon studies, having guided Signature Books’ editorial output for over three decades. The central subject of the interview is Ernest L. Wilkinson, BYU’s longest-serving president (1952\u20131971), whose 5,000+ page personal diary forms the basis of Bergera’s 600-page edited volume. Bergera first engaged the Wilkinson papers in the 1980s, eventually securing cooperation from Wilkinson’s family \u2014 particularly daughter Alice \u2014 to produce the edited edition.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> Wilkinson’s Background and Rise to BYU<\/h2>\n

Wilkinson grew up in modest circumstances in Ogden, Utah, attended BYU and later earned a law degree from George Washington University. Before coming to BYU, he built a successful legal career and was notably involved in Native American land-claims legislation on behalf of the Ute tribe. In his early 50s, he began lobbying for the BYU presidency through letters to LDS leader J. Reuben Clark, signaling his ambition to transform the institution.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> Building BYU Into a Major University<\/h2>\n

Wilkinson is credited as the driving force behind BYU’s transformation from what Bergera called “a glorified high school” into a major religious university with 25,000+ students. He leveraged the post-WWII GI Bill to attract veterans, then used rising enrollment numbers to argue for greater Church financial appropriations \u2014 a self-reinforcing growth strategy. Bergera also credits Dallin Oaks and Jeffrey Holland as important successors who continued BYU’s academic ascent, but identifies Wilkinson as the foundational architect.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> Wilkinson the Diarist<\/h2>\n

One of the interview’s most compelling threads is Wilkinson’s extraordinary discipline as a diarist. He was acutely aware that history is shaped by documents and intentionally wrote for future readers \u2014 often noting what official minutes would not capture. The diary offers a candid, if self-serving, portrait of Wilkinson’s personality: blunt, combative, and largely unapologetic, though occasionally self-aware about how he rubbed people the wrong way.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> The Student Spy Ring<\/h2>\n

Perhaps the most notorious episode discussed is the BYU faculty surveillance program Wilkinson organized in the mid-1960s. Returning from a failed 1964 U.S. Senate run as a Republican, Wilkinson became deeply politicized and concerned about “liberal” faculty \u2014 not communists, but Republicans he deemed insufficiently conservative. He recruited a small group of students to attend classes and report on faculty reactions to a deliberately provocative speech he gave on free enterprise and capitalism. When students went public, the resulting investigation \u2014 conducted by three vice presidents over several years \u2014 ultimately condemned Wilkinson by name and exonerated targeted faculty like political scientist Ray Hillam. Bergera notes that Wilkinson initially crafted language of “plausible deniability,” only later admitting partial involvement, and that the spy ring stands as the most morally disappointing episode in his presidency.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> Race, the Priesthood Ban, and Black Students<\/h2>\n

Bergera carefully navigates the question of Wilkinson’s racial attitudes, suggesting that Wilkinson himself may not have been virulently racist but was constrained by his board of trustees \u2014 particularly Harold B. Lee \u2014 who wanted to severely limit Black student enrollment at BYU. Wilkinson apparently recognized that admitting more Black students would deflate the growing civil rights protests targeting BYU’s athletic programs in the late 1960s, but he could not get board approval to expand outreach.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> LGBTQ Students and the Honor Code<\/h2>\n

Wilkinson’s stance toward LGBTQ students was unambiguous and harsh. Bergera confirmed a quote in which Wilkinson directly told students at a campus assembly that homosexuals were not welcome at BYU and should leave immediately. Wilkinson also took personal ownership of expanding and codifying the BYU Honor Code during the 1960s counterculture era, transforming it from an anti-cheating document into a comprehensive behavioral code covering dress, grooming, and morality \u2014 a legacy that persists today.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> Major Defeats: Ricks College and the Junior College Network<\/h2>\n

Two of Wilkinson’s greatest disappointments involved Church educational expansion. First, he repeatedly argued to move Ricks College from Rexburg to Idaho Falls, believing Rexburg was a dying town \u2014 but David O. McKay ultimately ended the debate by approving capital expenditures at the Rexburg campus. Second, Wilkinson envisioned a nationwide network of LDS junior colleges feeding students into BYU, and the Church actually purchased 11\u201312 parcels of land for this purpose. The project was killed by a combination of Church financial constraints in the 1960s and fierce opposition from Boyd K. Packer, who feared the junior colleges would undermine the seminary and institute programs.<\/p>\n

\n

<\/a> Signature Books and the Seventh East Press<\/h2>\n

The interview broadens to cover Bergera’s own career. He describes his early involvement with the\u00a0Seventh East Press<\/em>, a student newspaper at BYU launched in 1981 that aimed to cover stories and perspectives the official\u00a0Daily Universe<\/em>\u00a0would not. The paper was eventually expelled from campus after publishing an interview with philosopher Sterling McMurrin, reportedly due to pressure from Apostle Ezra Taft Benson. Bergera went on to lead Signature Books, publishing landmark works including Michael Quinn’s hierarchical studies, Grant Palmer’s\u00a0An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins<\/em>, and\u00a0Salamander<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 the best-selling account of the Mark Hofmann forgery bombings.<\/p>\n

\n

<\/a> Wilkinson’s Legacy and Human Dimensions<\/h2>\n

Despite his controversies, Wilkinson’s greatest personal pride was the establishment of student stakes and wards on BYU’s campus, which he believed enriched student social and spiritual life. Bergera also notes a lesser-known generous side: Wilkinson quietly gave personal funds to struggling students without publicizing it, and was described by his own children as a better grandfather than father due to his all-consuming work habits. The book’s cover \u2014 Wilkinson applying whitewash to the iconic “Y” on the mountain above BYU \u2014 is noted as an apt metaphor for both his legacy-building and his tendency to obscure uncomfortable truths.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/details>\n

.<\/span><\/p>\n

I. A Quiet Man in a Loud Tradition<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

In the long catalog of Latter-day Saint history, the loudest names are usually the contested ones: Joseph Smith and his successor Brigham Young, the dissenting brothers Pratt, the silenced Mountain Meadows witnesses<\/span>, and the modern celebrity apologists who answer for them. Gary James Bergera is not one of those names. He has never founded a church, never claimed a revelation, never excommunicated a colleague. He has produced, instead, what the Latter-day Saint tradition most needs and most resists in roughly equal measure: footnotes. Volume after volume of them. Diaries transcribed. Minutes preserved. First Presidency statements assembled, dated, and cross-referenced. The career amounts to a single sustained argument that the Restoration cannot be safely understood apart from its documents \u2014 and that the documents, once seen, will not always cooperate with the institutional story told from the pulpit.<\/p>\n

To the traditional Christian observer \u2014 for whom 1 Peter 3:15 enjoins a reasoned defense of the gospel \u2014 Bergera presents a curious figure. He is not an evangelical. He is not, by the public record, a hostile witness against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His own self-description, repeated in interviews stretching across forty years, is that of a Mormon historian who believes the best defense of any religious community is its own honest history. Yet his work has had the practical effect of dismantling several stories the institutional Church has told about itself. He has, by patient documentary labor, made it harder to claim that early Mormon leaders spoke with one voice, that polygamy was an orderly heaven-mandated program, that BYU was simply a faith-promoting research institution, and that ecclesiastical discipline against high-ranking transgressors has been administered consistently. None of this can be set aside by a serious evangelical engagement with the Restoration. The Christian who would speak intelligently to Latter-day Saint neighbors must either reckon with Bergera or settle for arguments their LDS friends have heard refuted a dozen times.<\/span><\/p>\n

This essay attempts that reckoning. It traces Bergera’s biography from his BYU education and Signature Books years through his current standing as the recently retired managing director of the Smith-Pettit Foundation; surveys the major bodies of his work; examines the principal critiques mounted against him by institutional LDS apologetics (FAIR Latter-day Saints and the Interpreter Foundation prominently among them); and offers a reasoned response to those critiques from a traditional, scripturally grounded Christian standpoint. The goal is neither hagiography nor polemic. It is, more modestly, an attempt to take the man seriously enough to disagree with him in the right places \u2014 and to learn from him in the places where he is right.<\/span><\/p>\n

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II. From Provo to the Smith\u2013Pettit Foundation: A Life in Mormon Letters<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

Gary James Bergera was born February 26, 1955, in Provo, Utah \u2014 a fact preserved in the cataloging records of BYU’s L. Tom Perry Special Collections and confirmed by Bergera himself in his 2018 Times & Seasons<\/i> interview with Kurt Manwaring. He grew up in the heart of the Latter-day Saint educational establishment, served a French-speaking LDS mission in southern France in the mid-1970s, and graduated twice from Brigham Young University: a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1980 and a master’s degree in public administration in 1982. Following his education, he worked for six years at the Missionary Training Center and then for fifteen years at Signature Books, the independent Salt Lake City publishing house founded in 1981 by George D. Smith and Scott Kenney. Since 2000, until his recent retirement, he has served as managing director of the Smith\u2013Pettit Foundation, the nonprofit established in 1999 to support Mormon-studies research, writing, and publications. He has also served, between 1992 and 1998, as managing editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought<\/i>, and as director of publishing at Signature Books from 1985 to 2000.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The shape of that r\u00e9sum\u00e9 matters. Bergera is, in his bones, an insider. His credentials are entirely BYU credentials. His mission was an orthodox LDS mission. His earliest employer was the institutional Church itself, by way of the Missionary Training Center. Only later did he migrate to the so-called “independent”<\/em><\/strong><\/span> wing of Mormon studies \u2014 the wing that publishes through Signature, debates at Sunstone, gathers under the John Whitmer Historical Association, and writes for Dialogue<\/i>. His passage from one camp to the other was gradual, professional, and, by every available indication, not driven by personal rancor. As he told Brad Westwood in a 2023 interview with the Utah Division of Cultural & Community Engagement, his interest has always been the writing and shepherding of history, not the prosecution of his coreligionists.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

That said, his books and articles together amount to nearly fifty years of work largely outside the orbit of the official Church History Department. He has edited On Desert Trails with Everett Ruess<\/i> (Gibbs Smith, 2000), The Autobiography of B. H. Roberts<\/i> (Signature Books, 1990), the companion volumes Joseph Smith’s Quorum of the Anointed, 1842\u20131845<\/i> and The Nauvoo Endowment Companies, 1845\u20131846<\/i> (with Devery S. Anderson), Line Upon Line: Essays on Mormon Doctrine<\/i>, Statements of the First Presidency: A Topical Compendium<\/i> (Signature Books, 2007), and the monumental three-volume Confessions of a Mormon Historian: The Diaries of Leonard J. Arrington, 1971\u20131997<\/i> (Signature Books, 2018). He co-authored, with Ronald Priddis, the 1985 critical history Brigham Young University: A House of Faith<\/i>, and is the sole author of Conflict in the Quorum: Orson Pratt, Brigham Young, Joseph Smith<\/i> (Signature Books, 2002; second printing, 2017). His most recent major work, Educating Zion: The Diaries of BYU President Ernest L. Wilkinson, 1952\u20131971<\/i>, was published by Signature Books in November 2025 to mark the 150th anniversary of BYU’s founding.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

His current life status, then, is that of a senior figure of Mormon historiography, recently retired from his last administrative post but still active as an editor and reviewer. He continues to live in Salt Lake City, where in 2019 he wrote a Salt Lake Tribune<\/i> commentary opposing a Rocky Mountain Power transmission project near his 400 North neighborhood \u2014 a domestic detail that, more than any institutional title, locates the man as still a neighbor and a working citizen of the Utah he has spent fifty years documenting.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

On the question of his formal church standing, the public record is not as tidy as a Christian apologetic frame might prefer. Some critics describe him as “ex-Mormon,”<\/strong><\/em><\/span> and his publishing affiliations have at times overlapped with figures who were disciplined by the Church. He himself has continued to write within Mormon studies as a Mormon historian, has accepted honors from the Mormon History Association, and has not \u2014 by any available public source \u2014 formally renounced the faith. The honest description is that his relationship to the institutional Church is complicated, exactly the kind of relationship that the longer Mormon intellectual tradition (Leonard Arrington, B. H. Roberts, even Sidney Rigdon in his way) has often produced and seldom resolved. Whether one calls him a Mormon, a Mormon historian, an ex-Mormon, or simply an independent scholar of Mormonism, the man’s work must be addressed on its merits.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2726 \u2726 \u2726<\/span><\/p>\n

III. The BYU Years: A Scholar’s Education at “the Lord’s University”<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

Bergera’s two BYU degrees are unremarkable on paper. Psychology, then public administration. No formal training in history, no doctorate in religious studies, no seminary credential. Critics \u2014 and there are several \u2014 have at times pointed to this as a disqualifying weakness. The argument is straightforward: a man who has not earned the union card of academic history ought not to be relied upon for academic history. Whatever one thinks of credentialism in general, the argument deserves a fair hearing. Bergera himself does not claim a Ph.D. He has not asked to be addressed as Doctor. He has chosen the path of the documentary editor, the painstaking transcriber and annotator of primary sources, rather than the path of the dissertation-writing professor.<\/span><\/p>\n

What he did acquire at BYU, however, is something the institution itself values: the inside view of Latter-day Saint culture from the inside, in its own primary sources, under its own pressures. By the time he and Ronald Priddis published Brigham Young University: A House of Faith<\/i> in 1985, both men were five years out from their 1980 BYU graduations and had seen the Wilkinson era’s residue at close range. Their book reads, in part, as the considered judgment of two alumni who had loved the school enough to be disappointed by it. Richard D. Poll, professor emeritus of history at Western Illinois University and himself a BYU veteran, captured the book’s character in his 1986 BYU Studies<\/i> review:<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

This is an interesting, provocative, tedious, titillating, mistitled, informative, tendentious, and important book. \u2026 Nevertheless, the book brought me to a fuller appreciation of the complexity of the church-university relationship as I looked, through Bergera’s and Priddis’s eyes, into the minutes, correspondence, and journals of the men \u2026 who had the responsibility for defining and managing the relationship.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 Richard D. Poll, BYU Studies 26:2 (1986), reviewing Bergera & Priddis, Brigham Young University: A House of Faith<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Poll’s verdict is worth pausing over. He was not a Bergera partisan. He concluded, in fact, that the book was “mistitled,”<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>that its title invited the wrong expectations, and that its bias against Ernest Wilkinson was “pronounced.”<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>But he could not deny \u2014 and would not \u2014 that Bergera and Priddis had assembled an enormous body of primary material that produced a fuller and truer picture of BYU than the four-volume Brigham Young University: The First One Hundred Years<\/i>, the authorized centennial history edited by Wilkinson himself. Poll’s most pointed criticism, repeated in his review, was about the provenance of certain documents. Some of the material Bergera and Priddis cited from board minutes and presidential files had apparently been copied earlier without authorization. The Christian reader should not dismiss this concern; honesty in citation is a moral matter. But neither should the Christian reader pretend that the concern undoes the book. Where the documents are accurate, they remain accurate regardless of how copies enter private hands. Poll himself, having served at BYU during much of the period the book covers, conceded that on three episodes in which he was personally involved, “Bergera and Priddis know more about them than I do.”<\/strong><\/em><\/span> That is, in the end, the most honest tribute a reviewer can pay.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The BYU years, in short, gave Bergera the indispensable thing: fluency in the documentary culture of Latter-day Saint leadership, and the conviction that this culture would survive serious examination. The conviction has shaped everything he has written since.<\/span><\/p>\n

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IV. Conflict in the Quorum: Recovering a Forgotten History<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

Bergera’s first major historical contribution, and the one for which he was honored as the Mormon History Association’s junior scholar award winner in 1981, was a long article published the previous year in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought<\/i> titled “The Orson Pratt\u2013Brigham Young Controversies: Conflict Within the Quorums, 1853 to 1868<\/a>.”<\/em> <\/strong>It would eventually grow into his 2002 book Conflict in the Quorum<\/i><\/strong><\/a>. In its original journal form, it ran nearly the entire issue and pulled together, for the first time in a single readable narrative, the recorded sermons, council minutes, private diaries, and correspondence of Apostle Orson Pratt and President Brigham Young across fifteen years of doctrinal struggle.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The narrative will be familiar to readers who have followed the Adam-God debate, the Pratt pamphlet The Seer<\/i>, and the early speculation about the omniscience of God. Bergera’s contribution was to assemble all the primary sources in one place and to let them speak. He quoted Wilford Woodruff’s minutes of the January 27, 1860, six-hour council meeting in Brigham Young’s office, in which Young pressed Pratt repeatedly to recant in writing the doctrines published in The Seer<\/i>. He quoted Pratt’s stubborn refusal:<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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I am not going to crawl to Brigham and act the Hypocrite and confess what I do not Believe. I will be a free man. President Young condemns my doctrines to be fals. I do not believe them to be fals which I published in the Seer in England. \u2026 I will not act the Hypocrite, it may cost me my fellowship, but I will stick to it. If I die tonight I would say, O Lord God Almighty I believe what I say.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/strong><\/span>Apostle Orson Pratt,<\/strong><\/span> January 27, 1860, as recorded in the Wilford Woodruff Journal; quoted in Gary James Bergera, “The Orson Pratt\u2013Brigham Young Controversies,” Dialogue 13:2 (Summer 1980)<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He likewise reported Young’s eventual verdict, after Pratt’s only partial public confession of January 29, 1860, was reviewed by the Quorum of the Twelve:<\/span><\/p>\n

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It may be thought strange by the Brethren that I will still fellowship Elder Pratt after what he has said but I shall do it, I am determined to whip Brother Pratt into it and make him work in the harness.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/strong>President Brigham Young,<\/strong> January 27, 1860, in Bergera, op. cit.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And he closed the article with the joint First Presidency\u2013Twelve declaration of August 23, 1865, in which Pratt’s The Seer<\/i>, Great First Cause<\/i>, Holy Spirit<\/i> tract, and 1853 edition of Lucy Mack Smith’s history were formally disowned as containing “many items of erroneous doctrine.”<\/strong><\/em><\/span> The original is available in PDF form on the Dialogue Journal site:<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Dialogue 13:2 (Summer 1980) PDF: https:\/\/www.dialoguejournal.com\/articles\/the-orson-pratt-brigham-young-controversies-conflict-within-the-quorums-1853-to-1868\/<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

For the traditional Christian, Bergera’s narrative is a treasure of the kind that 1 Peter 3:15 contemplates. It records, from inside-the-tent sources, the apostle Pratt’s persistent intuition that revelation must be reconcilable with reason and with the written word, against President Young’s countervailing demand that the living oracle outranks the dead one. Pratt \u2014 and the Christian reader will note the irony \u2014 was insisting on something like the Protestant principle: that prior, recorded revelation has binding force, and that the present prophet cannot override it without compelling evidence. The Adam-God doctrine, which Young defended and which Pratt resisted on scriptural grounds, was eventually quietly retired by Young’s successors and is today repudiated by the Church. On the substance of that long quarrel, Pratt was right, and Young was wrong by the Church’s own later judgment. Bergera made the record of that quarrel publicly available in a form no apologetic substitute can erase. Whatever critics may say of his other work, this contribution stands.<\/span><\/p>\n

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V. A House of Faith: The Book That Defined a Career<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

Five years after the Pratt\u2013Young article, Bergera and Priddis published Brigham Young University: A House of Faith<\/i>. The book was, and remains, the most thorough single critical history of the Latter-day Saint university \u2014 its 130 pages of endnotes alone amount to a research apparatus that has shaped every subsequent serious treatment of BYU. The book examines the Peterson-Chamberlin evolution controversy of 1911, the Wilkinson-era surveillance of suspected liberal faculty, the racial protests around BYU athletics, the rise and fall of various administrative styles, and the recurring institutional tension that BYU President Dallin H. Oaks, in his 1980 valedictory, conceded plainly:<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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The tensions between a vigorous church and a vigorous university are greater than many may suppose. \u2026 A genuine mingling of the insights of reason and revelation is infinitely \u2026 difficult.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/strong>Dallin H. Oaks,<\/strong> 1980 valedictory, quoted in Bergera & Priddis, Brigham Young University: A House of Faith (Signature Books, 1985), pp. 45, 367<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Poll’s BYU Studies<\/i> review accused the authors of having too much fun at Wilkinson’s expense and of letting their pro-academic-freedom bias slip into a slight against the man’s real contributions to the campus’s physical and enrollment growth. The objection deserves an honest hearing. Wilkinson did transform BYU from a regional institution into a major one. He raised funds, expanded the campus, secured David O. McKay’s continued support, and projected a Mormon educational presence into a postwar American academic landscape that was rapidly secularizing. To portray him only as an anti-Communist firebrand who policed his faculty is to flatten the man.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Yet the larger frame in which Bergera and Priddis place Wilkinson \u2014 that of a brilliant, stubborn lawyer-turned-administrator whose loyalty to a particular political vision occasionally tilted toward open partisanship \u2014 is amply documented in Bergera’s own subsequent Dialogue<\/i> article, “A Strange Phenomena: Ernest L. Wilkinson, the LDS Church, and Utah Politics<\/a>“<\/em> <\/strong>(Summer 1993). That article, drawn from Wilkinson’s own diaries in the BYU archives, records Wilkinson’s repeated consultations with President McKay over a possible run for the U.S. Senate, his confrontations with Democratic counselors Henry D. Moyle and Hugh B. Brown, his anti-United Nations advocacy, and his behind-the-scenes lobbying to install Barry Goldwater’s syndicated column in the Deseret News<\/i> in place of Drew Pearson. The diaries are unambiguous. The institutional record they paint is not slander; it is what Wilkinson himself wrote down. Bergera’s contribution was to print the entries with care and to let readers form their own judgments.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Two specific Wilkinson admissions are worth pausing over. The first comes from a 1960 meeting with Counselor J. Reuben Clark about a proposed cultural exchange in which BYU students would travel to the Soviet Union:<\/span><\/p>\n

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Clark won out, however, and the board ruled not to sanction the travel program. Wilkinson later wrote that in view of the board’s two conflicting resolutions, “I must, therefore, take up the two inconsistent actions at some future time and have them resolved.”<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/strong><\/span>Ernest L. Wilkinson Diary,<\/strong> <\/span>2 March 1960, quoted in Gary James Bergera, “A Strange Phenomena,” Dialogue 26:2 (Summer 1993)<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The second is the priesthood blessing that President McKay laid upon Wilkinson in April 1960 \u2014 recorded by Wilkinson himself \u2014 pleading that Wilkinson “might have vision to understand more than anyone else in educational circles the dangers of Communism and that [he] might be a leader in our schools in protecting our people against this ungodlike philosophy.”<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>To a Christian reader sensitive to the distinction between religious leadership and political opinion, the priesthood’s blessing of a political program is a striking artifact. Bergera does not editorialize. He prints what Wilkinson wrote. The artifact speaks for itself.<\/span><\/p>\n

On November 19, 2025, Bergera spoke at Benchmark Books in Salt Lake City to launch the book he calls the long-delayed companion to A House of Faith<\/i>: Educating Zion: The Diaries of BYU President Ernest L. Wilkinson, 1952\u20131971<\/i> (Signature Books, 2025). Reviewer Matthew Harris’s promotional encomium captures both the achievement and the framing that the publisher seeks for it:<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Wilkinson’s journals show how, through sheer force of will, Wilkinson made BYU into the university it is today. And they reveal much more: a rare, insider’s view of the general authorities of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints \u2026 and their (sometimes) clashing vision over what the university could become.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/strong><\/span>Matthew Harris,<\/strong><\/span> in Signature Books, November 2025 newsletter<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Note the careful word: “(sometimes) clashing vision.”<\/strong><\/em><\/span> Forty years on from A House of Faith<\/i>, that is exactly the case Bergera has been building. The general authorities did not always agree on what BYU should be. The institutional historian who concedes this concedes nothing of the gospel; he simply concedes that institutions, even sacred ones, are run by men.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Signature Books, November 2025 newsletter: https:\/\/www.signaturebooks.com\/news\/signature-news-november-2025<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

BYU Studies review (Poll): https:\/\/byustudies.byu.edu\/article\/brigham-young-university-a-house-of-faith<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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VI. Editor of Diaries, Steward of Documents<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

If A House of Faith<\/i> defined Bergera’s authorial voice, his long-term legacy will likely rest on his work as a documentary editor. The three-volume Confessions of a Mormon Historian: The Diaries of Leonard J. Arrington, 1971\u20131997<\/i> (Signature Books, 2018) is the most significant of these projects. Arrington was the only academically credentialed historian ever called as Church Historian, and his diaries cover the brief, remarkable “Arrington Spring”<\/strong><\/em><\/span> of LDS historiography in the 1970s. Bergera negotiated the formal contract between the Smith\u2013Pettit Foundation and the Arrington family trust in January 2012, after almost a year of preliminary conversations with Arrington’s daughter, Susan Arrington Madsen. The published volumes include not only Arrington’s typed diary entries but the scrapbooks of correspondence, meeting minutes, internal reports, theater programs, and ephemera that Arrington himself preserved.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In a 2018 interview with Kurt Manwaring, Bergera offered an unusually candid description of how Arrington saw himself and his work \u2014 a self-description that, by implication, applies almost word for word to Bergera’s own vocation:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Arrington was, in every sense of the term, an intellectuel engag\u00e9, more so than he often let on. He was a voracious, catholic reader whose interests ran the gamut. \u2026 His belief in the fundamental truth claims of his church \u2014 as he understood and interpreted them \u2014 was unwavering. He was suspicious of dogmatism and authoritarianism. \u2026 His diaries reveal a man committed to, victimized by, yet in important ways transcendent of his time and culture.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/strong><\/span>Gary James Bergera,<\/strong> <\/span>12 Questions interview with Kurt Manwaring, Times & Seasons, May 24, 2018<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

From the same interview, Bergera’s selection of a diary excerpt that he found especially telling \u2014 Arrington’s December 12, 1976, reflection on Church employment \u2014 illuminates the central frustration that has animated the entire “independent Mormon”<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>tradition since Arrington’s day:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

One almost feels that the bureaucracy and the hierarchy fail to use the Gospel in their dealing with their own appointees and, instead, rely on legalistic pronouncements and coercive administrative power. I have never seen a group of people so afraid to do something, so fearful of doing wrong, so terrorized by the possibility of vindictiveness. And this is a Church!<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/strong><\/span>Leonard J. Arrington,<\/strong> <\/span>Diary, December 12, 1976, in Bergera, ed., Confessions of a Mormon Historian (Signature Books, 2018)<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It is a remarkable sentence to find in the official diary of a Church Historian, and it is exactly the sort of sentence that institutional historians do not often preserve. Bergera preserved it, annotated it, and made it findable. The Mormon History Association recognized the labor with its Best Documentary Editing \/ Bibliography Award in 2020, an award given the year after the book’s publication.<\/span><\/p>\n

12 Questions interview: https:\/\/archive.timesandseasons.org\/2018\/05\/12-questions-with-gary-bergera\/index.html<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

MHA past awards roster: https:\/\/mormonhistoryassociation.org\/awards\/past-awards\/<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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VII. The Polygamy Files: Bergera, Hales, and the Question of Method<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

The most contested area of Bergera’s work \u2014 and the one that has drawn the sharpest fire from LDS-apologetic quarters \u2014 is his sustained scholarly engagement with Joseph Smith’s plural marriage. From his 1988 Dialogue<\/i> treatment of the polygamy revelation through his 2005 article “Identifying the Earliest Mormon Polygamists, 1841\u201344<\/a>,”<\/strong><\/em> his 2011 John Whitmer Historical Association Journal<\/i> essay “Vox Joseph Vox Dei,”<\/em> his 2015 study “Memory as Evidence: Dating Joseph Smith’s Plural Marriages to Louisa Beaman, Zina Jacobs, and Presendia Buell,”<\/em> and his 2018 review of William Victor Smith’s Textual Studies of the Doctrine and Covenants: The Plural Marriage Revelation<\/i>, Bergera has argued repeatedly for three theses that the institutional Church and its apologists have resisted:<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u25c6 First, that the relationship between Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger in Kirtland in 1835\u201336 is best understood, on the contemporaneous documentary record, as an extramarital affair rather than a settled plural marriage.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u25c6 Second, that John C. Bennett \u2014 for all his later infamy \u2014 was demonstrably close enough to Joseph Smith to have learned of plural marriage from him in Nauvoo, and that the apologetic effort to read Bennett entirely out of the inner circle distorts the documents.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u25c6 Third, that the historical evidence permits, and in some cases requires, the conclusion that Smith engaged in sexual polyandry \u2014 that is, that several of the women already legally married to other men, who were sealed to Joseph for time and eternity, had marital relations with him.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

These theses have provoked vigorous responses. The most extensive came in 2013 from Brian C. Hales, whose three-volume Joseph Smith’s Polygamy: History and Theology<\/i> Bergera had reviewed critically at Sunstone. Hales replied in Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture<\/i> with a 25-page essay titled “Stretching to Find the Negative,”<\/em> arguing that Bergera’s review was disproportionately negative (Hales counted only 6.7 percent of Bergera’s words as positive), that Bergera applied a double standard in his treatment of late reminiscences, and that the alleged sexual polyandry is not supported by any contemporaneous evidence.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Hales is not a man to be dismissed. He is a careful researcher with the resources of independent wealth, and his three volumes will remain the standard apologetic reference for years. He is right that Bergera, in his own published work, has freely quoted late recollections; he is right that no extant nineteenth-century LDS leader publicly defended sexual polyandry; he is right that section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants explicitly condemns a woman taking multiple husbands. These points need to be acknowledged.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet the apologetic response, when examined carefully, has weaknesses of its own. It rests heavily on an argument from silence: because Joseph Smith’s contemporaries did not publicly defend sexual polyandry, therefore the practice did not occur. The argument cuts both ways. The same generation of leaders did not publicly defend a great many practices we know they undertook in private \u2014 the temple endowment ceremony, as Smith introduced it in 1842, is itself an example. Polygamy’s first decade was conducted under such strict secrecy that the absence of public discussion proves little. Moreover, as Bergera and others have pointed out, the relevant question is not whether a man’s marriage was theologically legitimate by Joseph Smith’s lights but whether the physical relations actually occurred. Theology can recharacterize sexual relations; theology cannot retroactively prevent them.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the question of method \u2014 late versus contemporaneous sources \u2014 Bergera’s position is the more defensible. He has not refused to use late recollections; he has insisted that they be weighed against contradictory or absent earlier sources, that physical and chronological plausibility be checked, and that the historian’s burden is not to harmonize every account but to follow the documents where they lead. This is the ordinary procedure of secular historiography. Hales’s procedure, by contrast, often functions to produce harmonization first and weigh evidence second. The Christian reader will note that, even within Latter-day Saint scholarship, this same tension has long divided faithful historians like B. H. Roberts and Sterling McMurrin from official apologists. Bergera stands in a line going back at least to Roberts.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the substantive content of Smith’s polygamy revelation, Bergera’s most striking recent intervention is his 2018 review of William Victor Smith’s textual study. After noting the revelation’s central insistences \u2014 that Joseph’s salvation is divinely guaranteed, that Emma must accept the principle on pain of damnation, that the law of Sarah binds the wife either to grant permission for additional wives or be destroyed \u2014 Bergera arrives at a quietly remarkable judgment:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Joseph’s revelation, like the Lectures on Faith (which were included in the Doctrine and Covenants until 1921), should be retired from the official canon. There may be some especially meaningful passages in the revelation for believers, but the fact is, as Smith points out, the document itself, in its present iteration, was never intended for the Church.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/strong><\/span>Gary James Bergera,<\/strong> <\/span>“A Private Revelation,” Dialogue 51:4 (Winter 2018)<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is not the language of an angry apostate. It is the language of a Mormon historian inviting his church to make a canonical decision that its founder’s own context arguably did not require it to make. A traditional Christian, of course, will note something stranger: the document Bergera proposes for retirement promises eternal damnation to those who reject plural marriage. The Christian reader rests on the gospel of grace through faith in Jesus Christ (Ephesians 2:8\u20139), and finds in Galatians 1:8 a sufficient warning against revelations that contradict the apostolic deposit. From within an evangelical frame, section 132 retired from canon<\/i> is the right destination, but the journey there must travel through more than textual criticism; it must travel through the question of authority itself.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Bergera on William V. Smith: https:\/\/www.dialoguejournal.com\/articles\/a-private-revelation-william-victor-smith-textual-studies-of-the-doctrine-and-covenants-the-plural-marriage-revelation\/<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Hales rebuttal at Interpreter Foundation: https:\/\/interpreterfoundation.org\/journal\/stretching-to-find-the-negative-gary-bergeras-review-of-joseph-smiths-polygamy-history-and-theology<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2726 \u2726 \u2726<\/span><\/p>\n

VIII. Transgression Studies: Carrington, Lyman, and the Patriarch<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

Among Bergera’s most consequential and difficult articles is the three-part series “Transgression in the LDS Community: The Cases of Albert Carrington, Richard R. Lyman, and Joseph F. Smith,”<\/em> published in the Journal of Mormon History<\/i> across the Summer 2011, Fall 2011, and Winter 2012 issues. The series examines, in clinical and respectful detail, three historical disciplinary actions against high-ranking Latter-day Saint authorities:<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Apostle Albert Carrington (Part 1) was a member of the Quorum of the Twelve disciplined in the late nineteenth century for repeated adultery. Apostle Richard R. Lyman (Part 2) was disciplined and excommunicated in 1943 for a decades-long adulterous relationship that he had explicitly defined as a private plural marriage outside the post-Manifesto framework. Joseph F. Smith (Part 3) \u2014 and a careful distinction is required here, because there were two LDS leaders by that name \u2014 was not the sixth president of the Church but rather Joseph F. Smith<\/i> (1899\u20131964), who served as Patriarch to the Church from 1942 to 1946. In 1943, the younger Joseph F. Smith confessed to homosexual indiscretions, resigned the patriarchal office, and was later excommunicated. The contrast Bergera develops between the three cases \u2014 public versus private, defiant versus repentant, sexual versus financial, heterosexual versus same-sex \u2014 is the article’s central scholarly contribution.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

It is fair to ask, as some readers and reviewers have, whether such material should be in print at all. Bergera’s own answer, recorded in a 2011 letter to the editor explaining his sourcing, is the answer of the documentary editor: the records exist; they are already in private and institutional archives; they will become more widely known; and an annotated, contextualized treatment by a historian who understands the LDS disciplinary framework is preferable to either institutional silence or sensational exposure by hostile outsiders. The Keepapitchinin<\/i> blog correspondent who circulated word of Bergera’s article in September 2011 noted both that it was “drawing even greater attention in hallway conversations and over lunch tables”<\/strong><\/em><\/span> than other landmark essays in the same issue, and that one reader had written to the Journal<\/i> praising Bergera for his “thorough research and respectful tone.”<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>That is the right description. Even when Bergera handles the most painful material \u2014 sexual sin in the lives of men ordained to apostolic office \u2014 he does it with neither glee nor euphemism.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

From a traditional Christian perspective, the Carrington-Lyman-Smith series is unsettling reading but not surprising reading. The New Testament itself is candid about apostolic failure (Galatians 2:11\u201314; 1 Corinthians 1:11), and the deepest line in Christian doctrine \u2014 that we are saved by grace through faith and not by our own works \u2014 has always presupposed that even those called to leadership remain sinners in need of grace. Romans 3:23 does not exempt the apostolate. What Bergera’s research challenges is not Christian theology but a peculiar Latter-day Saint cultural expectation, never quite formalized as doctrine but pervasive in practice, that the Brethren are categorically more reliable than the rank-and-file. The articles do not destroy LDS faith claims; they complicate a folk version of those claims. That is a service, even an act of love, performed inside the tradition.<\/span><\/p>\n

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IX. Statements of the First Presidency: The FAIR Counterstrike<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

The single most sustained institutional attack on Bergera’s scholarship came in 2007 in response to his Statements of the LDS First Presidency: A Topical Compendium<\/i> (Signature Books). FAIR Latter-day Saints \u2014 formerly the Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research, the leading lay apologetic organization in the Church \u2014 published a long review under the title “Uncovering a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing.”<\/em> The review accuses Bergera and Signature Books of producing a misleadingly selective anthology, and it cites, with some triumph, a remark attributed to Bergera himself:<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Of the six individuals who were disciplined by the LDS church recently, we have published, or are in some way affiliated with most of them.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/strong><\/span>Gary James Bergera,<\/strong><\/span> quoted in “Uncovering a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing,” FAIR Latter-day Saints (ca. 2007)<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The review’s argument, briefly put: Bergera selected from First Presidency statements in ways that fit his agenda; he omitted clarifying material; his publisher’s track record reveals that the project is part of a larger anti-Church program. The review closes with the harsh quip, borrowed from Stephen Robinson: “Korihor’s back, and this time he’s got a printing press.”<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

This is the sort of critique that deserves a careful, charitable, and ultimately firm Christian reply. Four points are in order.<\/span><\/p>\n

(a) On selectivity.<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n

Every anthology is selective. Editorial selection is not, by itself, dishonesty. The serious question is whether the selection is transparent<\/i> and whether the omissions distort. Bergera’s Statements<\/i> volume runs to over 700 pages and is openly organized as a topical compendium. The reader knows what kind of book is in hand. An anthology of First Presidency utterances is not a Catechism of the Catholic Church<\/i>; it is a research aid, and like any such aid, it will reflect editorial judgment. Where FAIR’s reviewers can show specific omissions that materially mislead, the criticism stands. Where they cannot, the broader rhetoric collapses into a complaint about who published the book.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

(b) On guilt by association.<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n

FAIR’s invocation of Bergera’s affiliation with figures disciplined by the Church is, in evangelical terms, a textbook example of ad hominem<\/i> reasoning. The fact that Signature Books has published authors who have been disciplined later does not establish that any particular volume is unreliable. Christians have long honored sources \u2014 Origen and Tertullian, for instance \u2014 whose orthodoxy was disputed in their own day. The truth or falsity of a book’s content is independent of the institutional standing of its author.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

(c) On the “Korihor” rhetoric.<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n

To name a fellow human being after the Book of Mormon’s archetypal antichrist is a rhetorical move with consequences. It assigns to a scholar \u2014 Bergera, in this case \u2014 the role of a willful enemy of God. The traditional Christian, who holds that judgment of the human heart belongs to God alone (1 Corinthians 4:5), cannot endorse this kind of language. Whatever the merits of FAIR’s specific objections to Statements of the First Presidency<\/i>, the framing of Bergera as Korihor is unworthy of the gospel call to charity and unworthy of the Latter-day Saint emphasis on Christian behavior toward critics.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

(d) On the actual scholarship.<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n

It is worth noting what FAIR’s review does not<\/i> do. It does not produce a list of First Presidency statements wrongly transcribed by Bergera. It does not identify falsified dates. It does not show forged attributions. It quarrels about which statements were included and which were not \u2014 a matter of curatorial judgment, not documentary integrity. The book’s primary materials remain accurate. The reviewer’s project is to discredit the curator rather than to correct the documents, because the documents themselves cannot be corrected. They say what they say.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

A reasoned Christian rebuttal, then, recognizes the legitimacy of FAIR’s right to disagree publicly with Bergera’s editorial choices, while declining to follow FAIR into character assignment. The Bible’s posture in such disputes is exemplified in 2 Timothy 2:24\u201325: “the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness.”<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>Bergera’s opponents \u2014 and he does have them \u2014 deserve to be answered, but the answer is more credible when it is offered in something gentler than the language of antichrist.<\/span><\/p>\n

FAIR review (citations): https:\/\/www.fairlatterdaysaints.org\/archive\/publications\/uncovering-a-wolf-in-sheeps-clothing<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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X. Awards, Standing, and Where He Sits in the Field<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

The Mormon History Association has, across forty years, honored Bergera repeatedly. In 1981 he received the junior scholar Best Article Award for the original Pratt\u2013Young study. In 2017, he received a Special Citation. In 2018, he was awarded the Leonard J. Arrington Award for Service \u2014 the Association’s highest service honor, the same award given in subsequent years to Kathleen Flake, Richard E. Turley Jr., and Newell Bringhurst. In 2020, his edition of the Arrington diaries received the Best Documentary Editing \/ Bibliography Award. He has received additional honors from the John Whitmer Historical Association and the Utah State Historical Society. These are not honors conferred by either FAIR or the Interpreter Foundation; they are honors conferred by the academic and avocational guild that takes Mormon history seriously as history.<\/span><\/p>\n

That guild includes both believers and skeptics, Latter-day Saints and former Latter-day Saints, Christians of various traditions, and the unaffiliated. Its judgments are not infallible, but they are professional. A scholar who has earned the sustained respect of such a body across five decades cannot be plausibly dismissed as a hack or a propagandist. He may still be wrong about particular interpretations. He may have biases that color his readings. But he is a serious scholar producing serious work, and the Christian apologetic project does itself no favors by pretending otherwise.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2726 \u2726 \u2726<\/span><\/p>\n

XI. Is His Research Reliable?<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

The question must be asked directly because the user has asked it directly. Is Gary James Bergera’s research reliable?<\/span><\/p>\n

The answer, after careful examination of the available evidence, is: yes, with the customary qualifications that apply to any historian.<\/strong> <\/span>His primary-source transcriptions are accurate; his footnotes are dense and traceable; his bibliographies are thorough; his editorial decisions are explained openly in his prefaces. The errors that have been identified in his work over forty years \u2014 and they have been identified, by Hales among others \u2014 are interpretive, not factual ones. Where Hales believes Bergera has weighed evidence wrongly, the dispute is over weighing, not over what the documents say.<\/span><\/p>\n

The most important reliability test in documentary history is whether subsequent scholars, using the same sources, reach materially similar conclusions. By that test, Bergera has done well. His Pratt\u2013Young study has not been overturned. His Wilkinson research has been confirmed by the diaries themselves, now published in 2025. His Arrington edition is the standard. His earliest polygamist chronology is widely cited even by his critics. His Statements of the First Presidency<\/i> remain a research tool used across the field. His Brigham Young University: A House of Faith<\/i>, whatever its tone, has not been superseded.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

This is the empirical evidence of reliability. It is not the same thing as agreement; Christians may disagree, often strongly, with Bergera’s theological framing, his sympathy with certain dissenting voices, and his occasional rhetorical sharpness. But disagreement is not the same as unreliability. A useful analogy: serious evangelical New Testament scholars do not always agree with Bart Ehrman’s conclusions, but they cite his Greek-textual work because it is competent. The same logic applies to Bergera. Read him with a discerning eye, with one’s own Bible open, with the cross of Christ kept clearly in view, and one finds in Bergera what one finds in any serious historian: documented evidence, considered interpretation, occasional misjudgment, and overall integrity.<\/span><\/p>\n

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XII. A Christian Reflection: What Evangelical Readers Should Take Away<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

This essay has argued, against the rhetoric of some institutional apologists, that Bergera deserves to be read carefully rather than dismissed casually. It is appropriate, in closing, to ask what the traditional Christian \u2014 the one whose theology is shaped by the apostolic gospel, the Reformation’s sola scriptura<\/i>, and the historic confessions \u2014 should actually do with Bergera’s body of work.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

First, the Christian should recognize Bergera’s documentary work as a kind of common-grace gift<\/b><\/span>.<\/span> The God who is described in Psalm 19 as making His works known across the heavens is also the God who works through honest scholarship \u2014 even when the scholar’s theological frame is not our own. The Christian who wants to understand the Latter-day Saint tradition will be better equipped, not less, for having read Bergera’s Pratt\u2013Young narrative, his Wilkinson diaries, and his Arrington volumes. The documents are real; they predate Bergera; he simply made them findable.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Second, the Christian should read Bergera against the canon<\/b><\/span>.<\/span> The Berean Christians of Acts 17:11 were commended for testing even the apostle Paul’s preaching against the Scriptures. The same posture applies to any modern scholarly work. Bergera’s accounts of LDS doctrinal evolution \u2014 Adam-God, the plural marriage revelation, the development of priesthood-restoration narratives \u2014 provide a wealth of internal Latter-day Saint material that a Christian apologist can weigh against the New Testament. The same canon that gave Pratt’s intuition force against Young’s innovation \u2014 “how do we reconcile this with the revelations?”<\/strong><\/em><\/span> \u2014 gives the Christian a stable ground for evaluating any modern claim to new revelation. The work is not, in this respect, anti-LDS; it is pro-document, and the documents themselves invite the comparison.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Third, the Christian should learn from Bergera’s tone<\/b><\/span>. Read across forty years, his prose is remarkably free of sneer. He has been attacked, named after Korihor, denounced from BYU lecterns, contradicted at Sunstone, and rebuked in three-volume polygamy responses. He has replied, when he has replied, in measured paragraphs. This is not always the manner of evangelical apologetics, and where it is not, it should be. 1 Peter 3:15 famously calls for a reasoned defense; it less famously, in the very next clause, calls for that defense to be given “with gentleness and respect.”<\/strong><\/em><\/span> Bergera is neither an evangelical nor, by his own account, a target of evangelical proselytizing. But his manner is closer to apostolic gentleness than some of his loudest critics manage.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Fourth, the Christian should not mistake documentary criticism for the gospel itself<\/b><\/span>.<\/span> The deepest issue between traditional Christianity and the Latter-day Saint tradition is not whether Joseph Smith was sometimes inconsistent, or whether Brigham Young’s Adam-God speculations were eventually retired, or whether Apostle Lyman fell into private sin. The deepest issue is the identity of Jesus Christ and the means of salvation. Bergera’s work cannot answer that question. He has not asked it of his readers, and he has not tried to. The Christian apologist who treats Bergera’s research as itself sufficient to dislodge a Latter-day Saint friend from her faith mistakes the genre. Documents may unsettle confidence. They do not produce conversion. Only the proclaimed gospel of the crucified and risen Jesus, applied by the Holy Spirit, does that (Romans 1:16; 10:14\u201317). Use Bergera’s work as a help \u2014 never as a substitute \u2014 in the harder labor of speaking the gospel.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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XIII. Current Life Status<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

As of the date of this essay (May 2026), Gary James Bergera is recently retired as managing director of the Smith\u2013Pettit Foundation but remains active as a documentary editor and reviewer. His most recent major book, Educating Zion: The Diaries of BYU President Ernest L. Wilkinson, 1952\u20131971<\/i>, was released by Signature Books in November 2025 to mark the 150th anniversary of BYU’s founding. He spoke at Benchmark Books in Salt Lake City on November 19, 2025, on the new book. He continues to reside in the Salt Lake City area. His Salt Lake Tribune<\/i> commentary of July 2019 opposing a Rocky Mountain Power transmission project near his 400 North neighborhood places him still at the same west-side address he has long called home.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

His formal church standing has never been publicly clarified by him in any source available to this writer. Critics describe him as ex-Mormon; the Mormon History Association continues to describe him as a Mormon historian; he himself, in his 2018 Times & Seasons<\/i> interview, did not mark himself either way. The integrity of his work does not depend on the answer. The man can be read on the merits.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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XIV. Conclusion: The Footnoter and the Gospel<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

If the Restoration’s defenders are sometimes uneasy with Gary James Bergera, the discomfort is honest and worth understanding. A tradition built around living oracles cannot easily welcome a documentary editor who insists, with quiet thoroughness, that the oracles were sometimes inconsistent, sometimes mistaken, sometimes contradicted by the documents they themselves left behind. The pastoral instinct to protect ordinary believers from such complications is comprehensible. But the deeper Christian instinct \u2014 the instinct of the Reformation, of the Puritan diarists, of the conservative biblical scholarship of B. B. Warfield and Carl F. H. Henry \u2014 is that truth-telling is itself a form of love. To know what is actually so about the people we call our spiritual ancestors is not an attack on faith; it is the precondition of mature faith.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bergera has not produced the gospel. He has produced footnotes. The gospel, of course, is not in his books. But the documents he has assembled \u2014 the diary of Wilford Woodruff on January 27, 1860; the journal entries of Ernest Wilkinson on the senatorial races he never ran; the December 1976 reflection of Leonard Arrington on his employment in a fearful Church \u2014 those documents are now where any honest seeker can find them. A Christian who proposes to talk with a Latter-day Saint neighbor about the gospel ought to know what is in them. Bergera, more than any other single figure, made that knowing possible. To say so is not to baptize him. It is simply to give honest credit, in the same spirit in which his own work has tried to give honest credit to the long and complicated story of the people he has loved enough to document.<\/span><\/p>\n

To readers of The Righteous Cause<\/i>: read him. Read him carefully. Read him with the open Bible at your elbow and the cross of Christ before your eyes. Then talk to your Latter-day Saint friends with greater understanding and greater compassion. That is the use of a footnoter. That is the use of an honest historian. That, in the end, is what 1 Peter 3:15 commands and what the gospel makes possible.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Colophon and Sources<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

This essay was researched and drafted with AI-assisted scholarly collaboration by Anthropic’s Claude in dialogue with author Dennis Robbins of The Righteous Cause<\/i>. All factual claims have been keyed to publicly available primary sources, the principal ones listed below.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2022 Bergera bio \u2014 Speak Your Piece podcast (Utah DCCE): https:\/\/community.utah.gov\/blog\/gary-bergera-on-his-lifes-work-as-an-author-and-publisher-of-history\/
\n\u2022 Bergera bio \u2014 Signature Books: https:\/\/www.signaturebooks.com\/editorial\/bergera
\n\u2022 Bergera Amazon Author Page: https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/stores\/Gary-James-Bergera\/author\/B001JS18MQ
\n\u2022 Bergera, review of W. V. Smith, Dialogue 51:4 (2018): https:\/\/www.dialoguejournal.com\/articles\/a-private-revelation-william-victor-smith-textual-studies-of-the-doctrine-and-covenants-the-plural-marriage-revelation\/
\n\u2022 Bergera, “Pratt\u2013Young Controversies,” Dialogue 13:2 (1980): https:\/\/www.dialoguejournal.com\/articles\/the-orson-pratt-brigham-young-controversies-conflict-within-the-quorums-1853-to-1868\/
\n\u2022 Bergera, “A Strange Phenomena,” Dialogue 26:2 (1993): https:\/\/www.dialoguejournal.com\/articles\/a-strange-phenomena-ernest-l-wilkinson-the-lds-church-and-utah-politics\/
\n\u2022 Kurt Manwaring, 12 Questions with Bergera (2018): https:\/\/archive.timesandseasons.org\/2018\/05\/12-questions-with-gary-bergera\/index.html
\n\u2022 FAIR Latter-day Saints, “Uncovering a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing”: https:\/\/www.fairlatterdaysaints.org\/archive\/publications\/uncovering-a-wolf-in-sheeps-clothing
\n\u2022 Signature Books November 2025 newsletter (Educating Zion): https:\/\/www.signaturebooks.com\/news\/signature-news-november-2025
\n\u2022 Brian C. Hales, “Stretching to Find the Negative,” Interpreter (2013): https:\/\/interpreterfoundation.org\/journal\/stretching-to-find-the-negative-gary-bergeras-review-of-joseph-smiths-polygamy-history-and-theology
\n\u2022 Mormon History Association past awards: https:\/\/mormonhistoryassociation.org\/awards\/past-awards\/
\n\u2022 Richard D. Poll, review of A House of Faith, BYU Studies 26:2 (1986): https:\/\/byustudies.byu.edu\/article\/brigham-young-university-a-house-of-faith
\n\u2022 Bergera, Salt Lake Tribune commentary (July 9, 2019): https:\/\/www.sltrib.com\/opinion\/commentary\/2019\/07\/09\/commentary-rocky-mountain\/<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Soli Deo gloria \u2014 <\/i>for any good in this essay, all credit to God; any errors of judgment or fact remain my own.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

A Note on Research Methods and Accuracy<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

In recent years, some have voiced concern that artificial intelligence may distort facts or introduce inaccuracies into serious research. That criticism deserves acknowledgment. However, AI has now evolved into the most powerful research instrument available to any dedicated scholar\u2014capable of analyzing vast datasets, cross\u2011referencing historical records, and surfacing overlooked connections across sources. This work represents a collaboration between the author\u2019s investigative inquiry, verified primary documentation, and the advanced analytic capabilities of AI research tools. Here, AI was not used as a ghostwriter or a shortcut for scholarship, but as a disciplined research partner devoted to rigor, accuracy, and transparency.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Every factual claim in this work has been subjected to active verification. Where AI\u2011generated content was used as a starting point, it was tested against primary sources, peer\u2011reviewed scholarship, official institutional documentation, and established historical records. Where discrepancies were found\u2014and they were found\u2014corrections were made. The author has made every reasonable effort to ensure that quotations are accurately attributed, historical details are precisely rendered, and theological claims fairly represent the positions they describe or critique.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

That said, no work of this scope is immune to error, and the author has no interest in perpetuating inaccuracies in the service of an argument. If you are a reader\u2014whether sympathetic, skeptical, or hostile to the conclusions drawn here\u2014and you identify a factual error, a misattributed source, a misrepresented teaching, or a claim that cannot be substantiated, you are warmly and genuinely invited to say so. Reach out. The goal of this work is not to win a debate but to get the history right. Corrections offered in good faith will be received in the same spirit, and verified corrections will be incorporated into future editions without hesitation.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Truth, after all, has nothing to fear from scrutiny\u2014and neither does this work.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Footnoter of Zion: How a BYU-Trained Editor Reframed Mormonism’s Conversation With Its Own Past \u2726 \u2726 \u2726 But first on the agenda: This is a\u00a0Mormon Stories Podcast\u00a0interview hosted by John Dehlin, featuring\u00a0Gary James Bergera\u00a0\u2014 longtime director of Signature Books and the Smith Pettit Foundation \u2014 discussing his newly edited book,\u00a0Educating Zion: The Diaries of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8098,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-must-read"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Gary-Bergera.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8095"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8101,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8095\/revisions\/8101"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}