From the beginning of his 10-year tenure as LDS Church historian, Leonard J. Arrington’s quest for the unvarnished truth about Mormonism’s past spurred the relentless, sometimes crippling ire of his faith’s most conservative leaders — from apostle Boyd K. Packer to eventual church President Ezra Taft Benson.
“The church suffers from the boomerang effect of criticism,” Arrington wrote in his journal July 17, 1972. “It will not allow criticism within the church, so it is abnormally sensitive to criticism that comes from without the church.”
That lament, among many shared publicly for the first time in Signature Books’ new “Confessions of a Mormon Historian: The Diaries of Leonard J.