http://www.utlm.org/onlinebooks/changech2.htm#Censorship
Censorship seems to be a very important thing in the Mormon church. It is apparently felt that more converts can be won to the church with a bogus history than with a factual one.
Censorship seems to be a very important thing in the Mormon church. It is apparently felt that more converts can be won to the church with a bogus history than with a factual one.
Joseph Smith's mother, Lucy Smith, wrote a book, Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith, which was published by Apostle Orson Pratt in 1853. By the year 1865, however, Brigham Young began to frown upon this book. The first presidency of the church ordered that the book "should be gathered up and destroyed, so that no copies should be left" (Latter-Day Saint's Millennial Star, vol. 27, pp.657-58).
For many years the Mormon church has encouraged the destruction of publications that are critical of Joseph Smith or the church. The Mormon-owned Deseret News carried an article in 1953 in which tacit approval seems to be given to book burning:
Good-natured Sven A. Wiman can manage a cautious grin when his married daughter relates...how when he returned home each evening from his part-time employment in various used book stores throughout Sweden he would produce an anti-Mormon book and then proceed to burn it. Sweden, you learn, has literally no end of anti-Church books, and Elder Wiman set himself up as a one-man cleanup committee to destroy as many of these diatribes against the Church as possible (Deseret News, Church Section, May 16, 1953, p.10).
Mormon missionary campaign of book-burning
American Library Association's Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, May, 1963,...Wikander told of two Elders arriving at his library to inspect the index of Mormon material. They offered a list of "more up-to-date material" and after delivering it made the following proposition:
"Now that we had these books which told the truth about their religion, undoubtedly we would like to discard other books in the library which told lies about the Mormon Church. Other libraries, they said, had been glad to have this pointed out to them."
Self-appointed Comstocks among us have for years been dedicated to the unholy quest of seeking out and destroying books considered unfavorable.... My brother Raymond was approached by a zealot offering a number of rare Mormon books bearing library stamps; the devout saint blandly admitted stealing them to protect the public, but said he was sure that Raymond, would not be harmed (Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Summer 1967, p.26).
Even the most faithful Mormon scholars were often refused access to vital documents. Dr. Hugh Nibley, of Brigham Young University, was "refused" access to his great-grandfather's journal (see Mormonism - Shadow or Reality? pp.11-12).
Ralph W. Hansen, formerly manuscript librarian for the Brigham Young University, also complained of "the relative inaccessibility to scholars of the files of the Church Historian's Office" (Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Spring 1966, p.157).
Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (Spring 1966, p.26), Dr. Arrington stated: "it is unfortunate for the cause of Mormon history that the Church Historian's Library, which is in the possession of virtually all of the diaries of leading Mormons, has not seen fit to publish these diaries or to permit qualified historians to use them without restriction."
�Apart from purposeful misrepresentation, there is also the practice, both past and present, of suppressing historical materials or, if not suppressing them, of discouraging their discovery.� D. Carmon Hardy "Truth and Mistruth in Mormon History"
Then of course there was the Nauvoo Expositor Destruction!
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