Commenting
on Isaac Brockbank, a Latter-day Saint lawyer who embarked on a lecture circuit
to discuss the historicity of the First Vision against the then-recently published
work of Fawn Brodie (No Man Knows my
History), Steven C. Harper wrote:
On April 26, 1946, saints gathered to hear
him in a Salt Lake City chapel. They sane George Manwaring’s hymn, the one that
shaped their shared memory of Smith’s first vision and the meaning they found
in it.
Then
Brockbank began his remarks with an indictment—not of Fawn Brodie but of Mormon
culture. “We think we know without doing any studying,” he said, adding that he was
glad at least that the book forced him to re-examine the saints’ history, to
ask questions and seek answers. Brockbank
pointed unknowingly to the paradox between his actual audience and the saints’
ideal, the archetypical truth seeker. “We just repeat words,” Brockbank
lamented. “Don’t do any thinking, don’t do any questioning, don’t’ do any
studying, don’t question anything. We don’t think we have any right to”
(Isaac E. Brockbank, “Address Regarding Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History, 5-7, Church History Library, Salt Lake
City). (Steven C. Harper, First Vision:
Memory and Mormon Origins [New York: Oxford University Press, 2019], 191)
Sadly, in
many quarters of the Church, Brockbank’s indictment of Latter-day Saints still
rings true.