Monday, October 21, 2019

Isaac Brockbank's Indictment Against the Lack of Studying and "Truth Seeking" among LDS in 1946


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.