Jerald and Sandra Tanner
Jerald and Sandra Tanner are long-time Utah critics of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS Church).
The Tanners, both of whom were practicing Mormons before becoming born-again Christians, run the Utah Lighthouse Ministry, whose stated mission is to "document problems with the claims of Mormonism and compare LDS doctrines with Christianity." They have done this by reprinting original versions of early Mormon writings and scripture, highlighting changes in doctrine that have emerged over the years, such as the abandonment of Brigham Young's "Adam-God doctrine." Documents that they have published include:
- Mormonism: Shadow or Reality, a long, densely-written work full of reproductions of early Mormon documents accompanied by commentary written by the Tanners.
- The original version of the Book of Mormon, in which the Tanners highlight numerous changes in spelling, punctuation and wording. Most of these changes are trivial and have been defended by supporters of Mormonism as typographical rather than substantive alterations. A few changes, however, have doctrinal significance. Until recently, for example, the Book of Mormon referred frequently to righteous people as "white and delightsome," a phrase whose racial implications were interpreted by many Mormons as support for its practice of denying the priesthood to African-Americans. After this so-called "Negro doctrine" was abandoned in 1979, the phrase "white and delightsome" was revised to "pure and delightsome."
- Changing versions of the Mormon Temple Ceremony, which originally contained language and rituals that some people found lurid and offensive. From the point of LDS members, however, the most offensive aspect of the Tanners' decision to publish the ceremony is that it exposes to public scrutiny practices that members consider sacred and private.
The Tanners are not professional scholars, and their work has sometimes been criticized as tendentious and polemical. However, they have shown on occasion shown historical insight and intellectual integrity. They were among the first public skeptics, for example, of the Salamander letter, a notorious hoax against Mormonism perpetrated by one of its own members, Mark Hoffmann. Based on their understanding of early Mormon history, the Tanners stated that they though Hoffmann's Salamander letter was a hoax at a time when many members regarded it as genuine and the LDS Church itself purchased the document for its historical archives. In the 1980s, the Tanners also debunked false claims circulated by a Christian evangelist filmmaker who claimed that LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley had engaged in sex with prostitutes and young boys.[1]