Volume 03, No. 4

Among many Mormons there exists a genuine distrust of psychiatry. Apprehensions arise partly from misconceptions about psychotherapy and partly from a stigma that many attach to anything associated with emotional disorders. Many believe “If you live your religion, you won’t need a psychiatrist.” For many, to visit a psychiatrist would be to admit emotional and spiritual failure. Mormons might enter psychotherapy with not only the usual fears and anxieties concerning an unknown experience that lies ahead…

In 1930, when B. H. Roberts published his six-volume Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, learned journals were silent. But he himself, with pardonable pride, had described his work as “monumental.” One Mormon, answering Bernard De Voto’s contemptuous description of Utah as an intellectual desert, hailed Roberts as “another Gibbon.” Although hyperbolic, the favorable judgment was in general well deserved….

The ultimate fate of American minorities is to become tourist attractions. . . . But the tourist boom means the same thing in Utah that it means in Vermont, the same thing it means wherever the past has been piously “restored,” roped off, and put on display—not the vitality but the decadence of a way of life.
Such is the devastating indictment of Mormonism by Christopher Lasch in the January 26, 1967, New York Review of Books