Was Janice Allred excommunicated for apostasy or insubordination? What do you think? I was surprised to learn that Janice Allred still attends the LDS Church each week, despite being excommunicated for almost 30 years. Why? She’ll answer that and also describe what put her back on LDS Leader’s radar. Check out our conversation…
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Still Go to Church
Interview
GT 00:34 Wow. You know what’s amazing to me, in talking with you, Margaret, Paul, Maxine, and Michael Quinn, I haven’t been able to get Lynne Whitesides or Avraham on yet. But the five of you for sure, and I would assume the other two are the same. Well, I would include Avraham, for sure. He was the first one that was rebaptized.
Janice 01:00 Yes, he was.
GT 01:01 He was only out about a year or so.
Janice 01:03 No, he sought rebaptism very early.
GT 01:06 But all six of you, maybe all eight of you are still, to this day, deep, deep believers in Mormonism, and that Joseph Smith was a prophet. To me, it’s pretty astonishing, given that the Church has excommunicated or disfellowshipped all of you, that you maintain this fervent testimony. Why, when you’ve been so mistreated? I guess your testimony is not in man. Is that it?
Janice 01:45 That’s right? No. Because I know this about Margaret. We are sisters. We have been…
GT 01:55 You have talked a little bit, huh?
Janice 01:56 We have been close our entire lives. And we were not raised to see the Church as the most important thing. And that’s not in our hearts. For us, the most important thing is our testimony of Christ. And yes, the Church is important to me, because I do believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet, and the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants and The Pearl of Great Price, the revelations in those scriptures, to me, are so important in the theology that I have been working on. And so, I cannot. I couldn’t work on this theology without those revelations. So, of course, I am loyal to that. The institutional church? Well, we see many problems in it. {Rick chuckling}
GT 02:49 Well, I’ve heard and I’m very sad to hear, because I really wanted to get Lavina on. Apparently, she has poor health and so an interview is not going to happen there.[1] And I feel terrible about that. But my understanding is, she has continued to go to church every week for the last 30 years, barring health problems, I guess. Is that the same with you?
Janice 03:17 That’s true.
GT 03:18 That’s what I thought.
Janice 03:19 My husband teaches Physics at BYU.
GT 03:22 Still?
Janice 03:23 He is still, he has not retired.
GT 03:25 Wow.
Janice 03:27 He’s the same age as I am, which in case anyone wants to know, you can look it up. So I will not be hesitant to tell you I am 76.
GT 03:33 Okay, {chuckling}
Janice 03:35 And he still teaches at BYU and will probably—he always says he’s going to retire in two years. So we’ll see. {both laughing}
GT 03:43 It’s a rolling two years.
Janice 03:44 It is. He loves working there. And it was very…
GT 03:49 They don’t ‘t hassle him?
Janice 03:51 No, no.
GT 03:51 Oh wow!
Janice 03:52 The Physics Department has been very supportive of him, and me.
GT 03:58 And you still go to church every week?
Janice 04:00 I do. At the time I was excommunicated, we have nine children. Our oldest was married. She had been married in the Temple. And she had a baby. And our two older sons went on missions. Our oldest son went just as this was starting. He went just after I gave my speech in 1992. Our youngest was one month old when I did that.
GT 04:29 Was his name Nephi?
Janice 04:30 Yes.
GT 04:31 That’s what I remembered. Okay, I was glad I remembered that.
Janice 04:34 Nephi went on his mission that year. And then when he returned home, the week he got home, my picture was on the front page of The Salt Lake Tribune.
GT 04:47 Oh no.
Janice 04:48 And it was the story of my being in trouble for giving the speech.
GT 04:56 Wow.
Janice 04:58 Anyway, so that was a different speech. I forget. Joel, my second son, was on a mission at that time. So, yeah, Nephi left right after I gave the speech, and then I was warned against publishing it. But this is what happened as we were leaving to go to Mexico. This was just before the September Six.
GT 05:20 For Bruce’s sabbatical.
Janice 05:22 Yes. For David’s sabbatical.
GT 05:24 Yeah, David, sorry.
Getting Back on the LDS Radar
Interview
Janice 05:25 So my friend, Marti Bradley, who was editor of Dialogue at that time, said “We’re doing an issue on God the Mother. Do you have anything?”{Rick laughing} I said, “Sure. Yes, I do as a matter of fact.”
GT 05:39 “I’ve got lots of stuff!”
Janice 05:41 So, I submitted that paper not knowing, thinking, Okay, I told President Bacon, I would tell him if they’re going to publish it. [When] you submit a paper, you don’t know if they’re going to publish it. Why cause all this disturbance until I know what’s going to happen? I intended, when I submitted it, I hoped they would publish it. If they accepted it, I intended to publish it. And then I intended to tell him.
GT 06:06 Now may I ask how often you’ve been turned down?
Janice 06:10 Oh, I can’t remember.
GT 06:12 A bunch of times.
Janice 06:14 Enough times. Sure.
GT 06:15 Yeah.
GT 06:15 So it’s not a sure thing that you’re going to get published?
Janice 06:18 No, no, definitely not. And I didn’t know. This was a piece of serious theological work. And journals do not always want that. Anyway, so we go to Mexico, and I get all these (articles.) Communication was not good. I did not hear anything from my sister. But this dear friend of mine sent me copies of all these articles. So, we’re getting all this news. And when we got back, we had all this mail. And there was a letter of acceptance from Dialogue. They had accepted my piece. And things are [busy.] I have all these children. It’s Christmas. It takes a while. I don’t know when it’s coming out.
GT 07:14 Right. Yeah, publication can take…
Janice 07:16 It can take a long time!
GT 07:17 Years, sometimes.
Janice 07:18 You’ve got the editing process, you’ve got this whole thing.
GT 07:22 There is always back and forth. Can you change this? Or it’s too long. Cut out a bunch of stuff.
Janice 07:28 Oh, and in the meantime, again, I can get really upset by teachings coming from the Church, which I feel are not true. So, at the same time, President Hinckley, who was a counselor at this time, he was not the president of the Church. Benson was. And he gave this speech in which he said, “The Lord will never allow the prophet to lead the church astray,” which I felt was not true. So I decided to do my next Sunstone speech on challenging that idea. {Rick chuckling} So that’s how I got into the papers.
GT 08:15 You are a rabble rouser. {Rick laughing}
Janice 08:16 I am, I guess. {both laughing} Little did I know that Dialogue had published in the issue that was coming out in the winter of, this would be ’94, the upcoming articles. One of them happened to be my article.
GT 08:41 Oh, so they hadn’t published the article, just said that they were going to publish it.
Janice 08:44 Yes. And so some spy calls this to the attention of President Bacon.
GT 08:49 Oh, he’s your stake president.
Janice 08:51 Who is my stake president. And so he then is going to—he calls me again. The exact timing of all this, [I don’t remember.] In any case…
GT 09:04 It’s in the Mormon Alliance article.
Janice 09:05 Yes it is.
GT 09:06 I’ll put a link.
Janice 09:07 So I go through it. I go through everything in excruciating detail in that article. But yes, so I know that, at the same time I’m giving the speech at Sunstone, which challenges the idea that the Lord will not allow the prophet to lead the Church astray, which became, it’s called, Him Shall You Hear. Him Shall You Hear refers to the Lord. The one that we are supposed to hear is the Lord. It’s not the Prophet. We are never commanded. There are no scriptural references that command us to hear the Prophet. We are commanded to hear the Lord. Yes, the Prophet sometimes speaks the words of the Lord, but it’s not the Prophet we are commanded to hear or obey. It’s the Lord, himself. And that’s a very important point. So that’s what that article was about. So, this all came out at the same time that I was—and I think I had had a couple of interviews with my stake president, maybe my bishop. Peggy Stack was calling me to do an interview. I was telling her I don’t…
GT 09:23 Was she at the Tribune at the time?[2]
Janice 10:16 Yes.
GT 10:17 Okay, because she was the executive director of Sunstone in the 1980s.
Janice 10:22 Yes, she was no longer.
GT 10:23 Okay. So she’s already with the Tribune by now.
Janice 10:26 She was the first one I worked with at Sunstone. I published with Sunstone in, it would have been in ’78 or ’79.
GT 10:36 And that’s when Peggy was there?
Janice 10:37 Yeah. And she was there then. I did my first Sunstone presentation at The Symposium in 1980. And she was in charge of it then. But she’s no longer in charge. She’s at the Tribune now.
GT 10:50 Yeah.
Janice 10:50 And she had wanted to do an interview with me. But I said, “Let’s wait until,” I wanted to give it time. And I didn’t want to make it public until I knew for sure that they were going to have a court. Because I felt if I could negotiate through it—I was pretty naive. I should have known. But at this point, then it was Byrne Anderson, who called me right before the Symposium where I was giving this paper, “Him Shall You Hear.” And he said, “I read your paper”. I didn’t realize that the press was reading all these papers. He said,” I read your paper, and it’s really important. And I found out from Peggy Stack that you’re being investigated.”
I said, “Yeah.”
He said, “Can I do an interview?”
I said, “Okay, it’s all coming out.” So I did the interview with him. About that time, his article appeared on the front page of the Tribune.
GT 11:50 Oh boy.
Janice 11:51 That was the same day my son, Nephi, came home from his mission.
GT 11:55 Oh, no {chuckling.}
Janice 11:56 It was on TV and everything. So, that’s when everything broke loose for me.
GT 12:03 You know, you seem almost shy. But it’s amazing to me, you’re very resilient and very strong when it comes to things that you really believe in. And so it’s funny, as I was reading that article, I don’t think you enjoy speaking. Is that true?
Janice 12:29 No, I don’t.
GT 12:30 And that is why I appreciate you doing this.
Janice 12:33 I humorously said to, I can’t remember who, I said, because I had to watch myself on these interviews and TV, and I said, “If I had known this is what it was leading to, perhaps I would have said, ‘Okay, I won’t publish.'” {both laughing} No, I never cared for the interviews, they were hard for me. I can speak well, when I’m speaking about a subject that I care about. I don’t really like talking about myself. When I did the account of my excommunication for the case reports, Lavina was the editor. Well, we were co-editors, and she asked me, so she was helping me. And she would say things to me, like “Call me back. Okay, Janice, how did you feel? Put that in.” So, she helped me do that. And again, the reason I spent all that time and worked so hard to write that, we called it a documentary history. Because I felt this is not just about me. This is about what does it mean to be a believer in a Church community, and to have ideas that differ from those that are being promoted by the institution, in the hierarchy? How can these issues be resolved? What is the right way, for a church of God, to deal with these kinds of issues? I was very interested in that. And I’ve been interested in that. Not just about churches, but about communities in general. How do we live together in peace and harmony, and freedom? All of those questions are very interesting to me. So that’s why I wrote that account. But I’m…
GT 14:19 This is what year again?
Janice 14:21 This was 1994.
GT 14:23 Okay, 1994, so that put you back on the radar again.
Janice 14:26 Yes. I am definitely on the radar now. It’s the story.
GT 14:32 Are you still on the radar? Do you think they’re watching this?
Janice 14:36 I don’t know. I haven’t got any information about that for a long time. So, I don’t know. I mean, I do know one thing which is to me very interesting. My friend Lavina did apply to be rebaptized.
GT 14:50 Yeah, that was in the Tribune recently.
Janice 14:53 Yeah, it was a few years ago, and she was rejected. To me, that means they are still watching, and that means that if they rejected Lavina…
GT 15:05 Because Maxine Hanks is back.
Janice 15:07 Maxine is back.
GT 15:08 She joined, well it’s it been five or six years probably?
Janice 15:11 About that. Maxine’s story is Maxine’s story.
GT 15:15 Yeah, I’m hoping to get her on, too.
Janice 15:17 As she recounted, I did go to a Sunstone Symposium session, in which she talked about her rebaptism.
GT 15:24 Right. I went to that one, too.
Janice 15:25 And it seemed to me that as she recounted it, it did not fit what I understand are the Church procedures for rebaptism, which I know Lavina went through. So, I don’t know. Maxine has to answer for her own.
GT 15:38 Yeah, we’ll get her on.
Janice 15:40 Yeah. In any case, Lavina went through all the procedures, and it was rejected. Her stake president accepted it. Her bishop, they both okayed her rebaptism. Because of apostasy, I think, It had to be sent to the First Presidency, with not any reason for it.
GT 15:40 Right.
Janice 15:40 So to me that says they are still watching. Or at least somebody is still watching, I don’t know who.
Apostasy or Insubordination?
Interview
GT 16:10 {chuckling} I’ve been told that they monitor all the blogs, the mommy blogs, everything. And, if you say something out of line, they’ll let your bishop or stake president know.
Janice 16:25 That was definitely the case at this time, which was of course, 30 years ago. It was very clear to me that my stake president and bishop were being given copies of everything that they had. And there were a couple of things, I said, “Well, if you’ve got transcripts of all this, could you give me one because I don’t have written copies of everything.”
GT 16:49 Did he? {chuckling}
Janice 16:50 They didn’t like me saying things like that. And Margaret, when she did her excommunication, the guy had a whole pile of stuff.
GT 16:58 Oh, wow. So was your bishop? So in ’94, you got called in again.
Janice 17:06 Right?
GT 17:07 So ’92 was the first time and you were told, “Hey, don’t publish this.” And you said, “I’ll let you know.”
Janice 17:14 Right.
GT 17:15 And then ’94, there was this notification that they would publish. The bishop was upset. Was it the bishop or the stake president?
Janice 17:22 No, it was the stake president.
GT 17:23 The stake president was upset that you had submitted something.
Janice 17:27 That I was going to publish this, because it was and he said, you know..
GT 17:33 He got to that before you could get to him?
Janice 17:35 Yes. He got to me first. I was going—again, I didn’t know.
GT 17:41 Right.
Janice 17:42 Because I hadn’t looked. I mean, I do read Dialogue. But I was really busy.
GT 17:47 Because you were having babies and weddings and…
Janice 17:50 Weddings and other things.
GT 17:51 It seems like you had some health problems at this time, too.
Janice 17:55 Yes I did. I did not know until I was called in. And I think it was, again, I’ll have to refer to the account. It was either my bishop or I think it was my stake president. It may have been my bishop. So I had had three different bishops throughout this whole process. So in ’92, I won’t give their names. It’s in the history. In 1992, my bishop had not spoken to me at all. I think he might have been present for one of my interviews. I had several interviews with President Bacon. One sort of finding things out and calling in and being told not to publish. I think he was there on that second one. But he said not a word. He never said anything to me about it.
GT 18:42 Probably didn’t want to.
Janice 18:43 No. And then…
GT 18:45 It’s hard when they put the bishop, because he’s got to be the friend of the whole ward. And then they’re making them the enemy. {chuckling}
Janice 18:52 Then he was released. When we were in Mexico, we had a different Bishop.
GT 18:57 Okay.
Janice 18:57 And again, his name is in the book. He’s a fine person. I liked him a lot.
GT 19:02 This is the bishop in Mexico?
Janice 19:03 No, no. This is the bishop back here. So we were in Mexico for six months and then we come back. And then we had a new bishop.
GT 19:11 Right here in Provo.
Janice 19:12 Here in Provo.
GT 19:13 Okay.
Janice 19:13 It was not the same one who had been in interviews before. And I think he called me and told me that he said, “I dropped the ball. I was supposed to tell you not to publish the article. And now President Bacon is upset about it, and he wants to meet with you.” This is all before Sunstone, as I recall. It’s coming back to me. Yeah. So that was the second bishop. Again, he said, “I’m sorry, I dropped the ball. I was supposed to tell you.” I said it’s fine. I was going to do it anyway.
GT 19:47 Right.
Janice 19:49 So then our ward was divided. So, by the time we get to the court, I have another bishop.
GT 19:57 Bishop number three.
Janice 19:58 Bishop number three. Bishop Hammond. I’ll use his name. It’s in the report. So, he comes in, not having been privy to all this other stuff. He comes in. President Bacon is handling everything. And clearly President Bacon, at first, had been hesitant. At this time, it’s widely publicized. He’s in contact with Salt Lake. He tells me this himself. ” Two apostles told me…”
GT 20:28 Oh, wow,
Janice 20:29 He told me that. He said…
GT 20:31 Was Packer one of them? I know he was one in Margaret’s [case.]
Janice 20:35 I don’t know. He offered to tell. He said, “Would it make any difference to you to know which apostles have contacted me about this?” I said, “No, it wouldn’t”. So I didn’t ever find out.
GT 20:47 You weren’t curious?
Janice 20:48 I was curious. I just didn’t ask. I should have. I should have. Although it did become clear to me and I have this in my account of my excommunication that President Hinckley was actually, he wasn’t the president yet.
GT 21:07 Right.
Janice 21:08 But he was the one who was pushing for me to be excommunicated.
GT 21:12 Oh.
Janice 21:12 Well, in a way, it makes sense, because I had contradicted two of his speeches openly in these two essays that were…
GT 21:21 So you think, it was probably Hinckley and Packer, you think?
Janice 21:24 Packer was definitely behind the September Six. I don’t know if he was behind me or not. But I have pretty good evidence that Hinckley was. So Packer may have been, as well. I don’t know. So, that was in 1994. And it became, it was very widely publicized, after that first article in the Tribune. People pick it up, mother of nine being tried for talking about God the Mother. It makes a good story. {both chuckling}
{End of Part 2}
[1] Lavina died shortly after this interview on Oct 29, 2023.
[2] Deseret News also had an article: https://www.deseret.com/1994/9/1/19128430/prophet-won-t-lead-us-astray-counselor-says/
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Gospel Tangents
All Rights Reserved
Except for book reviews, no content may be reproduced without written permission
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