The Secret Mormon Meetings of 1922 - Shannon Caldwell Montez Ep. 1346

The 1922 Mormon Meetings: What Church Leaders Really Discussed About the Book of Mormon

A Hidden Historical Record Emerges

For nearly a century, the existence of a series of private meetings held in 1922 by senior Church leaders remained largely obscured from public knowledge. These secret Mormon meetings, convened specifically to address growing theological and historical problems with the Book of Mormon, reveal a candid conversation about faith, science, and institutional integrity that the Church hierarchy chose not to share with members. Historian Shannon Caldwell Montez has reconstructed these gatherings through meticulous archival research, uncovering who attended, what troubled them most, and why the meetings themselves became a kind of ecclesiastical black hole, their influence felt everywhere yet acknowledged nowhere.

Understanding these secret Mormon meetings matters because they expose a crucial moment when Church leadership privately grappled with questions about scriptural authenticity, questions they publicly denied existed. For members and researchers seeking to understand how institutional leadership has historically managed information about the faith's foundational texts, this archival recovery offers documentary evidence of carefully managed doubt.

Background: The Book of Mormon Crisis

The groundwork for these 1922 meetings had been laid over a decade earlier. In 1911, controversy erupted when academic study of ancient American geography began contradicting longstanding Mormon assumptions. Church leaders like B.H. Roberts, the most respected Mormon apologist and historian of his era, had begun quietly collecting evidence that the Book of Mormon's geographical claims presented serious difficulties.