Lavina Fielding Anderson
Latter Day Saint scholar, writer, editor, and feminist
Lavina Fielding Anderson (13 April 1944 – 29 October 2023) was a Latter-day Saint scholar, writer, editor, and feminist. Anderson held a PhD in English from the University of Washington.
Anderson was one of the original trustees of the Mormon Alliance, founded in 1992 to document allegations of spiritual and ecclesiastical abuse in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). In 1993, Anderson published a chronology documenting over 100 cases of what she regarded as spiritual abuse by LDS Church leaders during the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. This article became grounds for her excommunication on charges of apostasy in September 1993, as one of the September Six.
Anderson remained as active in the LDS Church as her excommunicant status allowed; in 1996, she was described by Levi S. Peterson as exemplary of an emerging "church in exile" composed of faithful excommunicants. In the late 1990s, she published three volumes of Case Reports of the Mormon Alliance co-authored with Janice Allred, documenting sexual and ritual abuse by lay clergy and calling for improvement in the institutional treatment of victims. In 2019, her local stake leaders reconvened her disciplinary council, in which she affirmed her faith but also expressed multiple views contrary to church teachings. The council recommended her rebaptism to the First Presidency; this was rejected without explanation, and without reiterating her conditions for reinstatement. As mentioned below, Mercy Without End contains eighteen of her essays reflecting on her twenty-five years attending church as an excommunicant.
“Lavina Fielding Anderson” enters the record as latter Day Saint scholar, writer, editor, and feminist. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Lavina, Fielding and Anderson can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q6502691. VIAF identifies the subject as 13645891. The Library of Congress control number is n82003980. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1944, 2023, 1992 and 1993.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lavina Fielding Anderson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.