Fawn McKay Brodie is perhaps the next most influential figure in shaping the falsehoods told about church history and the modern wave of anti-Mormon literature. She grew up in the Church and was a niece of President David O. McKay. But during her time at the University of Chicago she lost her testimony.

This was a period when the academic world was shifting sharply toward secular skepticism, and Freudian psychoanalysis was the intellectual trend dominating the campus. Freud’s ideas influenced historians, literary critics, and social scientists everywhere at the time, and this had a major impact on Brodie’s book. Ironically, most of Freud’s teachings are now rejected by modern psychology because they are unsupported by empirical evidence and rely heavily on subjectivity.

Brodie studied English, not history. Her degrees were in English Literature, and she never trained in historical method or archival research. Her strengths were storytelling and literary interpretation. Decades later, in the 1960s—long after she wrote No Man Knows My History—she taught history at UCLA without any formal history degrees, which has led many people to assume she was a trained historian when she was not.

As an ambitions young female author in a male-dominated secular academic world, Brodie wanted to make a name for herself and gain credibility as a serious intellectual. A controversial biography of Joseph Smith offered exactly that opportunity, and she wrote No Man Knows My History with that ambition in mind.

Shift in Anti Mormon Thinking

Because of Brodie’s work in 1945, the framework of anti-Mormon thought shifted dramatically. Her narrative was filled with assumptions, speculations, and Freudian interpretations intended to “fill in the gaps” and explain how the rise of Joseph Smith and the success of the Church could be accounted for without accepting the reality of revelation.

But this entire reconstruction was created more than a hundred years after Joseph’s death. She never knew him, nor did her book try and get historical insight from those who actually did know him well. Her interpretation was built on guesses, her amateur exposure to Freudian psychology, and the primary “evidence” she leaned on were… the hostile affidavits collected by Philastus Hurlbut. These affidavits came from a man excommunicated twice for adultery, who publicly threatened to kill Joseph Smith, who was legally restrained from approaching him, who vowed to destroy the Church, and who collected negative statements from neighbors already antagonistic toward the Smith family. Historians have long recognized that many of those statements were exaggerated, biased, or outright fabricated.

Brodie Admits Her Portrait of Joseph Was Not Historically Responsible

Although she never returned to the Church, Brodie did later admit that her portrayal of Joseph Smith was not historically accurate. She acknowledged that she used a single interpretive lens, overcommitted to the idea of Joseph as calculating, and left no room for the sincerity or religious experiences of early Latter-day Saints. After gaining real historical experience at UCLA, she expressed embarrassment over portions of her early work and openly stated she would have written the biography differently if she had understood how to evaluate sources properly. She also admitted that her psychological reading of Joseph’s motives was too speculative. To several scholars, she said that if she wrote it again, she would produce a more nuanced historical study.

Anti Mormons Don’t Acknowledge the Faults

Yet modern anti-Mormon writers ignore all of this. Even though Brodie herself admitted the faults in her work, the Anti writers treat Brodie’s Freudian assumptions—offered as possibilities in 1945—as if they are proven facts about Joseph Smith’s character. Before Brodie, anti-Mormon literature focused on alleged moral flaws and behavioral accusations. After her book, the narrative shifted to the idea of Joseph as a psychologically unstable, power-hungry, money-motivated, sexually driven narcissist whose charisma masked deep insecurity. Later critics—including the Tanners, the CES Letter, and Letter For My Wife—continue to rely heavily on Brodie’s framework and treat it as credible history, even though the foundations of her analysis were speculative, biased, and based on sources modern scholars have long recognized as unreliable.

CES Letter & Letter of My Wife’s Use of Fawn Brodies Assumptions

ChatGPT helped me compile this list of Brodies Assumptions that are reused as fact in the CES Ltter and Letter For My Wife

Conclusion

Fawn Brodie was not a historian and wasn’t attempting to write a historically accurate biography of Joseph Smith. At the end of the day, this is the pattern behind every wave of anti-Mormon material since the 1830s. The goal has never been to present balanced history or to follow the evidence wherever it leads. The goal is to create doubt, weaken trust, and pull people away from their faith. That is why they repeat disproven claims, rely on hostile sources, and frame speculation as settled fact. They are not trying to tell the full story—they are trying to tell a story that achieves a specific outcome. And once you see that, it becomes clear that these narratives are built to persuade, not to inform.