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Memoirs by disaffected members of this or that religious group appear regularly, generally to little notice. But apart from her platform, which guarantees an audience, and her superior skills as a writer, there's another reason Beck's memoir has received far more attention than the typical product of the deconversion genre. Her father, Hugh Nibley, is known throughout Mormondom as perhaps the most significant LDS apologist of the 20th century and one of our finest social commentators. In Leaving the Saints, Beck accuses her father of academic fraud and sexual abuse. Beck claims to have learned from a strange man in a tweed sport coat (called "Tweedy," a kind of Mormon Deep Throat) that her father's books are a hoax and that a good 90 percent of his footnotes are totally made up. The problem for Beck, of course, is that the books are still in print, still available for examination. If they weren't checked properly thirty years ago, they can be checked today. Further, I know personally many if not all of the source checkers; they are outstanding academics from such BYU departments as Ancient Scripture, Asian and Near Eastern Languages, Law, the Library, English, and Classics.
But at the very heart of this book is Beck's effort, in a Provo motel room, to confront her father about a kind of Egyptian ritual abuse (which she claims took place between ages five and eight) and elicit from him an admission of the heinous deed, to allow him to rid himself of the guilt before he dies. (Hugh Nibley did, by the way, pass away in late February of 2005.) Beck artfully weaves this uncomfortable scene of confrontation throughout the narrative.
How trustworthy a narrator is she? About herself Beck appears to be candid to a fault. She speaks of bouts of anorexia, thoughts of suicide, and insomnia mixed with nightmares. Yet one matter was completely left out of the book—a terribly important omission. Contrary to the impression she seeks to leave with the reader, Martha and John Beck did not leave BYU and the Church merely because of the "purge" of campus dissidents and a spirit of paranoia pervading the institution. They left because they both chose to come out of the closet as practicing homosexuals, which lifestyle is in violation of the BYU Honor Code and the teachings of the Church. Beck has since chosen to strike out against a Church that maintains a moral standard with which she obviously disagrees. As Hugh Nibley observed to his daughter in a conversation recorded in this book, so often "people leave [the Church], but they can't leave it alone. Always attacking, always lashing out, because you can't get away from the fact that it's the Lord's work."
On February 22, 2005, Beck's siblings issued a statement that said in part:
We are saddened by the book's countless errors, falsehoods, contradictions, and gross distortions. … Martha's most egregious accusation—that our father molested her over several years and the family covered up the crime—is not true. While salacious accusations sell books, the reader should know that in this case it simply did not happen. These allegations dishonor real abuse survivors who lose credibility and suffer increased anguish when false accusations are exposed. … Intellectual honesty is a fundamental value of the Nibley family, and sadly we do not see that tradition reflected in Leaving the Saints.
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