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Editor of Web Site May Face Mormon Excommunication

The editor of a Web site that encourages Mormons to question church history and doctrine has been told that he faces a church trial and possible excommunication because he is an apostate who is trying to lead church members astray.

David Twede, a fifth-generation Mormon who lives in Florida, is the managing editor of MormonThink, one of the most influential of the many Web sites on which active and former Mormons debate church teaching. Such sites have drawn increased traffic as Mormons turn to the Internet to find answers to controversial questions about Mormon history and traditions that the church does not address.

The church has come under heightened scrutiny with the presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney, a Mormon who once served as a bishop. The church went through a spate of public excommunications of prominent scholars and feminists in the early 1990s, but in recent years public excommunications of dissidents have been rare, church experts said.

Mr. Twede’s situation was first reported on Friday by the Web site The Daily Beast, which suggested that Mr. Twede was being disciplined because he had posted several articles on MormonThink critical of Mr. Romney.

In an interview, however, Mr. Twede said he was not certain that this was the reason he was facing excommunication. He has also written posts on his personal blog, linked to MormonThink, about how he recently started attending church again after five years as an atheist. He described how he had struck up a friendship with a Mormon he called Pat and had e-mailed materials to Pat and Pat’s spouse that he hoped would shake their faith.

Mr. Twede said that last Sunday, after he attended a worship service at his congregational meetinghouse in Orlando for only the second time, he was called into an office and “interrogated” for 45 minutes by the bishop; the stake president, who is a regional church authority; and two councilors, none of whom he had previously met.

“They said that they felt I was a spy and a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Mr. Twede said. “They said that they need to protect the flock from the Antichrist, from an apostate.”

They handed him a brief letter signed by the stake president, Allan T. Pratt, which said that “because you are reported to have been in apostasy,” they were convening a “disciplinary council” that could excommunicate him. They had spelled his name wrong.

Mr. Twede said that they pressed him for the names of others involved in MormonThink, but that he did not cooperate. He said that there were about 12 occasional writers and 5 steady editors, all volunteers. Mr. Twede said he took over only in July from the managing editor, who quit when he was also faced with excommunication.

Michael Purdy, a church spokesman, said in a statement, “It is patently false for someone to suggest they face church discipline for having questions or for expressing a political view.”

“Church discipline becomes necessary only in those rare occasions when an individual’s actions cannot be ignored while they claim to be in good standing with the church,” he wrote. “Every organization, whether religious or secular, must be able to define where its boundaries begin and end.”

Scott Gordon, president of the Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research, an organization in Redding, Calif., that defends Mormon theology, said that he had forwarded materials posted by Mr. Twede to church officials in Salt Lake City.

“It has nothing to do with Romney,” Mr. Gordon said. “I know members very high up in the church who are voting for Obama.”

“It’s about him posting on a blog that he was actively in there trying to subvert people’s beliefs in the L.D.S. church,” Mr. Gordon said, using the shorthand for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Philip Barlow, a professor of Mormon history and culture at Utah State University, said that other Mormon bloggers had posted negative articles about Mr. Romney without any repercussions from the church.

“You wouldn’t be called to a disciplinary council for criticizing Mitt Romney,” he said. “You would be called for doing harm to the church.”

Mr. Twede works with laser spectroscopy and remote sensing. He said he was a faithful Mormon until he began studying for his master’s in biophysics at the University of Michigan.

“I was raised in it, and believed in it, and was in church leadership roles,” he said. “But then when I was in graduate school, I began applying the same scientific methodology to church teaching. I could not see the justification of believing things when the evidence was so much in the other direction.”

But he said he valued the church’s culture and wanted to stay a member. He said, “To be excommunicated would be sort of cutting myself off from my people.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: Editor of Web Site May Face Mormon Excommunication. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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