Fact-Checking Mormon History: The Brethren Didn’t Know Enough to Teach Accurate History

Richard Bushman speaking at Faith Again

Richard Bushman recently articulated what is becoming a popular narrative to defend the Church’s track record on historical accuracy: Yes, the thinking goes, official Church history may have been sanitized to the point of being misleading, but that’s only because leaders didn’t know better.

Bushman said:

The downside of [the surge of interest in Mormon history in the 2000s] is that there is developing in the scholarly world a view of church history [that is] out of kilter with the church version, what’s told in Sunday school class. All sorts of things that don’t fit together such as the seer stones in the hat, or many, many other things.

That was a very dangerous situation because there came a time when the stuff is collected, it’s made available online. And people trying to prepare a Relief Society lesson would go online to try to collect some information get suddenly hit with this counter story that they’ve never heard before, that was authenticated, it’s got footnotes behind it, it’s got authority behind it. Not only do you have this disjuncture, things are not fitting anymore, but a question of “Why wasn’t I told this before?” A sense of betrayal and even rage, anger, and this somewhat illogical but understandable view [that] they’ve been lying to you all along. As if the church authorities knew it all and they were just concealing it.

There was a little bit of that. They did hide Mountain Meadows for a while. But on the whole the church authorities had no better knowledge of church history than the normal members and the general authorities also had to be educated in this new kind of history.

So it’s put us in this difficult position where we are being asked to change very rapidly to a new construct of our own history and it’s put a lot of strain on a lot of people. It’s quite amazing how over the last few years the church is formally and informally trying to adjust to that, with all these gospel topic stories that deal with the difficult issues all being assimilated in the church curriculum and Elder Ballard saying we all have to learn this material, we have to be ready, our kids have to learn it. We don’t want any more surprises.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t match what actually happened in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: Church leadership had multiple opportunities to course correct, but each time they chose instead to hide evidence and attack the historians who contradicted the sugarcoated, official history, rather than making needed changes. Here is a non-exhaustive list:

1. Some time between 1930 and 1965, the Church History department removed the 1832 account of the first vision from the letterbook/journal that contained it and moved it to a safe in the office of Church Historian, Apostle, and future President Joseph Fielding Smith. The 1832 account was potentially embarrassing because of its discrepancies with the official 1838 account; for instance, in 1832 Joseph wrote only that he saw “the Lord,” with no mention of a second personage. The few people who knew about this account were enjoined to secrecy. (See Stan Larson, “Another Look at Joseph Smith’s First Vision” for the history of how the existence of this account leaked out, and Greg Prince, “Joseph Smith’s First Vision in Historical Context” for the theological implications of the evolution of the First Vision.)
2. Fawn Brodie published No Man Knows My History in 1945, a skeptical but mostly fair biography of Joseph Smith. (Not the anti-Mormon polemic it is often assumed to be, Brodie nevertheless did fall short in failing to acknowledge Joseph’s sincere religiosity. See for instance Dan Vogel, “‘The Prophet Puzzle’ Revisited.”) The Church responded by excommunicating her and publishing a vicious rebuttal by Hugh Nibley, No, Ma’am, That’s Not History. Surely the low point of Nibley’s career, No Ma’am is full of attacks on Brodie’s character and straw man fallacies. Where Nibley disagrees with Brodie on the facts, Brodie has usually been vindicated. For instance, Nibley scoffs at Brodie relating Joseph’s use of seer stones as a treasure hunter as “accepting the weirdest extravagances of [local] gossip.” Since then, the evidence documenting Joesph’s active leadership of treasure digging (rather than merely participating as a hired shovel, as he portrayed himself later) has become incontrovertible.
3. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, Lester Bush researched what would become “Mormonism’s Negro doctrine: An historical overview.” He later explained that while Joseph Fielding Smith denied him access to the Church archives, he was able to reconstruct much of what he needed thanks to staff members who bent the spirit of access rules while observing the letter. Another important source was a cache of Apostle Adam S. Bennion’s papers that happened to be unrestricted at BYU, which was promptly locked down once Church authorities realized what it contained. Later, both Bush and Dialogue editor Robert A. Rees were pressured by Church leadership not to publish “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine,” and following publication Bush’s stake president was told to “take some appropriate action” disciplining him.
4. With support from Howard W. Hunter, N. Eldon Tanner, and Harold B. Lee, Leonard Arrington was called as Church Historian in 1972 with a mandate to professionalize Church history. But when other ranking apostles saw what that meant for the orthodox narrative (starting with the relatively mild Story of the Latter-Day Saints) they moved quickly to shut Arrington down. As his department was being dismantled in 1981, Arrington recorded, “Elders Benson and Petersen are very much in the saddle and they do not want archival material made available to anybody.” (Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History, p 339.)
5. Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith was published in 1984 with a faithful but candid discussion of Joseph‘s glass-looking and treasure-seeking, as well as his later banking scandal and polygamy. Despite winning every major award in the field of Mormon history, its authors were blacklisted by the Church. See my summary here.
6. In the late 1980s, the Church warned members away from listening to “alternate voices” that might contradict the official narrative, and followed this up in the early 1990s by excommunicating historians D. Michael Quinn, David Wright, and Brent Metcalfe, among others.

Verdict

While Bushman is correct in a pedantic sense that “the church authorities had no better knowledge of church history than the normal members,” they definitely did know that there was more to the story — but they didn’t want to know what that was, and they absolutely did not want rank-and-file Church members to know, either.

Of course, it is an oversimplification to treat the Brethren as a single entity. Certainly some Apostles and General Authorities had more inclination towards transparency. But the Authorities in favor of silence and obfuscation prevailed: rather than taking these indications of problems with the narrative as opportunities to learn more and make necessary changes, they acted with all their institutional power to stop those who tried to shed more light on Mormon history from making progress.

Only when they recognized that they were fighting a losing battle, beginning around the publication of Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling, did they change tactics and begin to make the changes we have seen recently.

Further Reading

• My earlier article, Did the Church Lie about its Past?
• Greg Prince, Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History.