History and Faith

Some years ago, I read an interesting essay by prominent LDS historian Davis Bitton entitled, "I Don't Have a Testimony of the History of the Church." To this day, I find this an excellent starting point for my own meditations on the relationship between history and faith. Mormonism is in the midst of a large-scale faith crisis because academic disciplines are apparently not too kind to beliefs and assumptions of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This is causing a lot of heartache. Families are breaking up over it. As someone who went through this whole process myself, I can't help but feel deeply saddened on behalf of others as I watch them suffer and, in some cases, even take drastic action.

What many do not understand--because, frankly, they would have no reason even to know about it--is that we are struggling with intellectual problems that are centuries old and, in the midst of that, being hit with new intellectual, social, and technological challenges. When I say 'we,' I don't just mean Mormons. I mean everyone. French historian Jacques Le Goff once argued that the Middle Ages really extended to the middle of the 19th century. More radically, perhaps, I would argue that in many ways antiquity did not end until the 19th century because, for the most part, much of the truly modernizing ideas and technological advances that made the modern world as we experience it really came into their own in the 19th century. Science, archaeology, history, and biblical criticism had advanced, but those advances were usually sporadic, and they penetrated very shallowly into the consciousness of wider humanity.

The advent of the internet was a nuclear blast in the arenas of information, knowledge, and understanding. That blast vastly expanded our access of information while sacrificing the value placed on knowledge and understanding. The great expansion of available information requires carefully processing, reflection, and organization in order to integrate it into useful structures of knowledge and understanding. Now more than ever, scholars are scrambling to work out or rework those structures. The consequences of this explosion of information and the difficulty of processing it are observable all around us. We have more information, but we trust it less, or we trust it idiosyncratically. I have my facts. You have yours. That is not a failure of individuals, or even a failure of institutions; it is actually a global crisis. Mormonism has not been untouched by that crisis, and, in fact, the church and its members have suffered a great deal in the process.

History is part of that mix. The methods of modern historiography (the writing of history) do not mesh well with the traditional use of the past in faith traditions. Faith traditions generally use the past to buttress their positions in the present. Trinitarian Christians will argue that a formulation of the nature of God written in the fourth century AD by learned bishops and scholars (the Nicene Creed) is well supported by material in the Bible written anywhere from the 9th century BC to the second century AD. The situation is actually much more complicated than that, but for most of Christianity the assumption of the Biblical foundations of the Trinity is largely taken for granted. Mormons generally believe that their assumptions about latter-day scripture and the history of the Church hew pretty closely to the versions they encounter in Sunday meetings and Church publications, but, once again, different scholarly arguments suggest the actual situation is more complicated.

Upon encountering these problems, many people lose their faith. Christians can lose their faith in the Bible, and Mormons can lose their faith in the Book of Mormon and the historical foundations of the LDS Church. Dr. Bitton, in meditating on this problem, noted that scholarly history, being a moving target, would never be a solid foundation to build faith on. He was, in my view, correct. Very few people who convert to a faith do so purely or even mostly on the basis of its historical narrative. Rather, they accept historical assumptions that seem to be concomitant with the foundational elements of the faith. For Christians, these foundations would be things such as the resurrection of Jesus and the Bible being the word of God. Mormons would add to that faith in the Book of Mormon being the word of God and Joseph Smith being a prophet.

I do not recall at any time as an LDS missionary asking an investigator whether they believed the Book of Mormon to be a historical text. Mormons instead assume that the text is ancient because that is, roughly speaking, what the text purports to be--an ancient text. I also do not recall asking investigators whether they believed certain elements of the First Vision to be factual history. I asked them, rather, and really as a pendant to the question of the Book of Mormon's divine origins, whether they now believed Joseph Smith was a prophet of God. Even these considerations from a missionary's perspective, however, do not go far enough. For, the truth is that people convert to a religion for all kinds of reasons, and often the pivotal question is whether they can accept the teachings and commitments set before them as a path of faith they are willing to walk down. A few agree to continue down the path by joining; many more opt not to do so.

Some, such as John Dehlin, have adopted a much different model for thinking about the "commitment of faith," as I put it. Much in the mode of the commercial relationship between producer and consumer, Dr. Dehlin supposes that it is only ethical for a Church to present itself according to some external standard of scholarly accuracy when it engages in missionary work. Otherwise, in his view, the Church is lying and thereby deceiving its members for reasons that may be mercenary. "We convert you so that you can maintain or expand our revenue stream." It should be, but unfortunately it is not, needless to say that Dr. Dehlin's formulation of conversion and the life of faith are completely at odds with centuries of Christian tradition. While it is true today that some churches market themselves like sneakers or a self-improvement program, faith is not such a thing, nor was it seen in those terms until very recently. History is not "the fine print." Evolving views of history do not reveal a breach of contract.

I do not blame John Dehlin and people like him for not being able to sort all of this out. We are all trying to sort these things out. We try to make sense of faith in a world of science and mass consumption. These are deep questions, and, unfortunately, individual people are buffeted by proximate concerns. These pressures often lead understandably troubled souls to preliminary answers that may arguably stunt their growth or greatly disrupt their lives. It would be preferable, I think, to see people adopt more patience and mutual grace as we stumble through this era of cataclysmic change. We need not assume that all who do not agree with us are bad actors who are pursuing selfish ends at our expense. Not only does that not make a lot of sense, but it is a symptom of the very problem itself. A conspiracy theory is the lazy solution for the complexities we are encountering.