Spencer McBride was walking across campus with his doctoral advisor in Baton Rouge, following a class in religious history, when his advisor said, “Spencer, you’re a smart guy, but can you really believe all these stories of visions and angels and gold plates?”
“You know, Dr. Burstein, yeah, I do,” McBride said.
When his advisor asked him how, the doctoral student explained that in addition to things known because of more conventional evidence, there are other things believed because of “spiritual experiences — and those are in the realm of faith.”
“And I believe that the two are not mutually exclusive.”
McBride, who is now the senior managing historian with the History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, joined two others with the Church History Department, including historian Brittany Chapman Nash, co-author of the four volumes of “Women of Faith in the Latter Days,” and history curator Scott Hales who was the literary editor for the “Saints” histories, in a panel discussion last Friday. Moderated by Petra Javadi-Evans, church history editorial manager, the discussion focused on “Methods to See the Redeemer in the Church’s Past” as part of a two-day conference, “‘I Am in Your Midst’: Jesus Christ at the center of Church History,” held in Salt Lake City and sponsored by the Church History Department.
Although a fusion of faith and reason motivates these historians, Javadi-Evans acknowledged at the outset, “there’s a common concern in academic circles that too much emphasis on Christ or overly Christ-centered language can make a work seem less vigorous or scholarly,” asking the panelists, how do you “keep Christ central in your work while still meeting scholarly standards?”
We live in a time where faith is seen as “antithetical to rigor,” Nash agreed, but “that was not always the case in the broad spectrum of history. We just happen to live in a time where that’s the way it is.”
She went on to suggest that historians of the past would probably look at secular historians today and think, “they’re pretty misguided. They feel like they need to separate faith and reason.”
Writing from a standpoint of faith changes a lot, these historians say. Speaking as a museum curator, Hales describes learning how important framing a painting is: “When you’re framing the painting, or you’re hanging a painting, sometimes the frame matters a great deal, and it can really, really help improve the experience of looking at a painting.”
“And I think that’s true with how we write about church history too. It’s all about how we contextualize the history and how we put that frame on it.” He went on to describe two books written about the martyrdom of Joseph Smith — one portraying him as courageous in a reverential way, and the other which represented the account cynically in a way that impugned his character.
“One way we can bring Jesus Christ in with our making things visible is by drawing on Christ’s attributes and how we approach history,” Brittany Chapman Nash said, echoing the remarks of other historians earlier on Friday. With a particularly difficult historical situation, Nash, author of “Let’s Talk about Polygamy,” described reaching to Christ to offer her ”some patience to work through” a particular historical situation.
“Always approach the past as a Christian,” Scott Hales agreed, “with that charity and that compassion and empathy. I think that’s part of what it means to be a Christian historian.”
Hales later elaborated on the importance of writing “with a great deal of charity, recognizing that that we’re all human beings, we all make mistakes, that we are all striving to be better through the Atonement of Jesus Christ.”
By keeping that in mind, he said, I can “do my best not to judge those I write about, but rather to see them as children of God, as brothers and sisters.”
Nash described this as bringing “the two great commandments” into scholarly work, and “to somehow be able to treat historical characters, with compassion, with charity,” even while we “strive for understanding and to be truthful in our portrayal of history.”
McBride suggested that plain-spoken directness could be another way historians bring Christian attributes into writing about the past. Acknowledging that answering some questions requires a lot of complexity, he encouraged teachers and writers to be “very direct” as they “state the controversial fact.”
By contrast, he said, “if you begin with mental gymnastics, if you begin apologizing before you’ve even explained the controversial issue, there’s a good chance you’re never going to get the trust.”
“If you’re sitting with a bunch of youth, just state the issue clearly, upfront. And all of a sudden it will send a message, ‘Oh, this person’s going to be very straightforward.’” McBride said we can then “give them the information that will empower them to work through it in their own faith journey.”
Yet while explaining “why this may not need to cause the concern,” McBride encouraged teachers to not send a message making “invalid the concern” with people inadvertently taking away a message, “oh, something’s wrong with me for feeling this way.”
It’s more helpful, McBride suggested, for people to feel empathy from a teacher who recognizes instead, “I understand why this is a cause for concern.”
“If history always makes you feel good, you are probably not learning a real history,” McBride often tells his students. “If the historical record always backs up your political point of view, like every single time history backs you up, you’re probably not drawing from objective history. It’s messy.”
“History will not always make us feel good.”
Rather than discomfort being a bad thing, McBride encouraged “normalizing discomfort and grief and sadness as part of Christian discipleship.” Similar to the grief people might feel while ministering to someone who is currently suffering for choices they’ve made, “it’s okay to feel that grief with the people of the past in the same way.”
Along with the uplift scripture provides, McBride mentioned “some passages in the Book of Mormon and in the Bible where the people are making bad choices, and it can make you really sad. And it’s OK that grief and sadness come along with the happiness and the triumph of life and history as well.”
Rather than “aberrations” that people ought to be “concerned about or to panic about,” McBride spoke of the value of realizing these painful feelings are “part of life now,” just as “it was part of life then.”
Even with the most comprehensive account of a difficult moment in history, there are always going to be important things we don’t know, these historians emphasized. “In some ways, studying history is really a great exercise in faith,” Hales said — pointing to natural “gaps in the historical record” where we don’t know certain things about difficult and sensitive questions.
It can be “really hard sometimes,” he admitted, when “we don’t have a great answer to give about something that happened in the past.”
“But we are not commanded to know. We are commanded to believe and to hope.”
“Whenever we find gaps in the historical record,” he said that he’s come to see that as an “opportunity for faith,” trusting God that “things will work out and that we will eventually find the answers that we need.”
By approaching history with faith, charity, compassion, honesty and humility, a writer, student or teacher of history can practice embodying the attributes of Christ. As the panel discussion closed, Scott Hales reiterated the theme of the history conference, reflecting on his own experience trying to ensure the Saints books reflected the same witness.
At the end of drafting Saints, Hales described receiving some important feedback that stood out: “bring Christ more to the foreground in this volume.”
In response, as one of the general editors, he said, “Well, wait a second, we’ve got Jesus Christ in the story. He’s everywhere in the devotion of the Saints.” But after a keyword search of the entire manuscript, he was surprised to see that “in fact, we really did not have a whole lot of references to Jesus throughout the book.”
“And what that caused us to do is to dig a little deeper and to look a little closer and to examine the sources more carefully, to find ways to bring Christ more to the center of that story.”
