I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the stories we tell about our history. There are important strengths and weaknesses to the way that we select and tell stories within the Church. Instead of sharing my own thoughts on the matter, I’m going to share an extended quote of Stephen Carter from episode 252 of the Mormon Discussion Podcast. I appreciate Brother Carter’s comments because he does a good job of capturing the value of framing Church History stories as morality tales, while also discussing what we lose by avoiding the difficult topics in Church History.

And now, the quote:

To me the strength of Mormonism isn’t its cleanliness or its respectability or even its doctrines. The strength of Mormonism to me is its stories. From what I’ve seen, since about 1910 or 1920, when we started really distancing ourselves from plural marriage, Mormonism has been steering away from these kind of messy stories. They’ve toned them down or they’ve recast them as morality tales.

The reason why we tell church history stories is to give instruction on how to behave, but in the process of doing that, we’ve replaced flesh and blood people with walking morality tales. And our willingness to follow rules has kind of become attached to our perception that these great historical persons were willing to follow these rules as well. So we become used to acting nobly because they did. We sing hymns about the sacrifice of the pioneers, and those motivate our own sacrifices. In other words, in a sense, we place our motivation for actions outside of ourselves. We say “well this is what Joseph Smith or my pioneer ancestors would do.”

This has done a lot of good for us. It has made us cohere as a culture, it has made us cohere as a people. You can kinda tell when you’re around a Mormon, and that’s a lot because of the way that we tell these historical stories.

But the thing is, the heat, the energy, the messiness of these historical people’s actual lives and personalities can’t be completely suppressed. As anyone who has studied Mormon history in any kind of depth knows, these people did really weird things, even for the time they were living in. They were digging up gold plates, they were publishing new scriptures, they were trying to literally build the city of Zion, they were gathering armies together, they were trekking from place to place, they were starting new cities with new types of government, they were practicing plural marriage. So they really were strange people.

So when we encounter aspects of their lives that can’t really be spun into a moral, and frankly, sometimes seem even to be anti-moral, it really destabilizes us. These paragons of virtue that we once used to motivate our own behavior kinda turn out to be all too human. And so that’s the downside of using history as morality tales.

And I am getting to a point.

So right now, from my perspective, the official church sources approach stories like Joseph Smith’s treasure digging sort of in muted tones. They tell the stories in a matter-of-fact sort of way, as if to say, “Oh yeah, that happened, now let’s get back to the important story.” It’s kind of a “we’ve covered our bases” sort of attitude. And so as a result, this fascinating portion of Joseph Smith’s life that has all kinds of bearing on how his formative years were spent, and how his world-view developed—which you know in turn impacted Mormonism deeply—is basically missing. It’s not integrated into the rest of the story. It’s kinda side-barred.

And of course if you take Joseph Smith’s life as a whole, it’s full of this wild stuff. It’s the reason people followed him. They didn’t follow him because he was righteous, they followed him because he was interesting. He was charismatic! And it’s this sense of adventure and breaking the mold bled over into his followers as well. This is the reason that we go and travel to go on tours of Kirtland and Nauvoo, because we’re going to interesting times- times when things were happening. We never go on the Harold B. Lee tour and go tour his offices in salt lake or anything. We go to Nauvoo! Where things were happening!

To me, stories like Joseph Smiths’s treasure digging, stories like Zion’s camp, stories like what happened around polygamy, stories like the Kirtland Safety Society, these are the stories that make Mormonism great and juicy to me because they open that sense of possibility and adventure that made Mormonism flourish in the first place, but has been so thoroughly removed since.

And I mean, you can think when you read these stories, instead of “Oh my gosh, hide it from the children! Don’t let the general public know that Joseph Smith was interesting, that he did all kinds of things, that all sorts of elements went into his prophethood! Make them think that it was just started from this one vision from the sky.” On the other hand, we could say “Holy cow! We were started by a former treasure digger! He found peep stones! He started a new marriage practice!” Because if we can own that, we can own the vivacity of that amazing charismatic man. He was like this great storm that rolled through the American religious scene, and like a storm he tore things up, things that have been long rooted, and left destruction behind. But at the same time, he made room for new growth. He left life-giving moisture to help it all grow up, and amazing things have come from that simultaneous destruction and life-giving reinvention.

And so if we can make room for this strange, bizarre, amazing, charismatic, complicated man, then that means that there’s all kinds of room for creation in the church. These stories make room for life. They tell the weird people in the church, the ones who don’t fit the mold, “Go ahead, be weird. That’s God’s gift to you. We were started by a weird guy. Cultivate it. See what you can add to this great big pizza of a church.”

So to me, these stories are launching pads. They’re not landing strips. They’re here to show us what’s possible instead of showing us what we should do. In my opinion, the best way to stop the exodus of members from the church isn’t to be honest about our history but to be amazed by it. To tell it to the hilt and to let that gusto and spirit of exploration bleed into our lives and sort of set it on fire.