From 1970-1915, Boyd K. Packer was an Apostle in the Mormon church, serving for 7 years as the acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve. During that time, Mormons sustained him as a prophet, seer, and revelator.

Prior to this, he worked in various administrative positions in the Church Education System, which offers seminary (high school) and institute (college) classes.

I want to discuss his 1981 speech, The Mantle is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect. This speech was given to seminary and institute teachers, admonishing them to omit certain parts of church history that were not faith promoting.

Specifically, he said this:

There is a temptation for the writer or the teacher of Church history to want to tell everything, whether it is worthy or faith promoting or not. Some things that are true are not very useful.

I want that to sink in for a minute. Here was an educator, telling other educators to censor the institution’s history for the benefit of the institution.

While I can understand the desire to minimize those things that make you look bad, omitting them completely is dishonest.

He goes on to speak of prerequisites, and how important it is for people to have a testimony that the church is true before they are exposed to the facts of history. This is so they can view these facts through the lens of their emotional commitment to the church.

It matters very much not only what we are told but when we are told it. Be careful that you build faith rather than destroy it. President William E. Berrett has told us how grateful he is that a testimony that the past leaders of the Church were prophets of God was firmly fixed in his mind before he was exposed to some of the so-called facts that historians have put in their published writings.

It’s hard to take this kind of thinking seriously. According to Packer and Berrett, we should start with the conclusion, “The church is true,” then look at data that has been carefully correlated to support that conclusion, and voila, we’ll conclude that the church is true.

This is called confirmation bias: the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.

What kind of history could Elder Packer be worried about? Joseph Smith’s practice of polygamy/polyandry? Brigham Young’s discourses on blood atonement?

Have you ever wondered why the lesson manuals skip over why Oliver Cowdery was excommunicated? The lesson manual can’t tell you, because then we’d have to discuss whether Joseph Smith was actually committing adultery when he was sleeping with his maid, Fanny Alger. And, if Joseph and Fanny did get married, we’d have to talk about the ethics of marrying your teenage employee without the consent of your first wife, despite the fact that D&C 132:61 explicitly says you need the consent of your first wife before you marry another wife. And we’d have to talk about how polygamy has always been illegal in the United States, yet Joseph Smith said we believe in “obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.”

You see, history gets messy really damn fast. It’s supposed to be that way. No one is purely a villain or a hero. So if you run into a narrative that seems to present an individual as being either/or, you can be confident that there is more to the story.

There are two ways that people come to conclusions. Using logic and facts, or emotion.

The most powerful forms of marketing use both logic and emotion to persuade us.

Within Mormonism, emotions are used to determine the truth. We say that we have a testimony that the church is true because we feel the spirit. Missionaries teach people that they can have a spiritual experience by reading the Book of Mormon and praying about it.

Interestingly, the field of psychology has labeled this phenomenon “elevation emotion.”

From Wikipedia:

Those in the elevation condition were more likely to report physical feelings of warmth or tingling in their chests. They were also more likely to express a desire to help or associate with others and to cultivate themselves to become better people. They found that happiness caused people to engage in more self-focused or internal pursuits, while elevation appeared to turn participants’ attention outward toward other people.

The above paragraph EXACTLY describes how I was taught to recognize the influence of the Holy Ghost in my life. Let me give you three examples.

The Holy Ghost can feel like a feeling of peace, or of warmth in the chest:

“But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right.” D&C 9:8

2. Those who are converted by the Holy Ghost shall experience a mighty change of heart:

“And they all cried with one voice, saying: Yea, we believe all the words which thou hast spoken unto us; and also, we know of their surety and truth, because of the Spirit of the Lord Omnipotent, which has wrought a mighty change in us, or in our hearts, that we have no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually.” Mosiah 5:2

3. As we become more converted to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, we will “look outwards” instead of turning “inwards.”

Thus, character is demonstrated by looking and reaching outward when the natural and instinctive response is to be self-absorbed and turn inward. If such a capacity is indeed the ultimate criterion of moral character, then the Savior of the world is the perfect example of such a consistent and charitable character. Elder David A. Bednar.

It seems that Wikipedia describes the feeling of the Holy Ghost remarkably well. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about this.

My point is that if you’ve ever tried to argue with someone using facts, and they ignore you by focusing on their emotional experiences, it’s because they came to their conclusion using their emotions, and, to them, your facts are irrelevant.

This is why Boyd K. Packer says, “It matters very much not only what we are told but when we are told it. Be careful that you build faith rather than destroy it.” If you first have a testimony through spiritual experiences, your emotions will form a shield around your mind that will then protect it from the “faith destroying” facts of history.

Either way, Elder Packer would just as well have you never learn any of the “faith destroying” facts of church history.

There is a temptation for the writer or the teacher of Church history to want to tell everything, whether it is worthy or faith promoting or not. Some things that are true are not very useful.

If you can’t tell, I disagree with Packer on this.

The fact is, everything that is true is useful, as long as you actually care about the truth.

If all you want to know is the Republican side of a political issue, then feel free to exclusively watch Fox News.

Just don’t be surprised if your worldview is hopelessly biased.

But, if you want to come to a conclusion that has a higher probability of being correct, then you have to research the issue from all sides. You need to learn what everyone has to say and then draw your own conclusions from the data.

If you then want to be emotional about the data, that’s fine. Just be emotional after you’ve been logical.