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:

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