"Useful" History
Joseph Smith used seerstones to find lost objects, and was recruited by neighborhood treasure seekers to try to find buried treasure.
As a young and unsuccessful lawyer, Abraham Lincolin wrote raunchy stories for local newspapers to help pay the bills.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. frequently cheated on his wife.
The Church of Jesus Christ and its correlation committees tend to take a lot of flak for what some term to be whitewashing the history of the church. Elder Boyd K. Packer once said, "Some things that are true are not very useful. . . In the Church we are not neutral. We are one sided. There is a war going on, and we are engaged in it. . ." (Boyd K. Packer, "The Mantle is Far, FarGreater Than the Intellect," BYU Studies, Summer 1981, pp. 263, 267). Recite this quote in the presence of a "so-called Mormon intellectual," and you can almost hear their blood pressure rising.
One of these people once said to me that the main problem with this is the quetion of why is it only the conservatives in the church (like Elder Packer) that get to decide what is useful or not? He said (I'm paraphrasing), "The reality of Joseph Smith as a treasure-seeking teenager growing into a prophet really inspires me." The answer is easy. He is obviously the only person in the world that feels that way, therefore he will not be deciding what is useful history anytime soon. No one ever says, "I'm inspired that King could be an adulterer and still accomplish all that he has." It's swept under the rug, and rightfully so.
Since no one is the villain of their own life story, everyone reserves the right to write "useful" history. Therefore, do not whine, gritch, or otherwise complain when the Church chooses to do the same.
As a young and unsuccessful lawyer, Abraham Lincolin wrote raunchy stories for local newspapers to help pay the bills.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. frequently cheated on his wife.
The Church of Jesus Christ and its correlation committees tend to take a lot of flak for what some term to be whitewashing the history of the church. Elder Boyd K. Packer once said, "Some things that are true are not very useful. . . In the Church we are not neutral. We are one sided. There is a war going on, and we are engaged in it. . ." (Boyd K. Packer, "The Mantle is Far, FarGreater Than the Intellect," BYU Studies, Summer 1981, pp. 263, 267). Recite this quote in the presence of a "so-called Mormon intellectual," and you can almost hear their blood pressure rising.
One of these people once said to me that the main problem with this is the quetion of why is it only the conservatives in the church (like Elder Packer) that get to decide what is useful or not? He said (I'm paraphrasing), "The reality of Joseph Smith as a treasure-seeking teenager growing into a prophet really inspires me." The answer is easy. He is obviously the only person in the world that feels that way, therefore he will not be deciding what is useful history anytime soon. No one ever says, "I'm inspired that King could be an adulterer and still accomplish all that he has." It's swept under the rug, and rightfully so.
Since no one is the villain of their own life story, everyone reserves the right to write "useful" history. Therefore, do not whine, gritch, or otherwise complain when the Church chooses to do the same.
posted by The Silent Observer at 10:58 AM
3 Comments:
In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that my feelings about history can be summed up with the immortal words of Henry Ford: "History is more or less bunk." I have a technical background, and am accustomed to working within well-defined boundaries using well-defined terms, but a few bad experiences with some crackpot historians who take things out of context or exclude exculpatory evidence has soured me towards the discipline.
I think Henry Ford had it right.
So do I, Chuck, and after discovering his great wisdom at a young age I repeated it often, much to the consternation of my high school history teacher.
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