David P : A Historian’s Look at Church History

With a Phd in American History, David’s academic perspective on using meekness to understand Church History is enhanced by his personal connection to an ancestor who played a significant role in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. David uses both his historical expertise and his personal spiritual experiences to discuss how charity and humility can help us work through our questions and to achieve a greater appreciation for church history and church leaders.

Further reading from Faith is Not Blind:

“Resources [like the Gospel Topic Essays] can help us work our way through complexity to mature simplicity . . . Is it wrong to wonder or even to wander? We don’t think so. The Church does not self-destruct under questioning and scrutiny. Rather, seeking answers and deeper understanding can really help us grow.”

(Faith Is Not Blind, Chapter 3, “Simplicity, Complexity, and the Internet Age,” p. 21)

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Faith Is Not Blind: Welcome to the Faith Is Not Blind Podcast. I’m here with David Pulsipher, Professor of History at BYU-Idaho. Welcome, David.

David: Thank you.

Faith Is Not Blind: David, tell us a little bit about yourself.

David:  Well, I’m a seventh generation Latter-day Saint. I grew up in the Salt Lake Area, which makes me very uninteresting in terms of how I grew up. I went to BYU. I served a mission in Pennsylvania. I’ve been married for about 27 years. I have six children and live here in Rexburg. I’ve been here in about 22 years. It’s been a wonderful life. 

Faith Is Not Blind: What made you want to study history?

David: I didn’t  have any moment where history suddenly grabbed me,  but I grew up with a deep sense of family history. And then I served a mission in Pennsylvania where I served in Gettysburg. I also served on the mission near the site of the Priesthood Restoration and I think there was just kind of an ethos of historical experiences that seem to follow me wherever I went. And over time that just seemed to be the natural place where I gravitated to. I wasn’t necessarily really into history as a child or a teenager. And even at BYU I studied American Studies, which is a study of the American culture more than  American History. But over the course of my graduate work I gradually shifted more from literature into history and then ended up being hired here to teach history. And I think it was more in the teaching of history than anything that I really discovered what I’m interested in.

Faith Is Not Blind: What was it about the teaching of history that stood out to you or that attracted you?

David: I’ve always just been interested in the human experience and the lives of individuals who shaped the world in one way or another–mostly those who have had a positive impact on the world. And I think in many ways my search for history has also been connected to my search for God. And understanding the human experience helps me to understand the mortal experience and the divine a little bit better in that searching for God and for truth.

Faith Is Not Blind: Tell us a little bit about your background with the church. You’re a  seventh generation member of the church. You have a long family history with the Church. But what about for you personally growing up? How does your testimony develop?

David: As a very young child I felt very close to God. I never had any particular questions about God’s existence or anything. I felt that God was there, deeply involved in my life as I grew into my teenage years. And I have parents–a father in particular–who always was very open with us about his own spiritual experiences. As I grew up, I knew I had a father who used the spirit about revelation in his life and would share those experiences with me. I knew I had ancestors that had had experiences. And also I I had on my mother’s side another kind of rich legacy that went back as well. I had a grandmother who served as one of the General Officers of the Church, so I felt her testimony and faith growing up.

When I was in my teenage years, however, I was sitting in seminary one day as a16-year-old sophomore. And I don’t even know what prompted it. It seemed that it literally came out of left field. I had no preparation for it. I had the thought, “What if this whole thing is a hoax?” And it startled me because I had always felt close to God as a child. And here I realized in that moment that I no longer knew if there even was a God. It wasn’t just “What if Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon are a hoax?” It was “What if God doesn’t exist?” And I had this startling revelation that I didn’t know if God existed anymore. And that kind of started a process for me to find out. I began making changes in my life. I realized that I had stopped praying. I wasn’t really living according to the truth that I had known as a child. And so I think I trusted enough in my childhood memories to know that maybe there was something I could recover if I worked hard enough at it. So I went through that process and it was really interesting.

Faith Is Not Blind: As you were surrounded by all of the external influences that could help your faith continue and keep going, you just have this one sort of split second existential crisis and that leads you to asking these questions. And so from there how did you go about recovering that faith?

David: It involved making some changes in my life and more particularly, I began to pray. And the thing that was hard was that I didn’t know if anyone was actually listening. So I began praying without any real sense that my prayers were going any further than the ceiling of my bedroom. But I began reading the scriptures. We happened to be in the Book of Mormon in Seminary that year and my Seminary Teacher called me into his office said, “I’ll give you an A (which I didn’t deserve) if you promise me you’ll read the Book of Mormon by the end of the summer.” The summer went by and about August I realized that I hadn’t been reading the Book of Mormon and I started reading it feverishly, wanting to be true to that promise if nothing else. At that point I started reading it feverishly. I literally finished it 15 minutes before school started and. And I was able to go in and tell him I had finished the Book of Mormon.

But that next year was the Old Testament and it may seem strange, but that was the year that I really discovered the scriptures. The Old Testament became the place where I really fell in love with the scriptures. And I continue to pray and at the same time I was enjoying my scripture study. I was praying, but I still really had no clear sense that God really existed. From all outward appearances you would have had no idea that something was going on. I was that kid who kind of knew all the answers in Sunday school, even the kind of smart-alecky kid who knew the answers. So by all outward appearances I looked like I was the model young man in priesthood, but really inside I didn’t know.  

So at the end of my junior year I was called to be in my high school’s Seminary Council President. Because we had so many seminary students we had seminary during release time and it was kind of like receiving an assignment to be part of a shadow student body group. And my responsibility was to call everybody else and to find out who God wanted to have on the council. And that created a major problem for me. I didn’t know if God was really there, and if He was, how to know if he was speaking to me. I was really blessed to have a good mentor in a Seminary advisor who was David Schuler. And he listened to me and coached me and walked me through it. I accepted the calling and then started the process of going through and studying it out in my mind. To make a very long story short, after many attempts at prayer that had failed, one night I went to the Lord in prayer. One of the things that I had been struggling with was, “How do I know if it’s emotion or if it’s the Spirit?” That was my biggest quandary. How can I tell if this is coming from inside of me or if it’s coming from externally? And I had no way of discerning that difference. And one night when I went to the Lord in prayer for the very first time I felt a spirit that came in and confirmed the specific thing that I was praying about. But in the end, that wasn’t the most important thing. The most important thing for me was that I felt the power of God’s love in such a way that I knew it was from beyond me. I had no doubt that it was coming from outside of me. And the thing that was most shocking to me at that moment was to realize that I’ve been feeling this my whole life, but I just hadn’t recognized it. It was like the volume got turned up. 

Faith Is No Blind: But how valuable to know it for yourself. Because in some ways having all of the externalities of the church and being so ensconced in some ways can sometimes maybe keep you right from having a personal response or a personal relationship or to know for sure individually.

David: And I needed that. I couldn’t continue on without that. I came to the point where I had to know for myself. But growing up with all of that around me led me to know that I could–or at least gave me hope that I could–know I could have that experience, that I could have a personal experience. So I left that night knowing that God was real and God was in a relationship with me. And if that was true, He was in a relationship with everyone. And I didn’t know anything else beyond that, but I knew that. And I’ve never had an experience to that level again. That experience became a kind of an anchor to which I’ve come back repeatedly.

Faith is Not Blind: It’s interesting coming back to history and your love of History and American culture, there are people who have a lot of historical issues with church history. And in those types of things–like with every history, it’s hard to know exactly what happened. We put together pieces. 

David: We can never know for sure.

Faith Is Not Blind: You can never know for sure. And there are some historical questions that are difficult, historical questions that pose a lot of challenges for people. So as you have that foundational experience with the Spirit and with your testimony, have you had any experiences with any of the tensions that we see between the church and church history in particular?

David: Well, that’s something that’s been essentially part of my whole life. The difficult problems of church history are an integral part of my family history. I’m a seventh generation Latter-day Saint, but one of those generational lines goes back to John D. Lee. So I’m a descendant of a man who helped orchestrate the murder of 120 people and did it in the name of his faith. And I’ve known that since I was a very small child. I can remember learning about it when I was 6, 7, 8 years old. 

Faith Is Not Blind: Just for those that don’t know, the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

David: Right. The Mountain Meadows Massacre. My great-great-great father organized it, He was the principle leader on the ground for that experience.

Faith Is Not Blind: And for you, that’s a combination of your love of history and your study of humanity and the past and those narratives and then also the family narrative. 

David: And the family narrative was interesting because the family narrative growing up was that he did nothing wrong. The family was largely in denial about his role. There was a very family narrative that wanted to exonerate him, that wanted to say, “Well, his gun didn’t go off and there’s no way to prove that he actually killed anybody and he was a good man.” And I remember even as a child wrestling with that because it didn’t seem quite right. That narrative didn’t seem quite right. On the other hand, that he was a total monster, that he was a depraved sadistic man didn’t seem right either. 

Actually the very first historical thing, the very first academic paper that I ever published, it was in a student journal at BYU. It was an essay grappling with these two versions of my grandfather and trying to say, “Isn’t there some way that we can understand him as a complex human being? As a person who had deep faith and was trying to do what was right, but also as somebody who made some serious errors in part based upon the very things that made him a strong defender of the faith?” Those very same character traits are also what lead him down a really horrific road. And some really tragic choices that he makes. I found myself pushing against the extremes. Those who wanted to paint him in a really awful light and those in my family who wanted to just redeem him and exonerate him of any responsibility for what happened. I think I didn’t realize it at the time, but that’s where I began really formulating my sense that history is messy and complicated, and that the whole picture usually embraces both the good and the bad.

Faith Is Not Blind: That’s a really personal example about the messiness of history and the nuances of history. You can respond to this if I’m out of bounds, but it seems to me that the further away we get from historical moment, the easier it is for us to look past the nuances and to want to categorize too quickly. It just makes the narrative of history easier to follow along if you know who the good guys are, who the bad guys are. This is someone we don’t like–you know some historical figure. When in fact, as an expert in history what you find as you go back is that there are things around the narrative, maybe above and below the narratives that challenge some of those labels we want to put on things that we weren’t there to witness.

David:I mean, I ask myself all the time because it’s in my DNA. My ancestor made these choices. What choices would I have made if I had been back there? If I’d been in the heat of that moment would I have had the courage to push against the mob mentality that basically took over? Or would I have gone along with it? You know the tragic thing is I can’t really say for sure which way I would have gone. I would like to hope that I would have had the courage to (and there were few that did–not my ancestors are others) who stood up and said, “No. That’s just wrong. We shouldn’t be doing this.” But they were the minority and most of the people went along with it. And they went along with it in part because they thought they were protecting their community. And they thought they were doing something good, but in the end they were doing something horrible. So yes, knowing the complexity helps me realize that we all have the division of good and evil running through our own hearts. And we make choices all the time which lead us to one side or the other side. 

Faith Is Not Blind: It sounds like you’re understanding that nuance–that we all have those parts of us. And what you’re watching in particular with your relative with the Mountain Meadows Massacre is the questions of “How does that happen? How does someone who we believe is faithful and good end up doing something that is tragic and horrific?” But it also sounds like understanding that nuance as you look back helps with your testimony. The understanding that that doesn’t affect your testimony or your sense of the Gospel as much as it does your understanding of how human beings respond in a particular historical moment.

David: Yes. I think I knew these things partly because it was a part of my family history and partly because I had a grandmother who was in the upper echelons of church leadership. I grew up with no illusions that there were perfect leaders. And I knew that there’s a difference between God and his human servants. And that just because people make poor choices or do things as we all do, it doesn’t negate God’s reality and his efforts to reach out to his children and to guide them and direct them through imperfect vessels and so on. So for me, my faith is actually strengthened by looking at the good that God does with such imperfect beings. And I look at John D. Lee who, for all of his faults, still was an instrument for good in many instances. Obviously in this instance he was betraying the truth, but in many other instances he was an instrument in God’s hands to do good in the world. And being able to hold both of those ideas at the same time actually gives me hope because I’m so imperfect. And knowing that maybe I can be an instrument in God’s hands and have a chance to do good even though I’m oftentimes making choices that hurt and are not helpful.

Faith is Not Blind: So let me ask you this question. With this background, especially with you thinking about your experience with looking back at your ancestor, how do you help your students gain that type of insight, either with history or with church history in particular?

David: One of the things that I focus on constantly with students is the view that history is complex. A good historian and the historians that I respect are the ones who approach history with a high degree of with two really important qualities: one is humility–a sense that we don’t know everything and because we can’t know everything there are elements of human lives and decisions and circumstances that we will just never be able to access from our point in history. So we always have to go in with the sense that what we know is limited and any interpretation of the past we come up with is going to be provisional, it’s going to be subject to change. So you start with humility and then the second thing is the best historians always go to their subjects with a high degree of charity. They need to be willing to see the past through the lens of forgiveness and charity.

I discovered this as a student in graduate school. I was studying the anti-polygamy legislation that had been passed in Congress in the 1880’s and court decisions. I have another grandfather an ancestor who part of the first case that was prosecuted for polygamy. So I grew up with polygamy and Mountain Meadows. There was never a moment when these topics sort of burst on to my mental stage. They were just always in the background of my family story. So I’m studying these court cases and I’m reading these Congressional debates and I’m angry at the way in which certain hypocrisies were coming out. Members of Congress who had mistresses and countenanced all sorts of immoral acts were then calling Latter-day Saints “highly immoral beings.” And I remember just getting angry. And I couldn’t understand how they could be so cruel to my people. And I was being very tribal. And as I’m sitting in the University of Minnesota Government section of their Library, which is always like in the dungeon of every library, and sitting there at this big metal table and I’m reading these debates because nothing was online at that point. And I’m getting angrier and angrier. And I remember having a moment where I almost heard a voice. The message was clear to me: “You have to forgive them.” And I realized that I had to forgive these people who had hurt my people. And as I forgave them I began to understand them. It wasn’t until I forgave them that I could understand. And I could understand how they were doing things they thought were right and that they were doing what they thought was going to make the world better even if I didn’t agree with what they did. And even if I could see hypocrisies that they couldn’t. They were still trying to do good in the world. And as I gave them the benefit of the doubt, the logic of what they were doing started to become clear. And that became the basis ultimately of my dissertation. It was the logic of enforcing the standard of monogamy and I looked at the way that that happened on Indian reservations where a lot of harm was done to Indian families as they tried to enforce the kind of European standards of marriage onto Native Americans. I was looking at the parallels between what was happening with Latter-day Saints and what was happening with Native Americans, and so the whole dissertation came out of that moment really. 

If I hadn’t forgiven them, I wouldn’t have had the insights that came later from being able to let go of the anger. And since I’ve noticed that there are historians who approach history with malice, who approached it with a chip on their shoulder, who want to prove a point, who want to settle scores. And those kinds of Historians, I don’t think are helpful and I don’t think they’re useful generally. But those who approach their subjects with charity and humility generally write the best histories. And I think it’s a good model for Church History. You’re going to look back and in any human record you’re going to find instances of incredible mistakes and pain. And I’ve learned to apply the same principles when I run into instances in Church History. Forgiveness and humility help me to see them as people struggling to find God who are making mistakes–sometimes horrific mistakes like Mountain Meadows and think they’re doing it in the defense of the kingdom and in God’s name. And having charity helps me to understand them at least even if I don’t agree with them, and then ultimately to see God working with very flawed people. But again, if you don’t go in with that sense of charity and forgiveness, you’re going to be angry a lot of the time at things people do. 

Faith Is Not Blind: Let me ask you one final question. And I love that response about charity and humility. It’s a great lesson for history, but it’s also a great lesson in general as we encounter people. Do you have any pieces of advice for people who are dealing with questions of Church History?

David: Probably my biggest piece of advice is to always remember that the church and its leaders–from prophets down to local leaders to the parents–the whole institution of the church is designed to bring us to God. but it is not God. The vehicle is always imperfect and will always stumble at times. But I think it’s important to realize that our faith is not in the Church. Our faith is in Jesus Christ. My faith is in our Heavenly Father. The church is designed to bring us to them, but it’s not to be the end. It’s the means. I think sometimes people get clouded about that. They think that the Church is somehow the end and that our faith is in it, when really the Church is pointing us to where our faith should be. And it will always be imperfect because it’s human and God is working with what he has to work with–which in my case is not a lot. But He still manages to do some really incredible things with pretty imperfect people. I think there’s sometimes a sense that the Church has to be perfect in order to be endorsed as God’s Church. But I think it’s the very fact that it’s human means that it’s never going to be perfect. If you’re looking for the perfect institution, you’ll never find it–even in history. Maybe even especially in history or in the present-day right now. It’s always going to be a work in progress.

Faith Is Not Blind: Wonderful. Thank you so much, David 

David: Thank you for the opportunity.