Janiece: How Becoming a Historian Helped Me Cope With Difficult Church History

As a professional historian, Janiece describes the intertwining of her love of the Restored Gospel and her love for history. The challenge of her academic work on the Mountain Meadows Massacre helped her gain perspective and compassion. She shares her hard-won wisdom about how to engage with even the most complex aspects of Church history with both an academic and a faithful perspective.

Further Reading in Faith is Not Blind:

“Ambiguities, apparent contradictions, and paradoxes are all around us. . . :earning to accept those apparent conflicts long enough to work through them is an essential step in finding the simplicity that lies beyond complexity”

(Faith Is Not Blind, Chapter 5, “Productive Ambiguity,” p. 39)

Transcript:

Faith Is Not Blind: Welcome to the Faith Is Not Blind Podcast. My name is Sarah d’Evegnée.  Today I’m talking to Janiece and one of the reasons that I wanted to interview her is because in some of the research that we’ve done and a lot of the interviews that we’ve done, the issue of Church History has come up again and again. And I thought it would be helpful to have a historian who loves Church History and loves history in general talk to us about her faith and about how learning about church history actually strengthens her faith. So welcome. We’re glad you’re here. 

Janiece: Thank you 

Faith Is Not Blind: First of all, could I have you give a little bit of your personal background and then we’ll work up to your academic background?

Janiece:  I grew up in California in the Bay Area. I went to BYU as an undergraduate, and well I guess I’m just transitioning into my academic background I suppose. But I served a mission in Argentina. My plan was to go to law school. I kind of felt like with my skill set, if I wanted to make any money that was probably a good choice. I came back from a mission–my Mission Presidents were both attorneys and I loved them both. But I came back and didn’t want to go to law school anymore. So I actually figured out what I wanted to do the week before I was supposed to graduate. I had plans to take a year off. I had a job lined up and I thought I’d just figure out what I wanted to do. But I kind of had this epiphany the week before I was supposed to graduate. And right in conjunction with that epiphany, I talked to the graduate director of the history master’s program at BYU who had been impossible to get ahold of and he magically answered his phone. And I decided that I wanted to do history. And I had not taken a history class at BYU. I was a political science major, so it wasn’t completely beyond the scope, but I felt really strongly about it. 

My Religion Professor was Stephen Robinson and I took a number of classes from him after I came home. And he had said, “You know, have you ever thought about doing Church History?” And growing up in California, being a seminary teacher was calling, not a job. I had never really considered that, but amongst the other options I was kind of mulling that over in my head, and it was suddenly very clear to me that that’s what I was supposed to do. And so I went and begged them to let me take some history prerequisite classes to start to be prepared for a Master’s Degree. And then I moved into the Master’s Degree at BYU.

Faith Is Not Blind: When you talk about it “just feeling right” to go into history, how would you describe that? How did you know and did it have anything to do with any earlier testimonies that you had?

Janiece:Yes. Definitely. I think we all figure out how the Spirit speaks to us individually. And I think it’s something difficult because it’s unique for each of us. Growing up, I think 90% of the time when people talked about feeling the Spirit they would quote Doctrine and Covenants 9 and describing a sort of “burning in the bosom” or a “stupor of thought”and there was nothing in between.  And I had never felt something that I would describe that way. Since that time I read a talk of President Oaks saying, “I have never felt something I would describe that way” and that gave me great solace that I’m not alone. I only ever heard people talk about personal revelation in specific ways and I had had my own experiences that I would describe very differently. For example, Joseph Smith talks about “pure intelligence flowing unto you” and that makes sense to me. That’s how I feel sometimes I think. Sometimes I get very emotional. Sometimes the Spirit makes me hyper. I feel the Spirit in a lot of different ways and learning to recognize that when you’re a missionary and trying to get people to recognize the Spirit, that’s a really difficult task because we all experience it differently. I may know someone is feeling the Spirit, but I don’t know exactly what it feels like when they feel it. And for me it was kind of a progression. There were different points when I received answers. 

My answer to go on a mission was one of those times. I was going to turn 21 (and back then I could go at 21) in January and it was my junior year at BYU. All fall semester I prayed and tried to get an answer, but it never felt right. it didn’t feel right saying “no” and it didn’t feel right saying “yes, I’m going.”  So I just decided, “Okay, I should go to another semester and I’ll figure it out next summer.” And then right before Thanksgiving I got my answer, and I think this is a pattern for me figuring out what I want to do with my life. And this experience set that pattern. I think another important thing for us to recognize is that the Lord will speak to us in a way that we are going to understand. And sometimes those patterns are repeated in our lives quite often. And the pattern that was set up with my decision to serve a mission is how I get answers. I struggle with something for a long time and then I get an answer very quickly. I woke up on a Sunday morning and I knew I needed to go on a mission. And this was the Sunday before Thanksgiving. I was in a Relief Society Presidency at the time or we had a meeting with the Bishop and he’s talking about different callings for the next semester and I said, “Yeah I think you need to fill my position.” He asked, “What’s going on?” That day I talked to him and I got my mission papers finished. I called my parents and I told them I was going on a mission.

But I remember lying in bed thinking, “What if I don’t feel this way in the morning? What am I going to do if I don’t still feel this tomorrow?”  And the only way I went to sleep was telling myself Okay, you can undo these things that you’ve done. It’s going to be okay.” And that has kind of set a pattern for me in figuring out how I receive personal revelation. For what I wanted to do in terms of a career that moment has been really important to me.

 I remember that spring before I started graduate school, I was taking a couple of those history prerequisite classes. I love spring at BYU. Everything is so green and you can actually have quiet moments on campus. And I remember walking on campus and just getting that feeling again, getting that reiteration that, “Yes. This is the right thing.”  And I have needed that because my route has been rather circuitous over the last several years until now. I have needed to remember that.” I think that as mortals we forget really easily. The Children of Israel had an issue with forgetting and we have an issue of forgetting. We have passed through the veil of forgetfulness and it’s always going to be hard for us. And maybe something that attracted me to history is that I believe that we don’t know how to perfectly replicate the past, but that we have opportunities to learn. I think the past can help teach us about ourselves. 

Faith Is Not Blind: What I love about that whole story is that you use the word “pattern.” The pattern for you might be different from the pattern for somebody else and that is very historical. We can’t assume that our present will somehow repeat the past. It seems like you establishing that pattern of knowing how the Lord speaks to you before you chose to go into history helped you know how to deal with Church History, which is very beautiful. Sometimes a circuitous path can actually be helpful and beneficial. 

So when you decided to go into Church History, how did you deal with some of the difficult issues? 

Janiece: If you grow up in the Church, you have kind of a primary version of Church History where everything fits in these nice, neat little boxes with bows on top.

Faith Is Not Blind: Which I think is good for primary children when you teach primary. It’s age-appropriate. 

Janiece: But the problem is if we never progress after that.  And I think that some of the fault is with how the learning has been structured in seminary and institute classes in the past. But I think also some of it is on us, that we are not putting forth enough effort to get to a point where we have a more mature understanding.

Faith Is Not Blind: So when would you say that you started to have that more mature understanding and did it mostly come from you seeking it out? 

Janiece: I think it mostly came from scripture classes, particularly. Steven Robinson was a really important mentor for me. I read his book called Believing Christ and I think that it was a really critical time for me spiritually. I think that I was trying to save myself. I kind of always thought that if I worked just a little bit harder I would never have to repent, that I would never have to  go through that pain. I could just avoid that all together. And mortality doesn’t work that way. Sin is an important part of mortality–experiencing and repenting and being changed by the process.  You know the point of mortality is not just for us to go point A to point B in the quickest way possible. I think Robinson kind of opened me up to thinking about the gospel and grace in a very different way than I had it before. And so when I heard that I could take classes from him I was really excited. His classes were a really important blend between the academic and spiritual that I have tried to emulate. And those classes really opened up for me how to deal with some of the ambiguity in the Gospel. And just learning to think about scripture more deeply also is going to bring up some difficulties. And that prepared me to think about the history of the Church in a different way.

One of my best friends went on a mission to Kirtland at the same time that I went to Argentina. And we both took a Church History class afterwards from somebody.who told really fantastic stories. But my friend who had served her mission in Kirtland would say to me, “It’s a really great story, but maybe it’s a little more complex than that.” I think that those things kind of prepared me to deal with history in a much more mature way and to deal with a much more complex narrative.

Faith Is Not Blind: I think it’s interesting to hear the echoes of how you felt on your mission with thinking, “I need to save myself. I need to do everything myself.”  Because often we feel the need to have this pristine, perfect record, which is kind of what we expect from history. It seems that learning that sometimes it’s actually good to work through difficulties could help you when you started looking at Church History as well.

Janiece: After I finished my Master’s Degree, I had changed my thesis topic rather late in the process.

Faith Is Not Blind: There’s a theme there.

Janiece: Yes. It’s that pattern again. And that should make me less frustrated with it when I’m in the middle of it, but it doesn’t. I finished a little late in the year and I was going to have a year before I could move on to a Ph.D program. And I needed a job. I had done an internship with the Church History Library with someone named Ron Walker who was a History Professor BYU. He needed a research assistant and I had an interview with him and felt like it went pretty well. He was working on a project about Brigham Young and the Native Americans. And he pulled me into his office for what I thought was a second interview. And as I went into the interview he told me, “What we’re actually working on is the Mountain Meadows Massacre. I would like you to be my research assistant, but you need to know what you’re getting yourself into.” And I needed a job. I wasn’t particularly enthralled with Mountain Meadows at that time. I don’t know how much I actually knew about it. And he said, “You need to pray about this. This is a hard thing.“ And I needed a job and I felt like it was the right thing for me to do. 

But for the first several months I was just reading newspapers from the 1870’s and these accounts and I was physically nauseated most of the time. And on top of that, they hadn’t announced the project publicly yet, and I wasn’t supposed to talk about it. And that was weighty. I could talk to the people who were working on the project, which certainly helped. But I have spent more than a decade of my life working on projects about Mountain Meadows, which I think is the darkest moment in Church History. And it was not easy. It wasn’t easy. After a time I was able to focus more on what was going on politically and what was going on and legally. I was the general editor of the legal papers and so I was more focused on that aspect of it which was much more manageable. I worked for Ron Walker for about six months and I was still going to have a few months before I went to Vanderbilt for my Phd Program. So I had lined up another job. But you can’t write a book in six months and the book wasn’t done. And I felt really strongly that I wasn’t done with Mountain Meadows. And Ron kind of said, “You can’t do both of these jobs, and I’m going to have to replace you when you’re gone anyway. So why don’t you go do this job that you committed to and do it well this summer.” But I didn’t feel like I was done with this project, which was right. So I went to get my Phd at Divinity School at Vanderbuilt and then came back and got a job working for Rick Turley on a project about John D. Lee. John D, Lee had two trials leading up to his execution for the Mountains Meadows Massacre. And I worked on that project. So for a decade my life revolved around the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

Faith Is Not Blind: And like you said, that topic is pretty dark. And maybe there are people who might not be aware that there could be anything labeled that way in Church History. When you talked about how difficult that was personally, how did you keep going? Because some people might ask you, “Why keep going? Why not just study something else? Why stick with the Church? And why stick with those topics?” How were you able to keep going?

Janiece: Rick Turley and I had a really important conversation at one point. He told me that before he approached this project, before he pitched it to the Brethren, he felt like he needed to be okay with whatever the worst outcome might be. In his mind the worst outcome was that Brigham Young ordered the massacre. And I still think that’s probably the worst outcome. And Rick said I had to be able to be okay with the worst outcome and he said, “Once I realized that the church is still true even if something really horrific happened, even if this worst possible thing happened, then I could go forward and know that I could be completely honest with this project.” And I think that was a really important lesson for me as a historian because I want to be balanced and I want to be complete. I think the best way for us to deal with difficult things is to approach them head-on and to learn everything we can. We always have to have humility. We’re not going to know everything, but when we approach difficult issues head-on and when we can learn as much as we can about the topic, I think that we’re able to deal with it. It’s when we assume we know what happened or when we don’t do the work to really learn as much as we can, I think that that’s where the problems come.

I think Elder Marlin K. Jensen said it first, that the problem isn’t Church History. The problem is not reading enough Church History. Some of the most faithful, believing people I know are historians and people ask, “How does that work when history is messy?” Well, real people’s lives are messy. That’s just a reality.  No one’s life happens in nice little neat boxes no matter how perfect you appear to everybody else. Life is messy, but when we just know bits and pieces, we maybe just see the bad parts. But if you’re really focused and your life is focused on understanding, then you can’t see the bad without seeing all the good. There are things that I don’t understand. And I do believe we have better answers than we used to, but it would be arrogant to say that we have all of the answers. No mortal has all of the answers. But when we do the work there are better answers when we’re looking at better sources and when we’re trying to look at the complete picture. But along with the bad comes all of this good and I cannot negate all of that good. I see people with messy lives and people who sometimes make the wrong call and do the wrong thing, but I actually have the opportunity to learn from that and then maybe I won’t fall into that same thing. There are plenty of other things that I’m going to mess up with, we have to be more humble and recognize there is just a chasm of things that we don’t understand. I also think that sometimes that helps us to focus on what we do know and what we do understand. I know that the Spirit has spoken to me and I know that the Spirit has made an imprint on my heart and I have to also trust that the Gospel is strong enough for other people to work through those things for themselves. I think sometimes we want to kind of compel people to believe and that’s never going to work.  

Faith Is Not Blind: It’s such a good point. I mean, if part of the messiness includes us trying to force people and compel people that won’t turn out well for anyone. Let me ask this question then: if someone is struggling particularly with church history and the messiness, where would you tell them to go to learn more? How would you help them focus on the good?

Janiece: I think the Gospel Topics Essays that we have are a great resource that are way underused. There are a  number of students that I have that have no idea where to go to find them. Go to the Church Website (churchofjesuschrist.org) and look under Gospel Study, and look for Gospel Topics. In that whole section there are thirteen Gospel Topics Essays that were written by professional historians who are experts. This is something that has gone through a rigorous vetting process. They have been read by the First Presidency and the Quorum of Twelve Apostles. It’s not just one person’s thoughts on the topics. Read those essays and go to the footnotes and read the sources in the footnotes. But I would also say in conjunction with that, go to the Church History Website. I used to work for the Church History Department, so I’ll give a plug. They have done this amazing work to gather together these narratives from Church History from the 19th century, but also from the 20th century. The Church is expanding internationally. And I think that as we read, we don’t just focus on the problem, but we try to learn more in general. Then we begin to see all of that good. I cannot negate the difficulties that many of the early Saints went through, and I don’t want to dismiss their voices. I want to try and understand their experience. I also believe that this will help us understand them better in a more complete way, and not just this kind of caricature. The person we put up on a pedestal isn’t someone we can understand. Pedestals are useless. Nobody can do anything on a pedestal. You can just look pretty on a pedestal and that’s it. Women, prophets, historical figures–people can’t do stuff on pedestals. We are agents and we are meant to act. And in real people’s lives when we act, sometimes that gets messy. But when we put in the time and we work, and I believe work is an eternal principle, we’re blessed. I think that grace more fully reaches out to us as we do more work

But that work can change us if we want to know the answers and if we want to feel settled about hard questions, I don’t have all of the answers, but I have enough that I’m okay. I can feel peace. Things are still going to be complicated and some of that messiness isn’t going to go away until mortality is done, but if we’re willing to put in some work then we can have better answers. We can access that peace that is available to us.

Faith Is Not Blind: I appreciate that so much. It’s so beautiful to know that as we reach out to God, He’ll reach out to us–even if it takes time, even if it’s a last-minute answer. He can help the messiness have some grace in it. And as we focus on Him, He can help us get through it.  You’re such a good example of that principle. Thank you so much for sharing your story. It was very helpful.