It is dangerous to make too much of the title of a book, as a title may reflect an inscrutable mixture of authorial intention and marketing savvy, inspiration, and desperation. In the case of Believing History, a new collection of Richard Lyman Bushman’s essays, however, the title is an apt summation of the issues explored within.
Bushman built his academic reputation through investigations of early American social history, published in books such as From Puritan to Yankee and The Refinement of America. On a parallel track, he studied his own religious tradition, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with special attention to its founder, Joseph Smith, and its seminal text, the Book of Mormon. Believing History brings together 17 of his Latter-day Saint essays, spanning about 30 years of thought. Because nearly all of the essays originally appeared in LDS publications of one sort or another, even readers who are familiar with Bushman might never have encountered these pieces.
The title word “believing” can be read as a modifier applied to “history,” the way one might use “social,” “Marxist,” or “feminist.” The editors of the volume, Jed Woodworth and Reid Nielson, suggest this reading in their introduction. They cite historians George Marsden and Grant Wacker, both of whom have argued that religious perspectives have as much right to a hearing in the academy as any others. The argument seems to have carried the day. Marsden recently won both the Bancroft and Curti prizes for his biography of Jonathan Edwards, and Wacker’s 2001 book on early Pentecostalism, Heaven Below, earned, among other accolades, an Award of Excellence from the American Academy of Religion. It is no insult to the quality of Bushman’s work to suggest that, just a decade ago, in the atmosphere Marsden described in The Soul of the American University, Believing History would not have been published by Columbia University Press but rather, as the editors originally planned, by Brigham Young University.
In one crucial respect, however, Bushman’s Mormon essays differ significantly from Jonathan Edwards: A Life and Heaven Below. While Marsden and Wacker openly acknowledge the people about whom they write as spiritual forebears, both historians closely follow the canons of their profession. A reader who deemed Edwardsian theology or Holy Spirit baptism a bunch of nonsense could nonetheless find the authors’ main arguments compelling. A reader who cannot be convinced that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob inspired Joseph Smith to translate the Book of Mormon will not be compelled similarly by Bushman’s essays, despite his erudite and winsome prose.
At his best, Bushman begins with a question that is relevant to non-Mormons and builds his argument using evidence to which non-Mormons can relate. The essay “Joseph Smith and Skepticism,” for example, looks at early criticisms of Smith in the context of late 18th- and early 19th-century rationalism. Bushman writes that when Voltaire, Hume, and their ilk began turning educated heads, it became crucial for orthodox Christians to separate legitimate miracles, principally Christ’s virgin birth and resurrection, from the sham healings and visions that skeptics too easily mocked. Following William Paley, Christian apologists developed a whole apparatus of “internal evidences” and “external evidences” for their faith that also could be used to evaluate rival claims. As a result, Bushman contends, Smith’s early critics hardly probed his message or credentials as a prophet. Instead, they reflexively lumped him in with the usual heretics, from Muhammad to Shaker founder Ann Lee and spiritualist Jemima Wilkinson.
For the first three-fourths of this essay, Bushman tackles an interesting question in a plausible way. But as he winds up, the reader is reminded that the essay was originally delivered in a lecture series sponsored by the LDS Commissioner of Education. Bushman avers that Smith did little to answer his critics’ calls for proof of his prophethood because two early revelations to the Mormon church stated, “Require not miracles” and “He that seeketh signs shall see signs, but not unto salvation.” Smith stood on revelation alone. So, it turns out, does Bushman. In his concluding remarks, he quotes the Mormon Book of Alma and asserts, “The Latter-day Saint answer to skepticism is not conventional evidence. … We ask that skeptics listen to the testimonies of believers who trust God because they have experienced power and truth.”
Bushman makes similar turns in all of these essays, except the first four, which consist of spiritual autobiography from beginning to end. The Book of Mormon answers for itself in the five essays on “The Book of Mormon and History,” and quotations from Mormon Scriptures permeate the eight essays on “Joseph Smith and Culture” as well. Such frequent reference is, in one sense, only natural. The Book of Mormon would be a key primary source for anyone seeking to understand the book, its author, or the church founded upon it. Still, as all history graduate students hear repeatedly, primary sources are not transparent—they must be read actively and critically, with attention to both what they say and what they do not say. Historians cannot automatically believe everything they read. In the case of the Book of Mormon, though, Bushman, as a faithful Latter-day Saint, must.
On this topic of primary sources, Mormon scholars have a significant advantage and a significant disadvantage in relation to, say, evangelical scholars. The advantage is archives. Latter-day Saints are renowned for meticulous record keeping, and none of their print documents is more than 200 years old. Thus Mormons have hard evidence of almost everything that happened in the early years of their church, while evangelicals have to make do with text fragments and archaeology. On the flip side, Mormons base their faith on rather recent miracles and revelations, plus a book that had the misfortune to appear as textual criticism hit its stride. An evangelical historian can write a lot about faith in the 19th century without having to broach subjects like the supernatural or the inspiration of Scripture. A Mormon historian lacks the luxury of compartmentalizing such questions.
To some observers, compartmentalization is the great weakness of the new, “respectable” evangelical histories. In a 1997 essay, “On Critical History,” Bruce Kuklick deemed the efforts of Marsden and others to write Christian history by the rules of the academy a “pact with the devil.” Such work might win accolades from nonbelievers, but at the expense of a unique Christian voice. Kuklick—himself a nonbeliever—called his evangelical colleagues to put up or shut up. Christians request a place at the academic table on the basis of possessing special insight into the true workings of the world, he wrote. “But how are Christians to show this? How can they show how God peeps through in history? If Christian convictions lend no such insight, if they are not cashed out, they are worthless.”1
Bushman certainly rises to Kuklick’s challenge. He writes, of his key primary source, “The genius of the Book of Mormon, like that of many works of art, is that it brings an entire society and culture into existence, with a religion, an economy, a technology, a government, a geography, a sociology, all combined into a complete world.” Bushman inhabits that world. He draws all of his questions into it, and all of his answers emanate from it. This is not to say that Bushman cannot wield the tools of the historical trade. He has demonstrated his skills in his non-Mormon writings, and he demonstrates them at only a slightly lower level in these essays, nearly all of which were originally crafted as lectures and consequently move at a much faster clip than monographs. But, in this volume at least, Bushman is a Mormon first and a historian second. Kuklick and company could ask for nothing more, right?
Somehow, I suspect that non-Mormons would very much like to see more from Bushman—specifically, more doubt. How can a historian, trained to scrutinize texts, accept the Book of Mormon at face value? How can someone so familiar with the foibles of Joseph Smith and the eccentricities of the early LDS church claim their spiritual heritage? How, in short, can such an obviously intelligent, educated, and well-traveled scholar remain a Mormon?
Bushman has fielded such questions from non-LDS colleagues his entire career. He addresses them in his autobiographical essays and his afterword, and his answer boils down to this: by believing history. 19th-century Mormon history sustains his faith because he believes it. Evangelicals examining the same period, or nearly any period since the first century ad, might be challenged, befuddled, or inspired, but they have far less at stake. Feeling little need to believe all the messiness of recent history, evangelicals are dumbstruck that anyone would even try. And so they keep asking the same questions, and Bushman keeps giving the same reply.
Believing History works as a tangible example of a scholar of faith cashing out his convictions. Unfortunately it does not, for that very reason, work well as history, at least not for non-Mormons. The reader of any history takes a great deal on faith—that the author used real sources, that he used them fairly, that the past is knowable. Asking readers to accept additionally that Lamanites and Nephites battled for supremacy on the American continent, and that their deeds were recorded on golden plates that a man from upstate New York translated, and that the wisdom of this man and succeeding Mormon prophets is binding for all humankind: that demands more than most readers will be willing to give.
Over against the diffidence of evangelical historians, who may sometimes say too little in what they write, Bushman’s essays are refreshingly bold. But over against the boldness of Richard Bushman, who as a historian of Mormonism simply takes too much of his tradition for granted, evangelical diffidence looks like the responsible way to go.
Elesha Coffman is a doctoral student in American religious history at Duke University.
1. Bruce Kuklick, “On Critical History,” in Kuklick and D.G. Hart, eds., Religious Advocacy and American History (Eerdmans, 1997), pp. 58–59.
Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
