Scott Woodward:
In today’s episode of Church History Matters, we are joined by special guest Dr. Keith Erekson, a church historian. Dr. Erekson wrote an important book entitled Real vs. Rumor: How to Dispel Latter-day Myths. It embodies many of the principles of truth-seeking we have been exploring throughout this series, and then some. Casey and I were excited to interview Dr. Erekson about his book and to invite him to demonstrate what those principles look like in practice by inviting him to grapple on air with some challenging church history questions. And we were not disappointed. I’m Scott Woodward, and my co-host is Casey Griffiths, and today we dive into our ninth episode in this series dealing with truth seeking and good thinking. Now let’s get into it. Casey, Casey. How’s it going, sir?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Hi, Scott. It’s going great. I’m really excited for our guest today.

Scott Woodward:
We have a very cool guest today, and we’re going to have another one next week. We thought we’d switch things up a little bit and stop talking about good thinking and just invite some great thinkers on here to show us how it’s done and to talk about their good work.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I was going to say if we’re doing a series on good thinking, we have to eventually invite someone that can think well.

Scott Woodward:
At least one person on this series.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
You and I have been winging it the whole time, but we actually do have a good thinker with us today, and that is Keith A. Erekson. Keith’s with us right now. Say hi, Keith.

Keith A. Erekson:
Hi. Glad to be here. Thank you.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Thanks for joining us, and let me tell you a little bit about why we’re excited to have Keith. So Keith’s an award-winning author, teacher, he’s a public historian, and he currently serves as the Director of Historical Research and Outreach for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Keith also sits on the editorial board for the Church Historians Press. Keith has authored numerous books and articles on topics including politics, hoaxes, Abraham Lincoln, Elvis Presley, and Latter-day Saint history, and you wouldn’t think all those things go together, but he’s a renaissance man.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, eclectic.

Keith A. Erekson:
You’re always surprised.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So for seven years Keith directed the Church History Library. Before that, Keith was a tenured associate professor of history, a founding director of the Center for History, Teaching, and Learning at the University of Texas at El Paso, at UTEP. He holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from Brigham Young University, a doctoral degree in history from Indiana University, and a master’s of business administration from the University of Texas in El Paso. And Keith does a lot of outreach work and partnerships with internal departments of the church and external groups focusing on Latter-day Saint history. So Keith, we’re really thrilled to have you here with us and to help us figure out how to do good thinking.

Keith A. Erekson:
I’m honored to be here.

Scott Woodward:
So you are kind of at the end of a series we’ve been doing on truth seeking and good thinking, and one of our guiding questions has been what mental moves are made by intelligent, critically thinking Latter-day Saints whose faith is strengthened rather than damaged by diving deeply into our church’s history and doctrine? And we think that’s a really important question. And Keith, you’ve written an incredible book on this very topic. We’re going to highlight that in just a moment, but let me tee it up with this scripture: Our theme scripture has been D&C 88:118. And we’ve been struck by the Lord’s language here where he says, “And as all have not faith, seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom. Yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom. Seek learning even by study and also by faith.” What’s remarkable is that the Lord does not sound particularly bothered here by those in the church who don’t have faith, as though not having faith is perhaps, like, even a very normal and understandable developmental stage to be in, right? And the Lord’s solution to not having faith is to seek learning and wisdom together with other seekers out of the best books. That’s incredible counsel. Do you want more faith than—within a community of other seekers? Engage the best books with the goal of extracting from them all the wisdom and learning you can by study and by faith. And so, Keith, this is why we have invited you on the show. You’ve written what I would not hesitate to call one of the best books on the topic of good thinking, especially about church history topics, but I think the principles apply much more broadly than that as well. So let me just read a line from your introduction, and then I want to hear your thoughts on this. You said, “The best protection lies not in memorizing every possible fact or in debunking all the errors, but rather in knowing how good thinking works.” And then you said, “Thinking habits are skills that combine study and faith to make sense of rumors, myths, and history, and you need not become an expert on every subject to recognize when good thinking is not being used. Like Abish’s Lamanite Queen,” I love this line, “you may not be a medical expert, but you can tell when something stinks or not.” Keith, what—tell us about this book. What led you to writing this book? It’s called Real vs. Rumor. Why did you write it? What need were you trying to fill? Tell us the backstory.

Keith A. Erekson:
You know, this was a really fun thing to do, but it grew out of some moments of pain, or at least confusion, and so—you started with my background. When I was at the university, I worked in the field of history, teaching, and learning. I researched. I published. I taught courses at the undergrad, master’s, and doctoral level about how to teach history, how to think about history, and so that was just kind of what I was doing, and then I have this sudden change that takes me from that environment to the Church History Library, and we do all kinds of wonderful things in the Church History Library, but one of them is we have a front door that’s open to the public in downtown Salt Lake City, and you would be surprised what kind of people with sources and stories walk in the front door, and they believe that Joseph Smith gave their ancestor a treasured object. They believe that their family has some magical relic that makes them special. I mean, they just come in with all kinds of crazy stories, and one day it just kind of dawned on me that these two worlds of mine needed to be connected. You know, and people would come in, and they would think, oh, you know, Joseph Smith gave this book to my ancestor and signed it. And so we’d look at it, and the signature didn’t look totally right, but then you flip it open a few pages, and you say, look here: This book was published in 1849. That was five years after Joseph was murdered, so he couldn’t have given—and they’re just crushed. They’ve been telling this story for generations. They’ve passed it down through their family. And so the realization was, you know, if we thought a little bit better, we could avoid some problems and hopefully draw closer to the Lord.

Scott Woodward:
I love that. And you might need to crush a few dreams or hopes on the way there, Keith. Such is the work of mythbusting.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I’m going to say I am one of the people who Keith crushed dreams of—

Keith A. Erekson:
Oh, no.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
—because I was working on a book about exactly what it sounds like, like, relics of the Restoration, and we wanted to put Elvis Presley’s Book of Mormon into the book, and that is one of the myths that you debunked, right, Keith? That Elvis’s Book of Mormon is in the Church History Library.

Keith A. Erekson:
Yeah, we—yep. The handwriting is forged in that volume, and so the accompanying story doesn’t work.

Scott Woodward:
Oh my word. Gosh, Keith, you’re messing with the narratives that we love to tell ourselves.

Keith A. Erekson:
You know, my mother-in-law calls me a bubble popper.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Keith A. Erekson:
And she says, why do you have to go around popping people’s bubbles? And, you know, we say it in jest, but I think the real reason to kind of get into this space is many people do try and build their testimony or their relationship with God on these stories, and that’s not where we build our foundation. Our foundation is explicitly taught in the scriptures to be built on Jesus Christ, not on a cool story or a neat coincidence. This is how I joke back to my mother-in-law: well, if your testimony is built on that bubble, it deserves to be popped, and you need to go and build it on the Savior.

Scott Woodward:
Ah, shoot.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Wow. Dropping bombs all over the place here.

Keith A. Erekson:
Well, you know, you can joke with your mother-in-law.

Scott Woodward:
In your chapter two of your book, you talk about study and faith, just that phrase right out of D&C 88:118, and you talk about faith differently than we often hear it talked about culturally, and that is that faith is a form of evidence itself, and, I mean, your source is pretty good, Keith. You go to Hebrews 11, that faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

Keith A. Erekson:
That’s right.

Scott Woodward:
In your book you say this: “Gathering and evaluating evidence is a process of learning by study and by faith. I always cringe when I hear people say something like, well, I know such and such through science or reason, but the rest I’ll have to take on faith.”

Keith A. Erekson:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And then you say, “This statement suggests that faith is not about evidence. After all the evidence is gathered and found wanting, then a person turns reluctantly to something called faith to patch the holes. Instead,” you say, “our scriptures teach that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Thus, faith is not the absence of certitude, positive thinking, or a weak foundation of flimsy evidence; faith is a type of evidence that can be strengthened by observations, reports, and inferences, but it also exists independent of them.” So, Keith, you make it sound like the work of study and faith is at least partially the work of accumulating evidence for the unseen, whether that’s historically unseen or metaphysically unseen, and then making the best case we can from that evidence. Am I reading you right here?

Keith A. Erekson:
Yeah, you’re reading it right. I think faith is one of the kinds of evidence we look for, and in any instance, you’re never looking for one piece of evidence. I don’t want one journal account. If there are five, I’m going to find them all. I don’t want just somebody’s testimony if there is historical evidence, and so, for me, the act of gathering evidence is a comprehensive act. How do I find all that there is? And the all that there is includes historical documents, but it also includes the experiences of people, both in the past, maybe, in interacting with God, but also in subsequent generations. We exercise faith as we study history, and so that part of the process is there, and I think it’s important to know that it happens over time. One really interesting story that I think illustrates this is the First Vision, and when we teach it, we frequently go right in Joseph Smith—History, and we’re in those verses, you know, 12 and 15 and 17 and then we stop at verse 20 and we say, okay, there was the First Vision. But I think there’s another piece in there. When Joseph goes and tells his story and people react and then he sits back and reflects, and when he has that moment and he says, it doesn’t matter what they said: I knew it, I knew that God knew it, I can’t deny it—I think that is just as important part of the story of the First Vision as the previous verses because Joseph is adding something there. He’s adding this awareness that the thing he encountered or experienced really was real, and he processes it there, I think, in a way different than when he wakes up lying on his back, like, gee, what happened? This is later, he’s thought it through, and he says, no, this really is real, and I can’t deny that, and that conviction is extremely important to his story and to ours.

Scott Woodward:
That’s another piece of evidence that you’re putting together with every other piece of evidence.

Keith A. Erekson:
That’s right.

Scott Woodward:
We’ve used the quote a few times in this podcast from Orson Pratt. I love this quote: he said, “True faith is founded on true evidence. The greater the evidence, the greater will be the faith resulting from that evidence.” And that’s what I hear you saying, Keith, is that let’s just not be afraid of any evidence. Let’s go gather all of it, and let’s see what story we can put together that makes the best sense of the evidence.

Keith A. Erekson:
Yeah. That sounds great. Find everything you can.

Scott Woodward:
Gather it all up. I love it.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Great example of, there’s kind of a false dichotomy that it’s either evidence or faith that determines your testimony. It was always intended to be a mixture of both.

Keith A. Erekson:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
The Lord gave us eyes, you know, and he gave us a brain, and I think he intends for us to work out a lot of these things. There is a moment when we have to sort of take a leap of faith, but that leap can be informed. That leap can be based on the best work that we can do up to that point, so.

Keith A. Erekson:
Even if we use the leap metaphor, a leap has to start from somewhere, and it has to go in a direction. It isn’t just blind. You know something, even when you’re leaping.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. Exactly right. Well, I want to take up something you bring up in your book, too. In chapter three you talk about assumptions, and in our series we did a whole episode on examining a person’s assumptions that they bring to a story. This is one of the things you wrote in your book: “Frequently so-called challenges with church history stem from bad assumptions in the present. Poor assumptions can cause error and harm. As we identify and address the assumptions in our thinking, we follow Paul’s counsel to prove all things, hold fast that which is good. It takes humility to change our assumptions after we learn they are incorrect.” Then you go on to say many of the myths we carry within us are linked to bad assumptions. To protect ourselves, we must develop the awareness to see our assumptions and the humility to change them. So, Keith, what do you think are some of the most common assumptions that people bring that could be erroneous and that sometimes throw them off when they’re studying the history of the church?

Keith A. Erekson:
That’s a great question. Maybe I’ll start with a category and then a separate example. I think as a category, there’s an assumption that people in the past were just like me. And so this category influences all kinds of things that people worry about. They look at somebody practicing plural marriage, and they imagine that that person has the same Disney princess romantic view of marriage that we have in the 21st century, when we don’t. The romantic model of marriage is a modern construct. Kind of across the board, just assuming they thought like me, they used words the same as me—you know, we’ll find a word in an old document and say, look, they said this word. Well, wait a minute. How are they using that word? What do they think it means? I think the easiest way to illustrate this is any time you’ve ever sat down with the Doctrine and Covenants and tried to make sense of priesthood-related words like keys, ordain, sustain, they don’t make sense. They don’t add up. The different revelations use those words differently, and part of it is they use the words differently in the 1830s and 40s, but a big part of it is we, by 2023, have settled in that this word, ordain, only applies for a priesthood office, and this word, set apart, only applies for a calling. That’s us. That’s us in the 21st century who have made that structure, and that structure does not at all match the 1830s and 1840s, and so we trip over that, and we’ll get upset. Oh, look. The scriptures don’t match. They contradict. The problem is in our head. The problem is my 21st century categories that I’m using. I’m assuming, because it’s the same word, ordain, or set apart, it means the same thing. So that’s, I think, a general one. Maybe to go specific, I think the topic of living prophets is a topic that we have filled in with so many assumptions, and sometimes I almost wonder if we have created in the 21st century a false prophet.

Scott Woodward:
Whoa.

Keith A. Erekson:
Kind of like a golden calf, like, we want a prophet who is perfect, who doesn’t make mistakes, who knows everything about the future, who anytime he has a problem he picks up the bat-phone to heaven and God gives him an immediate answer that’s perfectly clear and spells out all the implications. And we never say these things. Even saying them makes people chuckle.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Keith A. Erekson:
But these ideas are underneath when people get frustrated. Why could Brigham Young do that? How could Joseph do that? Can I trust a current prophet? A lot of times it’s because we have this assumption, well, a prophet should be a social justice warrior, out laying down in the streets, leading social change. Where is that coming from? You know, we’re filling in with assumptions. And they come from our culture, they come from movies, but they find their way in, and we expect—and then we get frustrated. Well, why isn’t the prophet acting that way I think he’s supposed to act?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Well, and idolatry is a really apt metaphor there, right? Because a person that has those misperceptions of prophetic office usually hasn’t read the scriptures where the prophets are depicted as very fallible and very human and very prone to make mistakes, to stumble and kind of move forward. They’re good people, but, again, a close reading of the scriptures shows that even someone like Moses—I think more people have Charlton Heston’s version of Moses in mind than the version of Moses that’s found in the book of Exodus.

Keith A. Erekson:
Why do you need Aaron if you have Charlton Heston?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
That’s a great point, Keith.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So any other common assumptions that you think trip us up?

Keith A. Erekson:
You know, I mean, I think every single topic has them, no matter what you’re talking about, but those are the biggest, I think, categories. If you could say, I’m going to eliminate all my present-minded assumptions and all my bad assumptions about prophets, you are well down the road to being pretty stable.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. Let’s talk more about prophets, because you talk a lot about this in your book. In chapter six, you write, “Perhaps no underlying script causes more angst for Latter-day Saints as does the assumption that prophets are infallible. At the surface level, we happily state that Jesus lived the only perfect life, and we contrast our view of prophets against the Catholic idea of papal infallibility, and yet at some deeper level,” and I think this is what you were just talking about, “we have elevated Wilford Woodruff’s observation that the Lord will not permit a prophet to lead the people astray into a hidden belief that prophets cannot make mistakes. We hold this script despite scriptural stories about prophets who denied knowing Jesus or betrayed Him, resisted the Lord’s calls, disagreed publicly with each other, failed and brought suffering on their followers, fell into follies and errors repeatedly, and were chastised or punished by God.” And then you say, many church leaders have acknowledged that prophets are not perfect, don’t know everything, and make mistakes.” Keith, I wholeheartedly agree with you that the assumption that prophets can’t or shouldn’t make significant errors totally persists in the church, and it creates problems for Latter-day Saints, despite, like, so many scriptural examples to the contrary. And I think you’re right that the cause of the problem traces in large part back to Wilford Woodruff’s quote where he says that, where he says, “The Lord will never permit me or any other man who stands as president of the church to lead you astray. It’s not in the programme,” he said. “It’s not in the mind of God.” So can we start by talking about that quote here, Keith? What should we do with President Woodruff’s statement? I mean, given so many examples in scripture and church history of where prophets have made mistakes, it seems that either that statement is inaccurate for President Woodruff, or it’s inaccurately understood by most Latter-day Saints. Either way, it creates a sort of dissonance in the mind that needs to be addressed, I feel like, and that needs to be thought through carefully here. We have a listener back in our Blacks and the Priesthood series, but I pulled his question in here. I thought it was appropriate. He said, on this point, “How can church members reconcile A, the teaching that the prophet or president won’t ever lead the church astray, with B, the fact that church presidents for over a century taught false doctrine about Blacks?” That’s a really specific example. So, Keith, how would you nuance President Woodruff’s statement? What’s the best way for us to think about this issue, do you think?

Keith A. Erekson:
Yeah, this is a really great example that cuts right to the heart of both the challenges that we bring when we don’t think well about things and also just kind of what’s at stake.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Keith A. Erekson:
Ultimately, you know, good thinking isn’t, like, a little hobby. You know, I don’t put on my little golf shoes and go out for a day. This is really about what we think about God. How could God do that? What do we think about prophets? Do we trust them? At the end of the day it’s not about facts and information. It is about emotional things, trust and discipleship and obedience. And so I think there are two ways that we can kind of enter into a conversation about this statement. One of them springs from where we were just talking about, analyzing our assumptions, and another one springs from the way that we often share information from church history. We often do it in a very abbreviated way. We take a sentence or two, and we share it. Our current culture amplifies this. Nobody has an attention span more than eight seconds anymore. We’re scrolling through things. We don’t even want to read whole news articles. We want summaries at the beginning. And there is a danger here when we just pull out a portion of something from the past. And so the quote that you’ve shared here does that, and we’ll dive down into that in a minute, but I want to switch back to the assumption part of it.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Keith A. Erekson:
One of the consequences when we snatch a little piece out of a scripture or an old talk or sermon is that it’s—it is incomplete, because we’ve just kind of taken it out of its original setting, and then when we plop it into ours, listeners, we sense that it’s incomplete and without thinking about it, our mind starts filling in all of the rest, and we fill it in with our assumptions. And so one of the questions I’ll often ask people who are thinking through this is, what do you think “astray” means? Because we’ll throw this around, the prophet can never lead the church astray. Okay, stop. What do you think it means?

Scott Woodward:
Let’s define some terms.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Keith A. Erekson:
And they’ll give different answers, and then you can kind of probe those answers. And so the specific question you gave, is that a church president couldn’t teach something incorrect? Okay, we have examples in scriptures of that happening, but your asker also kind of raises the ante a little. It’s multiple church presidents for a long period of time. We would go back, then, and say, well, do we have those examples in scripture? And we do have those examples in past scripture as well. There’s another dimension here that I kind of feel in your ask, or in this specific one, which is that church presidents teaching this has caused pain for people. People have suffered because of these kinds of things. You kind of go back and say, so okay, so does not leading the church astray mean that no one will ever suffer anything? And so we can go to stories, and these are often stories that we forget. So think about the story of Nephi getting the brass plates. We often tell this, and we contrast Nephi and Laman and Lemuel. Well, what about Sam? What does Sam get? What’s the outcome to Sam for following the prophet? He believes his dad and says, I’ll go back to Jerusalem. He believes Nephi and goes along. Well, Sam gets beat up, he gets his property stolen, he gets his life threatened, and we go back to Nephi in that case. Nephi’s kind of doing trial and error, right? Like, well, let’s ask him for the plates. Ooh, that didn’t work. Well, let’s try and buy him. Oh, that doesn’t work either. And so that’s a story where we see the prophet not knowing exactly what to do, and God giving him agency to do things, and there being consequences for people who are trusting the Lord, trusting the prophet. Sam walks away with real-life consequence, damage, from that experience. So that’s one thing, to kind of probe what do you, well, what do you think astray really means?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
That question of what does astray mean is an excellent one, Keith. I mean, it took the Israelites forty years to get to the Holy Land. Does that mean Moses led them astray? Not necessarily, right?

Keith A. Erekson:
Yeah. And then the second thing we can do is take this statement, the Lord will never permit me or any man who stands as president of the church to lead you astray, and put it in the context of the whole statement. In Official Declaration 1, this is right in the scriptures—it’s at the end of the declaration, there are some excerpts, because when Wilford Woodruff announced the manifesto, not everybody said, oh, great; they said, wait a minute. We think you’re leading us astray. And so President Woodruff went out and spoke to people, and so where that quote ended that we shared, it keeps going, here’s what’s interesting: “who attempts to lead men astray from the oracles of God and from their duty.” So Wilford Woodruff hasn’t just made a bumper sticker or a meme that says the prophet will never lead people astray.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Keith A. Erekson:
He keeps going, and he says, from what? From the oracles of God and from their duty. Now, oracles, we also now encounter something from history, which is a word we don’t use anymore. I don’t remember the last time I’ve heard “oracles” stated at General Conference. You go back to the 19th century, this word shows up all the time. Joseph Smith uses it in his sermons. We see it in letters. We see it in other sermons. And in 19th century usage, it’s a big word. It refers to the deity who gives wisdom. It refers to the person who receives the wisdom from deity. It refers to the message.

Scott Woodward:
The revelations.

Keith A. Erekson:
The revelation themselves are the oracles. And so that’s a broad aspect here, and then President Woodruff adds, “from their duty.” And so when I read, you know, this excerpt, I think one of the things that President Woodruff is teaching us is that there is a God, He exists, He calls servants, they give messages, I’m bringing you a message, and that message is meant to help you in your duty, in your relationship with God, your covenants, your strength, and so that’s where prophets are working. That’s where God has put them to work. So for me, it’s a mix of those. Seeing that particular quote, and then we have to kind of rewrite the script here away from just the meme version of prophets will never do anything to okay, here’s what prophets get called to do. They’re pointing us to the Savior, but they’re also operating in times and places, and the Lord gives them space to do things.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
So in one sentence here, church presidents for over a century, this good listener asked, taught false doctrine about blacks. You would say that’s not an example of leading the church astray so much as . . . what? Are you saying because this did not actually take church members away from their duty, from their covenants? I’m trying to bring to bear what you just said on this particular question. Is this an example of leading the church astray or no in terms of teaching false doctrine—and specifically, for those who haven’t heard that series, we’re talking about teaching that blacks were somehow less valiant in premortality, or that the curse of Cain was the reason for which they were barred from priesthood and temple ordinances. And so those are the two doctrines that were taught by multiple apostles. So is that not leading astray? So just address that real quick, if you don’t mind.

Keith A. Erekson:
Yeah. So both of those teachings are teachings that the Church disavows.

Scott Woodward:
Totally disavows now.

Keith A. Erekson:
We’ve published in print that we disavow those teachings, and you’re right: Church leaders, many, taught those. So, kind of applying the two tools that we used here, one would be, you know, kind of asking, what does astray mean to the asker? And I can’t fill that one in, but to the part about doing our duty and pointing us to the Savior, even though those things were being taught, there never was a restriction on church membership or baptism, those covenants, remission of sins. So I think if we’re looking at the space where prophets can help all of God’s children draw closer, then that space still exists in the 19th century, in the 20th century, while church leaders are teaching some of these ideas, and so that was probably more than the one sentence you asked for.

Scott Woodward:
It’s a tough question.

Keith A. Erekson:
Yeah, they’re tough. They touch our heart. Lots of dimensions. If we say, I’m going to give you a bumper sticker answer, we’re deluding ourselves, and we’re harming the asker.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
That’s the problem sometimes is people want a one-sentence answer, and if you’re really going to thoroughly answer this in a meaningful, thoughtful way, it takes more than one sentence.

Keith A. Erekson:
And I think we need to be more proactive in saying that, you know? Because we’ll get in meme wars on social media and, you know, somebody will demand, well, if you can’t do this in a sentence, then you’re wrong. And you need to say, no, that’s not the terms of engagement here.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Keith A. Erekson:
Let’s set different terms.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Keith A. Erekson:
The first term of engagement is God’s thoughts are higher than our thoughts, and I don’t know everything. That’s where I’m going to start. And now we’ll explore a little, but the term can’t be, if you don’t give me a bumper sticker, you have no truth.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. We need to learn to embrace complexity and see it as a good thing rather than as a negative thing.

Scott Woodward:
And I can’t help but think that, like, Wilford Woodruff’s statement is in some ways an outlier statement. Prior to him, like, Joseph Smith never taught that. Brigham Young never taught that. John Taylor never taught that. Then he taught it, and it’s been repeated in different ways since his day, but it always seems to come back to him. It’s a one-off statement. You know, you have Elder Anderson saying the true doctrine is taught by all fifteen. You’ve got Elder Bednar and others talking about how when it’s consistently repeated over time, that’s when you can have higher confidence that it’s true, right?

Keith A. Erekson:
Yes.

Scott Woodward:
I guess I’m just curious: Is an alternate way of thinking about this that potentially that was a strong statement made in a particular context to the people in that day who were really struggling with the cessation of plural marriage, which, maybe when we try to pluck it out of that context and apply it to all church history, like, doesn’t actually fit. I think Wilford Woodruff was saying God’s not leading me astray in this thing. I promise the revelation was legit, and he explains it. The Lord told me. The Lord showed me. Multiple times he’s expressing that, and I think in some ways he’s responding to that pressure of, are you sure, President Woodruff, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Is it possible that he overstated? Is it possible that that statement itself maybe is not as universally applicable as sometimes we use it? You know what I’m saying?

Keith A. Erekson:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, and I go back and forth. One thought I was having was that’s not in the scriptural canon. It’s supportive material in the Doctrine and Covenants. It’s not the canonized text.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
At the same time, too, they’ve repeated it a lot.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
But maybe it is a statement that needs a little bit more nuance than we frequently use with it.

Keith A. Erekson:
And I think the repetition is frequently in the realm of meme-like or bumper-sticker-like.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Keith A. Erekson:
We toss it out, and we use it to prove some point, you know? We’re proof texting that rather than trying to understand Wilford Woodruff, and the bigger question, trying to understand how God deals with humans.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. And it’s used to sometimes shut down conversations, right? They’ll just, well, Wilford Woodruff said that the Lord will never permit the prophet to lead us astray, so we don’t need to worry about that. And sometimes people are carrying serious pain.

Keith A. Erekson:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
To just slap that Wilford Woodruff quote is not helpful, but hurtful in some people’s hearts, I’ve noticed. And so we just have to be careful. We have to be tender. Like you said, not use it as a bumper sticker, as a meme, to almost try to shut down conversation.

Keith A. Erekson:
I like what you said there, because not just this quote—in our culture, we frequently look for one definitive answer quote that we can drop the hammer down and end a conversation.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Keith A. Erekson:
If your classroom discussion is getting a little tense, somebody will drop this quote and try and end it, and I think that whole practice is harmful for faith and belief and inquiry and loving each other.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, and the topic of prophetic fallibility itself is somewhat of a, I think, a touchy subject in the hearts of many. I’ve noticed a tendency among some church educators to shy away from sharing any specific instances of when prophets have made mistakes because they think, and they’ve told me so, that doing so might dangerously compromise their students’ confidence in prophets. And yet I know others who feel the opposite: They feel that not discussing prophetic errors can unconsciously feed into the fable of prophetic infallibility and dangerously set their students up for future faith problems when they encounter unquestionable errors committed by prophets. Both sides think it’s dangerous to do the thing that the other side is doing.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
What would you advise on that front? Help us think through this. Is it okay to highlight prophetic error, or should we avoid talking about it?

Keith A. Erekson:
Yeah, when I hear it framed that way, the first thing that screams out to me is that we’ve set up a binary here, a false binary. Either I’m going to teach only that Peter walked on water and had a testimony and was the chief apostle after Jesus’s death, or I’m going to make sure, and everybody knows, that Peter sank in the water and he denied the Savior. And the answer is it’s both. If I’m going to teach the scriptures, which is the charge—you gave the context of religious education. If that’s my charge, then I have to teach both, or I’m—I have chosen, I’ve set myself up as God of the scriptures to decide which scripture passages you need to know. It’s both. And that’s just a really pointless debate.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Keith A. Erekson:
Tell me who Peter was. That’s what I want to know. Tell me what we know about Peter and his experience, and I’m going to learn that Peter had all of those exciting dimensions to his life and testimony and his works.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, excellent.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
On that note of binary thinking, that is a chapter in your book.

Keith A. Erekson:
It is.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
In chapter five you said this: “Beware of histories or politicians or news channels that force you to choose between only two options: myth or reality, profit or fraud, faith or reason, fact or fiction. Such false balances make for seductive clickbait, but they distort the past and the present.” And so, Keith, it seems like we’re coming back to a general theme, which is oversimplification is a major danger that we have, and complexity is a good thing.

Keith A. Erekson:
Yes.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
What tips do you have? How does a person avoid black-and-white thinking, you know, just going along with that memification that’s tended to happen with information in our society?

Keith A. Erekson:
Yeah. I would start by saying that we don’t want to say binaries are bad. That’s a binary, but I’ve just repackaged it.

Scott Woodward:
Good point.

Keith A. Erekson:
And so we do need to see that a binary is a tool. It’s a social tool. It’s a cultural tool. And there are times, situations, where it works. If I’m trying to keep small humans alive, binaries are very effective: Don’t run in the street. Don’t stick your hand in the outlet. Do eat your vegetables. If I’m trying to write computer code—humans have done miraculous things with ones and zeros writing binary code, and so that is fantastic. There are other settings where binaries just make it really difficult. As we grow up, as we encounter how life works, the questions about family and faith and love and community and friendship—binaries don’t work as well in those settings, but if that’s the only tool we bring, we end up having a problem. And then some of the things, you mentioned that quote, like politicians, they exploit binaries. Nobody goes out to vote because, oh, it’s a nice afternoon, you should vote: You stir somebody up. Our candidate is the truth, and if you vote for the other guy, the country’s going to hell, and you really, you draw those polarizing—and you become even more polarized to try and compel to some action you desire, and President Nelson has wisely warned us to avoid this kind of polarization, this kind of conflict.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Keith A. Erekson:
You mentioned doctrine a little bit earlier. We frequently ask, you know, what is doctrine? And we’ll turn to the scriptures and look where Jesus is saying, this is my doctrine, but we always avoid, almost always, the first time in scripture that Jesus says, this is my doctrine, and it’s in 3 Nephi chapter 11, where he will talk about faith and baptism, but the first thing he says is, there are disputations about my teachings. These need to be done away. This is not my doctrine. My doctrine is no contention. And so binaries are a tool that pulls us this way. And we see that in Jesus’s New Testament ministry. So many of the times when people come and try and trick Him, they’re trying to force Him into a binary, and He expands them every time. You know, so they’ll come to Him and say, okay, Jesus, should we pay our taxes or not? And so He says, you know, bring me a coin. What’s there? Give to the government what belongs to the government. Give to God what’s God’s. That’s a both. He gives a both answer, like we were talking about earlier. There’s another time when they come to Him and say, look, here’s a blind man. Who sinned? The man or his parents? Jesus says, neither. This is a fake choice. It’s neither one of those. Let me tell you something different. And so Jesus is modeling for us the awareness and then the strategies to either do both or neither. Or President Oaks taught a great strategy: good, better, best. Am I going to go to heaven or hell? Well, Joseph Smith and Jesus teach, there are more. In my Father’s house there are many mansions. There are more kingdoms. And so we just have to know that our culture is just infiltrated with binaries and binary thinking, we need to be aware of it and push back and say, no, I’m going to make a different choice. Not one of those two that you say are the only possible ones.

Scott Woodward:
Love that. Excellent. Casey, I think it’s time for us to get into our final round of pickleball.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Ooh, mental pickleball.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. Mental pickleball. Or I think we even call it jujitsu and pickleball combined. Pickle-jitsu I think is what we called it in one episode. Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I don’t know what we settled on.

Scott Woodward:
Keith, I apologize for the weirdness in the title here, but listen.

Keith A. Erekson:
So I need to take off my shoes and stay out of the kitchen? Is that the . . .

Scott Woodward:
Exactly.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
If you have one of those headbands to absorb sweat, like, put it on right now.

Scott Woodward:
Put it on.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
We’re going to step out of the court and work things out there.

Scott Woodward:
Lightning round. So what we’re going to do, I just want to throw out a difficult church history issue that is brought to bear on a modern question. I just want to ask you to respond. You talk about a lot of different skills in your book, which have a lot of overlap with what we’ve talked about in this series: things like thinking slowly about complex things, identifying and challenging your assumptions, avoiding either-or thinking, like you mentioned, contextualizing facts, not over-claiming what evidence doesn’t back up, that kind of stuff. And so we’re just going to throw out this issue: it’s a real issue. It’s been raised by several of our listeners in a previous series we did, again, on Blacks and the Priesthood. Some of the most sticky questions I feel like are on that topic, and so we wanted to watch you, you know, kind of think through this and just kind of air your thoughts here. So here it is: So some people see parallels between the church’s past restrictive policy toward blacks in the church and the church’s current restrictive policy toward gays in the church, specifically prohibiting gay temple marriage. If church leaders got it wrong about race for so many years, the thinking goes, what’s to say they’re not currently getting gay marriage wrong? Two of our listeners, for example, expressed it like this: Here’s Michael from Salt Lake City. He said, “This history is often used by people in and out of the church to label current church positions on the doctrine of the family, gender, and marriage as changeable, and that these ‘policies’ will change when church leaders without old-fashioned prejudices come to power, specifically that the church will allow members in same-sex marriages to have temple blessings eventually. How would you respond to these ideas? What is similar and what is different about the priesthood ban and the church position on the family?” I think Michael asked the question perfectly there. Let me just add one more with Julie from Lodi, California. Julie said, “I understand Brigham Young was a man of his times just as our prophets today. How can I know for myself that the ban against gay temple marriage is not a similar situation as the priesthood and temple ban?” She says, “I just want to know that my thinking is proper on this subject.” So these are both asking about good thinking on this issue. Keith, what would you say in response to Michael and Julie and so many others who’ve asked a variety of this question?

Keith A. Erekson:
Yeah. This question is doing two things, as I hear it and think about it. One is it’s drawing a parallel or an analogy between two events in two different historical time periods.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Keith A. Erekson:
And the second thing it’s doing is, on the basis of that analogy that they’ve drawn, it’s trying to predict the future. Both of those are the actions that are happening in this question.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Keith A. Erekson:
I’ll start with the latter one and just acknowledge that as someone who’s trained in history and spent my time thinking there, we’re trying so hard to understand the past that I really have no idea about the future, and so I’m really the wrong person to ask about future. One of the things we do learn in the study of history, though, is no matter what people say, history doesn’t repeat itself. There’s, like, zero predictive value of looking at things in history and across the board, right? You look at all of the stock market trends, and they’re all going until something happens that you didn’t anticipate because you didn’t anticipate it. Weather forecasters, you know, they’ve got models for hurricanes and now the models don’t work because ocean temperatures are higher, then—and all their models—and so predicting based on history is a challenge that I don’t really have much to offer.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Keith A. Erekson:
To the analogy part, there are important things that we should say here, and chapter 8 in Real vs. Rumor talks about analogies. There is a quick version here: The single biggest error that people make in analogies is they don’t think about the categories of the comparison. So what happens is analogies end up, in popular use, being really superficial. If we take this one, there’s really two things in common: They don’t like either one. They don’t like the past priesthood restriction, and they don’t like the current position about LGBTQ.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Keith A. Erekson:
And so then they look at the priesthood one and say, it changed, and then they say, therefore, I want the other one to change or predict it to change. And that’s as deep as the analysis goes, and it’s akin to saying, American football and the world football, or what Americans call soccer, are the same because they both use a ball, and they’re played on a field. That is a valid comparison. I gave you two facts, and yeah, I could go check those facts. Yes, both are played with a ball. Oh, yes, both are played on a field. They’re not played on a court. They’re not played in water. And so I have my two facts, and I made this analogy, therefore I’ve given you the true truth about football and soccer. Well, no, right?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Keith A. Erekson:
Because we know those sports. We look at those, and we say, no, that doesn’t work. And so in that case we’re saying, I need better categories of comparison. The categories can’t be, what tool does it use and where does it play? I need more specific categories. What are the rules? How does it work? What is the shape of the ball? Does the weight of the ball matter? Does the size of the field? What body parts can be used? And so for something like this, we’re going to go back to where we were. I don’t really have a bumper sticker answer for you, but I can say if we look at these two cases—and people will also do LGBTQ aligned with plural marriage. They’ll try and draw a parallel there with the end of plural marriage, a change in policy, but each of these, as you drill down and say, okay, what do I want to compare, they end up being very different. So if we look at here, the priesthood restriction, we have a very specific moment of announcement, 1852. Compared to LGBTQ, this is one that was in kind of in the back of consciousness, and there isn’t a kind of announcement or declaration.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Keith A. Erekson:
We go to the priesthood restriction, even at the time of the announcement, Brigham Young says, there will be a time when this will change, and Blacks will have all that Whites have, and more. There’s not a parallel—

Scott Woodward:
No.

Keith A. Erekson:
—to that in the space of talking about LGBTQ questions, and so the analogy starts to break down, but another thing that bad analogies do is they hide things that we don’t think to look up, that get lost in the parallel. And so on something like LGBTQ policy, I think it’s really significant to point out that there have been substantial changes in the way the church has talked about this question and church leaders in the past forty years. You know, we’ve gone from saying, this is a choice, a sinful choice, to today you open the general handbook, and it says the church takes no position on the origin of homosexual, same sex—they’ll use different words.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Keith A. Erekson:
So bad analogies cause lots of harm, and I think this is a bad analogy, and it’s not one that’s useful for predicting something in the future.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Keith A. Erekson:
None of this is of any value at predicting the future. You can make a whole long list of the ways that this is a bad analogy, but that’s totally irrelevant to what happens in the future. And that’s another error, to think that I either can or can’t make an analogy, and if I can, then it will change, and if I can’t, then it won’t. We need to dissociate the idea that I’m going to make an analogy and it will predict what will happen next year and instead look at what’s happening right now, and the Church is being very involved in advocating for civil rights.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Keith A. Erekson:
Making donations, being a part of efforts in support of suicide prevention, you know? And so these kinds of things get lost when we say, I’m making this historical analogy. This is when we say, come back to the present and see what we’re doing.

Scott Woodward:
No predictive power whatsoever with analogies good or bad is what I’m hearing you say.

Keith A. Erekson:
Yes.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
It feels like these historical analogies also have to be looked at to the point to where they’re useful. If you’re using it to understand a person’s feelings and to empathize, then it’s useful, but if we use it to try and predict what’s going to happen next, that’s just been shown time and time again to not necessarily be the best way to figure things out.

Scott Woodward:
That’s a really important point.

Keith A. Erekson:
Yeah, so important.

Scott Woodward:
Well, great. Pickleball session ended. Unless, Casey, anything else you want to throw out there on the court? Are we feeling good about that?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
No, I think Keith whooped us at mental pickleball. Pickle-jitsu.

Keith A. Erekson:
Well, don’t even tell me the score, because the pickleball scores never make sense.

Scott Woodward:
It’s not the score that counts.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, it’s not the sc—everybody had a good time. I’m going to be, like, the understanding dad. We had fun. That’s the important thing. The score doesn’t matter, kids.

Scott Woodward:
Whatever.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
But I do want to get back to something that does matter, Keith, and just in our final moments with you ask a question that we ask of a lot of our guests, which is just this: You’re a thorough student of the history of the church. You’ve looked at a lot of things. You’ve brought all these skills as a historian to the table. What makes you a believer in the Restoration?

Keith A. Erekson:
Yeah. You know, I think for me, sometimes people will ask me this question in this way, you know: Is there anything you could learn about church history that would shake you and make you leave? And when I was a history professor in Texas, nobody ever asked me that question about American history or anything else, and then I came to work for the church. People ask me this question all the time, and honestly, the question didn’t make sense to me at first. I couldn’t figure out what people were asking, and it’s probably because of the way that my life has unfolded. My relationship with God, my testimony, began when I was young, began at, you know, a time when I was sick and had a priesthood blessing and was healed. It happened when I was 12, and my family finished reading the Book of Mormon, and my dad said, you know, you all have to go and ask God for yourselves, and I did, and I had an experience that, in later reflection, I came to the same conclusion that Joseph Smith did about his, that God knew me, and that was real, and that thing happened, and I knew it happened, and God knew it happened. That’s where my experience of God and testimony and doing the Lord’s work has come. My undergrad was not in history. I started studying history as a master’s student. And so for me, in my personal life, they’ve always just been in different spaces, and I think that’s what I realized. That’s why it felt so weird for me. Church history never gave me a testimony, so why would church history remove my testimony? My testimony is about my relationship with God. Our culture of testimony bearing is one where we stand up and we list things we know as if there are facts. I know this, I know this. We teach little kids, you know, five fingers on my hand, here are the five things to bear your testimony of. Well, for me, my testimony is really about—it’s experiences. It’s experiences with God. It’s experiences with the Spirit. It’s experiences with forgiveness, both seeking and extending. It’s experiences with trying to be like Jesus and to feel blessed and enabled and empowered and guided. And those kinds of experiences, you know, happen every day. In my family, for Family Home Evening, one of the things we do, we have a “living the gospel” moment. We kind of rotate around everyone, and the parameters are you have to share an experience from the past seven days in which you were living the gospel and you felt God’s hand or blessing or touch. And so—and it’s something that’s grown out of me kind of recoiling when people will speak up in elders quorum and they’ll say, like, well, when I was on my mission, I had this experience, and I’m thinking, my goodness. That was forty years ago. Does God not do anything with you anymore? And so you asked the question, why am I still a believer? Well, it’s because I still have interactions with the divine that bless my life and my family, and they guide me in my work experience, and I know that God knows those things, and I’m grateful for them.

Scott Woodward:
Well, thank you so much, Keith. It’s been wonderful to have you on, and we appreciate your time, and we highly recommend your book Real vs. Rumor to all of our listeners. Such a great, thoughtful work on how to do good thinking.

Keith A. Erekson:
Oh, thank you for that kind recommendation.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Thanks, Keith, for all the good work you do. I know you also frequently speak to groups, young adults especially. Keep doing what you’re doing.

Keith A. Erekson:
Thank you.

Scott Woodward:
God bless. We’ll see ya. Thank you for listening to this episode of Church History Matters. For more of Dr. Keith Erekson’s good thinking, we highly recommend you check out his book, Real vs. Rumor: How to Dispel Latter-day Myths. And we are excited to announce that next week, on our last episode of this series, we will be joined by another great thinker: Dr. Anthony Sweat, a professor of Church History and Doctrine at Brigham Young University. Casey and I will interview Dr. Sweat about his phenomenal book about truth seeking, entitled Seekers Wanted: The Skills You Need for the Faith You Want. We very much look forward to sharing this interview with you. If you’re enjoying Church History Matters, we’d appreciate it if you could take a moment to subscribe, rate, review, and comment on the podcast. That makes us easier to find. Today’s episode was produced by Scott Woodward and edited by Nick Galieti and Scott Woodward, with show notes and transcript by Gabe Davis. Church History Matters is a podcast of Scripture Central, a nonprofit which exists to help build enduring faith in Jesus Christ by making Latter-day Saint scripture and church history accessible, comprehensible, and defensible to people everywhere. For more resources to enhance your gospel study, go to scripturecentral.org, where everything is available for free because of the generous donations of people like you. And while we try very hard to be historically and doctrinally accurate in what we say on this podcast, please remember that all views expressed in this and every episode are our views alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Scripture Central or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Thank you so much for being a part of this with us.