Liberating Ourselves from the Obsession with Historicity

A few years ago, I was sitting in a café in Cowley, England with a friend. He was then a Ph.D. student at Oxford studying Christian apologetics. My friend is a sincere, thoughtful person and, as was common between us, we were chatting about religion. He was going through what a former mentor of mine would have called a “period of discernment”: he was questioning his faith. He had spent more time researching the history of his tradition during his studies and much of what he had found was unsettling for him. He was a preacher in his local Pentecostal congregation and had a wonderful young child with his wife who was very devout to their denomination, to the extent that she became fearful and upset any time he brought up his struggles with her. Needless to say, he was going through a very difficult moment in his life. He felt like he was short on good options. So, I took what time I could to listen and chat with him so that he could at least feel heard.

I am sure that many of us reading about my friend’s situation feel a sense of instant camaraderie with him, at least to some extent. The details may not line up perfectly, but in a broad sense, many of us feel as if we’ve been in exactly the same place: we remember the pain of discovering information that contradicts the stories we heard as children and the feeling of dirtiness that comes with holding onto stories that we assume no one else knows. These stories feel like black-market contraband. The shock that stems from them transforms into slow-roasting angst and distrust in the words of authorities that we once found comfort in. Perhaps once or twice we have tried to confide in someone who reacts with fear.

“What kind of horrible sources have you been reading?” they might ask.

“Uh, Wikipedia,” we respond.

“I don’t want to hear any more about this,” they respond, looking around as if we have just said something horribly crude and offensive in public.

So the angst sinks in and sits, quietly brewing. In order to let out what is so desperate to escape, we find outlets for other kinds of dissent: behavioral, political, social. We’re up-set with parents, leaders, and ward members. “If only they knew what I knew,” we think. There was one particular point made in my conversation with my friend that can shed some light on this all-too-common experience. My hope is that, by exploring the implications of this one point, we can let go of the assumptions that cause the pain described above. At some point, my friend casually brought up a line of anecdotal reasoning that I have heard numerous times in conversations with educated Christians. He said it assuming that I had heard it before as if it was a starting point where we could agree so that we could move on together and better see his plight. His anecdote paraphrased went something like: “If someone in some hypothetical world was to discover the physical bones of Jesus and present them to me with irrefutable evidence that they were his, I would renounce my faith then and there.”

The underlying purpose of his statement was not an archaeological comment on the bones of Jesus Christ. It was an attempt to express a genuine commitment to objective truth. In different words, my friend was stating that if the core historical claims of the Christian faith were proved false, he would immediately renounce the faith because of his primary commitment to truth rather than the comforts of his lifestyle. He brought this point up because he felt that he was then in precisely that position: the foundational stories of his religion did not happen as they were recited to him, so he had no choice but to abandon everything. I’m sure many of us have felt this same way about our LDS faith.

Here is where my friend and I finally disagreed. I believe that the assumptions of this statement, and therefore the behavior of the hypothetical characters discussed so far, are fundamentally incorrect. Here is an altogether separate paradigm of thought that might be liberating to hear: you can, in fact, be religious without believing that the stories a religion tells are literally true. Abandoning this obsession with equating truth to historicity is a pathway to a higher form of religiosity. Let me attempt to explain why. As children, we develop simple conceptions of what truth is. Our parents tell us there is a Santa Claus. We believe there is literally a man in a red suit making our presents every December in the North Pole. One day, we no longer believe this. The assumption is that we let go of these childish projections because our grasp on truth has matured. In reality, our conception of truth has not matured at all. At one point, we believed something existed. At another, we did not. The same assumption carries forward: truth is physical, literal, material. Something either happened or it did not. It is either physically true or physically false. Most people conceive truth this way at six years old and hold onto it fiercely until they are laid into the grave.

As children, our parents tell us there is a God. We see pictures of an old man on a golden throne living somewhere in space and assume that these depictions accurately represent God. We grow up with paintings of Joseph Smith triumphantly lifting a golden book out of the ground and then reading off a literal translation. We naturally assume that this is what actually happened. It’s easy to see how none of these conceptions of religious truth are much different than our childhood belief in Santa Claus.

Maybe we hold onto the stories of God and the translation of the Book of Mormon quite a bit longer because so much more is at stake. Despite this, the underlying way in which we approach them is the same. For many, the time eventually comes when the paradoxes for these also become too much to ignore. The possibility that these stories literally occurred in the way we learned them becomes too incredulous to swallow. Naturally, our assumption about truth compels us to make what we see to be a moral choice. We reason that there cannot be a physical being living somewhere out there named God. Joseph Smith could not have translated a golden book that he found buried on a hill. There, we must let go of our faith. It seems to be the only way.

By reducing our reality to a binary true and false, we also reduce the essence of religion to the historicity of its stories. We assume that if there is no physical God, or Jesus’ bones did not float into Heaven, or if there was no Nephite people or golden record, then religion as a whole is invalid. As is true for my friend’s anecdote, the assumption is that religion is merely a collection of historical claims. This assumption is not only incorrect but enormously dangerous for both the believer and the skeptic. By holding onto it, we focus our energy on something that is ultimately tangential to the religious experience. We have missed the point.

One might wonder what this assumption about truth generates in a community of believers. At its best, endless resources are spent in an attempt to validate it: archaeological digs searching for Nephite cities or a library of genetic research attempting to un-explain a field of findings on Native American origins. At its worst, this effort is a vehement suppression of in-formation and honest truth-seeking that is based on fear. The fear is that if the stories I was told as a child are not literally true, then the meaning I find in my religion is illusory and the purpose of my life a mere delusion. Although these good people mean well, they will fight tooth and nail to contradict the illusory nature of religion, no matter how many people end up as casualties.

For a skeptic, the assumption about truth holds no water, either. Upon discovering contradictory information that puts the physical narrative of any given story under question, faith entirely collapses. It is assumed that there is no way to both live a faithful life and recognize that it does not hold up to the standards of Western scientific positivism. The origin of Western atheism is found in this skepticism.

One by one, empirical methods have made the arguments for an omnipotent being living in the Heavens practically impossible. Centuries of ethics, mystical experiences, and sacred spaces around the planet become nothing more than silly fairy tales. Be-cause a group of European men developed a new form of falsifiable reasoning during the Enlightenment, everyone from Siddhartha Gautama to your mother has been kidding themselves for their entire lives. So began a new self-assured iconoclasm to destroy the opium of the masses.

But what if there was another way? What if we instead embraced the ineffable under-currents of religious truth? What if we opened our institutions and cultures to embrace the paradoxes that come with our stories? Imagine a religious world freed from both the dogmatic shackles of theocratic storytelling as well as the pretentious fetters of secular exceptionalism. Imagine a world where believers of all kinds and all ages were permitted to truly experience the sacred through rituals, teachings, alms, and stories without chaining themselves to a material conception of truth. What if we moved on from simplistic debates about the historicity of our stories and came to the conclusion that the heart of religion is something enormously more profound? What if we gave our attention to the numinous experiences that have inspired human culture for millennia, whatever the associated stories were? What if we opened the way for a new step in our conception of faith?

Opening ourselves to the possibility of a faith that is not rooted in the historicity of stories can bring healing, openness, and new conceptions of religiosity. Many of us would be surprised to learn that legions of believers from a variety of traditions have already entered this realm. In fact, it is not just possible to be a believing person that does not believe that the stories we tell are literally true, but it can even be a higher way of belief. This does not mean rejecting the stories entirely, but entails seeing a light within their symbology that is more profound than the stories themselves.

It was no coincidence that Jesus taught in parables about the “Kingdom of God”. He was not hoping that his followers would pick apart the details of the story to prove that they actually happened. He was hoping that a select few would have the “ears to hear” the deeper meaning behind the material symbols: as he called it, “the Kingdom within”. We lose the purpose of religion by focusing on whether or not religious stories actually happened. It is naïve to entirely write off the Hindu religion because we do not believe that the story of the Bhagavad Gita actually happened. A great mistake is made when we assume that the story is the religion itself when in reality the stories are pathways towards a core that makes up the essence of religion. To mistake the means for the ends is both a great tragedy and an all too common one. By so doing, skeptics build self-destructive angst and believers build harsh defensiveness. Neither of these is necessary for the preservation of truth.

The obsession with historicity is merely a byproduct of Western post-Enlightenment thought that has damaged our capacity for true faith: not one based on believing some-thing happened as it was told, but a capacity to see truth beneath the material and find meaning in it. Embracing the latter will lead us to greater peace and a wider capacity for compassion to ourselves and others. We gain the clarity of mind to let go of the illusion that information is contraband and the conceit that we are holding on to something important that others do not know. We enjoy stories without undue concern for the details of their retellings. We recognize that they are being retold by imperfect people and can focus on their higher power to influence the human spirit.

I am not saying that we should take these ideas into Primary to liberate our toddlers. There is nothing wrong with or inferior about an LDS child’s conception of truth, just as there is nothing wrong with a devout, pious adult who does not believe that there was an actual Nephite civilization. In fact, there would seem to be more similarities between these two groups than one might initially assume.

I am not advocating for a certain style of religious praxis. I am not engaging in apologetics or polemics. I am not saying that letting go of material interpretations of religious narratives will allow all to be fully active members of any given tradition. For some, full engagement with the Church will be the healthiest route for a spiritually nourishing life. For others, a range of different levels of activity or non-activity with the Church is better. For even others, no interaction whatsoever is the better way. The important thing is that we allow ourselves and others this breadth without judgment or resentment of their way of life and without making assumptions about their relationship with truth.

Any attempts to reign in truth and subordinate it, institutionally or otherwise, will fail. As Levinas and Plato would put it, truth is something that exists “beyond being”. It is not subject to the intellectual or religious frameworks of our creation. No institution nor mode of interpretation can claim exceptional access to it. Historical analysis is import-ant but cannot make up the foundation of the religious experience. An obsession with historicity damages the sacred realm of higher truth. The experience of the transcendent is at the core of why we are religious. A literal concern for stories does not allow room for the beauty of paradox, in which transcendence is ultimately found. Only by being at peace with the complexities of religious storytelling can one take the next step towards the pursuit of religious truth. We live collectively in its pursuit. It would do us well to ignore the temptation to enforce our boundaries upon it.