The most trustworthy histories come from those who love their subject, say scholars behind ‘Saints’

In America’s ascendent age of grievance, it’s become common for journalists, commentators and even some scholars to assert that unless you’re willing to deeply critique an individual or institution, you’re not equipped to pursue the “full truth” of a matter. Those who happen to care deeply about the same subject, the thinking goes, can’t be trusted to share the reality of what’s taking place.
Historian Jed Woodworth disagrees. “There’s a problem with saying that if you’re deeply invested in something, that somehow you have less ability to tell the truth,” he tells Deseret News.
Take gardening, for example. “If you were to try and convince me of the merits of gardening and I didn’t believe in it, would you want to go to someone who dislikes gardening or detests gardening, or hasn’t put in the time into gardening?”
“Or would you want to go to someone who reads gardening books on their vacations — someone who’s so into gardening and loves it so much they want every little detail to be told well as they show you the beauties of gardening?”
Woodworth matches that metaphoric description fairly well, having given the last 10 years of his professional life to help support the team behind a multi-volume history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recently completed — the last 7 years as its managing historian.
“Too often our members think that if they go to someone who dislikes the church,” he adds, “that somehow those people are more invested in the truth than the people who love the church and want to see it prospering.”
Those seeking the truth about anything will learn more from people who are “willing to give their life for that thing,” Woodworth argues, and who consequently “take great care” in their work to represent the subject.
“It’s really important for people to understand that every detail in Saints is based on source material,” Lisa Olsen Tait tells Deseret News, a general editor for Saints and specialist in women’s history at the Church History Department. “If we say someone smiled, they smiled in the sources. If we say it was raining, that’s because the source tells us that. If we say someone felt a certain way, it’s because they said so in the source that we have.”
“If we do not have a source that tells us what it was like to be there, what something looked like, what something sounded like or what something felt like, we can’t make that detail up,” adds Scott Hales, a historian and literary editor for the project — describing on the Church News podcast their team’s commitment for the writing to be “sourced to specific documents which we make available to the reader.”
Hales characterized this commitment to sources as a “check” on the impulse as a writer to “dive in with all your creative powers” in wanting to bring to life the most engaging stories. Among other things, their team was motivated by the questions: “What are the best stories to tell that will represent this era adequately?” and “does this story tell some kind of wider change over time in the church?”
Historian Matthew J. Grow, managing director of the Church History Department, describes one of the main goals of the project as ensuring the history was “impeccable, meticulously researched and totally accurate.”
Remarkably, more than a thousand reviewers, translators, editors, historians and writers contributed to the work over the past decade and a half. “I don’t think that we could count the number of person hours that have gone into this project,” says Elder Hugo E. Martinez, a General Authority Seventy who serves as assistant executive director of the Church History Department.
Woodworth highlights eight exhaustive stages of peer review — including from subject matter experts, international readers and young adults, the editorial team and Church Historian, and several senior leaders. That entails “upwards of 80 reviewers” for the entire volume, and another 100 readers for designated parts, generating a flurry of comments to incorporate.
“It’s just painstakingly reference-edited,” Woodworth summarizes, “meaning we care a lot about it. We want to get it right.” By way of comparison, he adds, “my sense is that if we were to find people who didn’t like the church, they wouldn’t be nearly so careful if they were writing about the church.”
Tait cautions against popular historical interpretations “that claim too much.” Even with so many years of reviewing primary sources, she hopes that readers will notice the distinctive way Saints is written. “We’re very careful. We’re very cautious.”
“The events of the past are gone,” this editor says, and “we only have a certain amount of source material information that we can recover from things that happened in the past.”
That means history is always going to require our best interpretations from the present, Tait explains. “That does not mean it’s not trustworthy,” she says, only that we need to be humble. This explains why historical materials being published by the church are “very measured in what we claim to know and be certain about with things that happened in the past.” She tells Deseret News that she wishes people would see more clearly how that compares with the approach often taken on YouTube and other online places “where it is very polemical, antagonistic, and makes very strong claims.”
“Doing a history is less about proving things than it is about presenting the facts, presenting the sources, and information that we have,” Tait says, while acknowledging, “That’s always going to be shaped by the perspective and the intention of the person who writes the history.”
“History is not the past but a map of the past, drawn from a particular point of view, to be useful to the modern traveler,” taught Henry Glassie, renowned historian from the Indiana University Bloomington.
Readers may well ask, what uses and purposes is a particular historian trying to advance? One historical textbook suggests students openly explore: “What events and developments does the author emphasize? Does he or she see some as more important than others? What is the author’s attitude toward these developments and the historical actors to whom he or she refers? Is the author impressed? Scornful? Neutral? Disappointed?”
In Saints, the team has worked hard to “present the source material as carefully and accurately as possible,” Tait says, while adding, “we’ve certainly shaped the stories in a way that people with different agendas would not do.”
“Is there something sacred about this story?” was one key criteria for story selection, says Woodworth — describing how the team looked for accounts of “people who are striving to overcome the natural man” and who could demonstrate the scriptural process of “yielding to the enticings of the Holy Spirit and becoming a (Latter-day) Saint.”
“What is that like to be fallen and then to find the Savior and become one with him?” Rather than just showing everything, Woodworth says, “the history somehow has to capture our kind of small plates mentality” — prioritizing experiences ”worthy of say, the small plates of Nephi” (wherein the ancient prophet desired “room that I may write of the things of God”).
Tait acknowledges that yes, “the church is going to tell a positive history about itself, and why shouldn’t it?” Some would write this off as positive “messaging,” she says, “but you can also say that it’s just plain true that we have a really amazing history and there are a lot of beautiful, positive, powerful things in our history.”
“The claims, the stories, the narratives that we tell, are true. They’re just true. They’re based on the information, and the sources that we do have.”
But, again, some might wonder: Is it really okay for a historian to prioritize stories and events that build faith in the Savior? “I think that those kinds of questions come from a little bit of a misunderstanding of what history is and how history is done,” Tait says.
Compared to a prior era when scholars aspired to be “strictly objective,” most academics today “understand that bias is going to be baked into whatever you’re doing,” Woodworth says. “The question is not, will you have bias, but will you be fair? Can you be transparent about your bias, or can you be fair to the range of experiences Latter-day Saints have?”
“We’re certainly aspiring to fairness,” he adds — and “as historians, we are accountable to the standards, and the methods of the historical craft and profession. There are things that you do and don’t do as a historian, when you’re following those practices.”
“Different people can look at different sources and interpret them in different ways,” Tait affirms. “But for someone to claim ‘I’m the only one who’s telling you the truth. I’m the only one who knows what this means,’ that’s when you should be skeptical — especially when the agenda is explicitly to tear down, to undercut, to reduce trust. That’s every bit as much of an agenda as building faith.”
“We’re in a place where people are also very cynical about history,” Tait reflects. Especially when that history is connected to an institution with a strong mission, she says, it’s easy for people to presume that “there’s this inherent desire to sanitize and cover up and withhold,” so therefore, “you can’t trust it.”
Yet “why should you trust someone who has an agenda to tear something down?” she adds. “Why should that be any more inherently trustworthy than someone creating a history that has the intention to build up and to present a certain story?”