Joseph the Believer

How to Think About LDS History

The LDS Church's truth claims are in many cases inextricably tied to the occurrence of historical events. However, the way history is written and recorded leaves us with a lot less guidance and a lot less understanding of what "really happened" than we think we have. As a result, we often think we know the "answers" when in fact almost everything we think we know is written by a secondhand witness that faces memory problems, doesn't have access to anyone's interior thoughts, is liable to mistake rumor for fact, and may not even have become aware of many important facts in the first place. As if that weren't enough, we don't even know what we don't know. That is, we can be quite sure there mountains of facts and evidence about the life of Joseph Smith or the history of the LDS faith that for whatever reason never got recorded or about which we simply have never become aware. We can be certain as well that at least some of them, our of so many, would be significant enough to change some or all of our conclusions and perceptions. This means we should be slow to draw conclusions from narrative histories, biographies, and academic papers, which can only be as good as the sources they are based on, and further contain their own sets of historical biases. The alternative we hope to offer on Shattering Triangles will be a history written from, we hope, Joseph Smith's own perspective. It tries to ignore all of the noise and issues in the margins and just narrate his life as he evidently believed it to be shaped. We expect the first video in this new series to be ready for release in about a month, with additional videos being released each month going forward. Each video will cover a different topic, in what we hope is an interesting and useful format, with a faithful, inside perspective on Joseph Smith.