The accomplished Mormon historian Richard Bushman writes in "The Social Dimension of Rationality" (Bushman 1996) that his religious belief in angels and the Book of Mormon often earns him amused or surprised looks from academic colleagues. It's certainly true that when we think of a stereotypical professor in his ivory tower, we don't imagine him believing in angels. In a country as religious as America though, we shouldn't be surprised to find that many professors are religious, even Christian. Bushman is one of those, and in this essay he explains how a well-respected academic like himself can maintain his faith in the remarkable claims of Mormonism.

The justification of his beliefs Bushman lays out is not unusual. His ideas reflect the statement made by another Mormon scholar:

Latter-day Saints also use pragmatic and empiricological methods as legitimate means of gaining knowledge. They believe God expects them to use all forms of knowledge, including the revelatory and the scientific. (Paul 1992)

Dr. Bushman puts it another way:

The cultural position of Mormon belief, then, is strangely anomalous. For me it grows out of family culture, a thousand personal associations, and deep human needs. At the same time, it is girded up with forceful (though never unassailable) rational arguments based on conventional scholarly methods and the rules of rational discourse.

In other words, his belief is based on religious faith as well as reason. He refers to the academic credentials and voluminous writings of FARMS apologists, Hugh Nibley, and other Mormon scholars to establish that there is a substantial body of work which provides those rational arguments that complement his faith. He also argues that all of us have a non-rational aspect to our beliefs. Bushman is correct in saying "Probably my colleagues have peculiar notions of their own that they would not want to defend before a panel of academic critics." We all possess worldviews that are a mix of rational understanding, our culture, and core beliefs that we cannot rationally justify.

Bushman's argument for his belief becomes confusing after this point. He discusses the postmodern critique of science and scholarship, but insists that he is "loath to go all the way with postmodernist thinkers. We can all think of utterly biased and self-serving scholarship that we are sure would not hold up under scrutiny..." To use the example of philosopher Philip Kitcher, most people will trust an academic scientist over one working for a tobacco company when it comes to determining whether smoking causes cancer. There is such a thing as objectivity, even if it is not what we reflexively think it is. (Kitcher 2001 pg. 29-41) Yet Bushman ultimately does in fact go "all the way" with postmodernists, by insisting that the truth of Mormon claims cannot be verified or denied by scholarship. "But is this Mormon truth real?" he asks:

We cannot help asking, Is it anything more than a hopeful fabrication? That question comes from the ghost of the Enlightenment, the ghost that tells us we can escape our subjectivity and find truth above human frailty, a truth that all reasonable people will be forced to accept. But it is a ghost that speaks to us; the hope of objective truth has been slain. No one is capable of finding that dreamed-of reality by scholarly methods. Objectivity is the claim of people who think they are gods now, not of persons worshipping God and striving to be like him...

Mormon scholars like Bushman try to have it both ways -- they claim that there are "shelves of scholarship in support of the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith's story," and in the next breath they insist that scholarship can say nothing about the truth of Mormon historical claims. Bushman admits in the end that it is the "goodness in the God of the Mormon scriptures" that compels him to believe. If this is really the case, then he can't seriously claim that his religious belief depends even in part on rational arguments; they have become irrelevant except to "keep up our connection with the academic establishments."

I once believed what Dr. Bushman says he believes. My basis for accepting Mormon claims was, like his, split between elements of reason and revelation or faith -- spiritual experiences, "family culture," and "deep human needs." I stopped believing those claims, but not because I could no longer believe in angels, visions or miracles. Dr. Bushman implies in his essay that if his colleagues could get past their biases against angels, they would find the work of FARMS apologists convincing. I disagree -- I have no bias against angels or miracles; what I really cannot believe anymore are the rational arguments for the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith's history.

Bushman himself clearly defined this issue in his seminal work on the early ministry of Joseph Smith. He wrote:

[The] stories of sacred occurrences [such as the First Vision, delivery of the Gold Plates and the restoration of the priesthood] formed the substance of Mormon belief as early as 1830. What distinguished Mormonism was not so much the Gospel Mormons taught, which in many respects resembled other Christians' teachings, but what they believed had happened -- to Joseph Smith, to Book of Mormon characters, and to Moses and Enoch... The core of Mormon belief was a conviction about actual events. The test of faith was not adherence to a certain confession of faith but belief that Christ was resurrected, that Joseph Smith saw God, that the Book of Mormon was true history, and that Peter, James, and John restored the apostleship. Mormonism was history, not philosophy. (Bushman 1984, italics mine)

Belief in Mormonism requires a belief that certain events actually took place. Bushman asks "But is this Mormon truth real?" I am convinced that the clear answer is accessible to scholarship, and that this answer is no. It is for this reason that I no longer believe in Mormonism.

Like Bushman, I once thought that the prolific writings of highly educated Mormon apologists solidly established the historical claims that were important to the rational part of my belief. In his essay, Bushman claims that these apologists "abide by all the canons of rational discourse." This is simply not true. For example, Hugh Nibley has been scathingly critiqued for his methods, even by other Mormons:

Missionaries and seminary students are trained to proof-text, gathering only those scriptural verses that appear to support a particular doctrine, without regard to the context of the quotes. But although he possesses more than enough sophistication and analytical ability to rise above such techniques, it seems that Nibley's standard methodology with virtually all his sources, scriptural or not, is proof-texting. His glib freedom in wrenching hitherto unimagined insights and novel connections from ancient documents makes more methodical scholars cringe, including many who are equally devoted to Mormonism. (Keith Norman, Sunstone 11, no. 2 [March 1987]: 34)

In most of the articles Nibley shows a tendency to gather sources from a variety of cultures all over the ancient world, lump them all together, and then pick and choose the bits and pieces he wants. By selectively including what suits his presuppositions and ignoring what does not, he is able to manufacture an ancient system of religion that is remarkably similar in many ways to our own--precisely what he sets out to demonstrate in the first place. (Kent Jackson in BYU Studies, vol. 28 no. 4 p. 114-118, 1988)

Mormon apologists are like many anti-evolution writers, especially ones that espouse "Intelligent Design" Creationism. These people have graduate degrees from top programs and academic appointments at solid universities. And yet their arguments are never persuasive to someone outside of their religious faith, especially other scholars in their field. FARMS writers are the same; as Bushman says, "This scholarship is not generally acknowledged outside of Mormon circles." Mormons and Creationists both believe this is due to an academic bias against religion.

If Creationists had serious evidence for flaws in the theory of evolution, they should be able to present them divorced from religious beliefs and publish them in a professional journal. After all, evolutionary biologists frequently publish such critiques. (The critiques are then quickly taken up and quoted out of context by Creationists.) Similarly, FARMS writers would easily find an outlet to publish any evidence they had for Semitic elements in Native American cultures or history; this could be done without any reference to the Book of Mormon. If these religiously faithful writers had honest-to-god, serious, scholarly evidence for their claims that they could publish without reference to religious beliefs or authority, outside scholars would listen. Yet neither group of writers has managed to do this, and ultimately it is because they do not "abide by all the canons of rational discourse."

Bushman himself provides an example of how believers hold their scholarship on religious claims to lower academic standards. In his biography of Joseph Smith (Bushman 1984), he discusses the literal conferral of the Melchizedek priesthood by the angels Peter, James, and John. He treats it as a real, historical event, and if that were all there was to the issue, I would say that this miracle is beyond the reach of scholarship. Yet Bushman completely ignores information which strongly suggests that this story of Peter, James, and John was written into history years after it was supposed to have taken place. There is not a single document that mentions this event before 1834, 4-5 years after the ordination supposedly occurred, as well as after Joseph began ordaining others as Elders. This is in spite of the fact that Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery had both written of other early miraculous events; Peter, James and John are conspicuously absent from these accounts. We only start seeing this angelic trio mentioned after Joseph sustained serious challenges to his leadership of the church.

Revelations were rewritten to reflect this new history. Today's D&C 27, which in our published scriptures is dated 1830, mentions Peter, James, and John:

Behold, this is wisdom in me; wherefore, marvel not, for the hour cometh that I will drink of the fruit of the vine with you on the earth, and with Moroni, whom I have sent unto you to reveal the Book of Mormon...And also with Peter, and James, and John, whom I have sent unto you, by whom I have ordained you and confirmed you to be apostles...and bear the keys of your ministry and of the same things which I revealed unto them...Wherefore, lift up your hearts and rejoice, and gird up your loins, and take upon you my whole armor, that ye may be able to withstand the evil day... (D&C 27:5-12,15)

In the 1833 Book of Commandments this revelation was published without any mention of the three First-century apostles:

Behold this is wisdom in me, wherefore marvel not, for the hour cometh that I will drink of the fruit of the vine with you, on the earth, and with all those whom my Father hath given me out of the world: Wherefore lift up your hears and rejoice, and gird up your loins and be faithful until I come: - even so, Amen. (BoC, 28:6-7)

Mormons who open their scriptures today think that a written revelation mentioned Peter, James, and John in 1830; they have no indication that the revelation was significantly revised to include the angelic restoration of the Melchizedek Priesthood.

While scholarship may not be able to touch angels, rewrites of history by human beings are certainly within its purview. If, as Bushman claims, Mormon beliefs are based on history, not philosophy, then the lack of any mention of Peter, James, and John before 1834 is an important issue. How does Bushman deal with it in his book? He simply ignores it. This is not "abiding by the canons of rational discourse." If a historian dealt with the sources for a non-religious, controversial event in such a cavalier way, he would lose the respect of his colleagues. Yet Mormon scholars think they can just cry "angel!" and that scholarly methods are then magically irrelevant.

If Bushman and other believers in fantastic religious claims want to be taken seriously by the academy, they need to do better than this. Scholarship may not be able to touch the realm of the supernatural, but believers need to show a willingness to examine their history and philosophy in a rigorous way if they want to develop a place for a Christian viewpoint at the academic table. Many "conservative" religions are already doing this; Baylor and Notre Dame have serious theologians who transcend religious apologetics and are making significant scholarly contributions. BYU, with its Sunday School-style religion program is generally averse to serious theology.

Bushman insists that scholarship can't answer the question "Is this Mormon truth real?" A non-religious parallel to the Book of Mormon may illustrate what I believe scholarship can tell us about the reality of Mormon claims. Imagine that historians are trying to decide whether a document supposedly written by a pre-Columbian New World colony of Greeks is actually ancient. A 19th-century expert on ancient Greece claimed to translate it from a document given to him by a tribe of Native Americans, but the original was later lost in a fire. The expert's ability to translate Greek was excellent, so there is no question that he could have translated the document. The question is whether this document really is ancient.

Any historian, Bushman included I imagine, would agree that the truth in this case can be approached by scholarship. If the document is full of anachronisms and 19th century ideas, nobody would question the conclusion that the document was a fraud. Alternatively, the evidence may be murky enough to lead us to confess that we don't know. If the document contained things about ancient Greece that our 19th-century expert would not have known, we would conclude that it is authentic. This is exactly the approach that FARMS writers and Book of Mormon critics take -- FARMS scholars claim the text has authentic ancient hallmarks that Joseph could not have imitated, while critics point out anachronisms and 19th-century ideas in a supposedly ancient text. The issue is actually quite simple, and Bushman is wrong to say that "No one is capable of finding that dreamed-of reality by scholarly methods." Scholars are quite capable of this assessment of the Book of Mormon when they frame their arguments without reference to purely religious claims. Mormonism is history, and with enough evidence historical truths can in fact be established.

At this point, it is a matter of judging the competing scholarly claims, without any worry about what the supernatural implications are. I find FARMS scholarship unconvincing, not only because they don't follow the expected rules of rational discourse, but because they argue against a broad mainstream consensus of various academic fields with only thin evidence. As Carl Sagan wrote, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Critics of the Book of Mormon have the weight of non-Mormon scholarship on their side, since their conclusions are consistent with careful research by scholars who don't think about the Book of Mormon at all. Bushman opens his essay with a lament about the exclusion of a Christian viewpoint from academia. Historian David Hollinger, who is not Christian, recently discussed this lament:

Many of those who want to reform academia in a more religious direction turn out, upon scrutiny, to be hoping to change the structure of plausibility taken for granted by the prevailing epistemic communities, but are slow to articulate and defend this reform...

There was once a time when scholars in the North Atlantic West took for granted a shared Christianity. In that bygone era, the boundaries of the epistemic community and the boundaries of the community of faith were largely coterminus. But now the boundaries of the epistemic communities that define discussion in the learned world are no longer coterminus with the Christian community of faith...There are good reasons, too obvious in the intellectual history of the last three hundred years to bear repeating here, why the prevailing epistemic communities now have the boundaries that they do, and why these communities, as a consequence of their relative de-Christianization, no longer count biblical evidence and other religious experience particular to Christianity as relevant to the assessment of a truth-claim or an interpretation... [At] issue...is the specific direction the always ongoing revision of the epistemic rules of these communities should take. (Hollinger 2002)

If apologists are doing their work only "to keep up our connections with the academic establishments," then they are only playing a game with the academic community and are not serious about advancing our knowledge through scholarship. If this is the case, they should not expect a serious response from the academic community, and they should not insist that their belief in Mormon historical claims is based, even in part, on reason. In spite of his mention of volumes of scholarship, Bushman in the end admits that for him reason is irrelevant: "But I hold to my beliefs not because of the evidence or the arguments but because I find our Mormon truth good and yearn to install it at the center of my life." This may be fine for Richard Bushman, but it is insufficient for those of us who really do believe that Mormon claims to truth rest in history.

Bushman, R. L. (1984). Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism. Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press.

Bushman, R. L. (1996). The Social Dimension of Rationality. Expressions of Faith: Testimonies of Latter-day Saint Scholars. S. E. Black, Deseret Book & FARMS.

Hollinger, D. A. (2002). Enough Already: Universities Do Not Need More Christianity. Religion, Scholarship, and Higher Education: Perspectives, Models and Future Prospects. A. Sterk: 40-49.

Kitcher, P. (2001). Science, Truth, and Democracy, Oxford University Press.

Paul, E. R. (1992). Science and Religion. The Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 4 Vols. D. H. Ludlow, Macmillan.