Interviewed about Real vs. Rumor. The show is produced, filmed, edited, and distributed by students at BYU-Idaho, who were excellent hosts. Watch online here.
Reprinted from FromtheDesk.org (August 16, 2021)
How to Dispel Latter-day Myths
Sponsored by BYU Studies — Historian Keith Erekson is the author of Real vs. Rumor: How to Dispel Latter-day Myths.
What is the backstory for Real vs. Rumor: How to Dispel Latter-day Myths?
Keith Erekson:The long backstory is that before I came to Church employment I was a history professor who researched, published, consulted, and taught in the field of history teaching and learning. I spent many years thinking about what it means to think historically, whether in commemoration activities, public history, or school classrooms.
The shorter backstory is that after arriving in the Church History Library, I regularly encountered situations that would have been a lot easier if people had known how to think historically. So I hope the book can help.
What are some of the most common myths and rumors you encounter? Do you see any common themes in them?
Keith Erekson: I think the word “myth” can describe three things. First, there are errors of fact, that people often debunk in a “myth vs. fact” way. Then there are big sweeping stories–mythic, epic stories–that give meaning to life no matter how accurate the facts are. Finally, there are mental shortcuts and blindspots that shape the way we encounter the world.
The book uses examples of the first and second types in order to get at the third.
These “myths within us,” as I call them, are everywhere—we think we know everything, we don’t ask for evidence, we assume, we fail to see the interpretations made by others, we limit our options, and we get distracted by insignificant details.
Perhaps the most common and most problematic is a simplistic binary view of the world that sees everything as “either/or” options–good or evil, members or nonmembers, Democrats or Republicans, Black citizens or White police, faith or doubt (see Chapter 5).
Why are church history rumors so appealing?
Keith Erekson: The “myths within us” succeed because they are shortcuts that substitute for thinking. They are tidy, they feel good, they are like comfort food for our brains. By default, our brains prefer not to think. Brains develop habits and patterns that they follow on autopilot.
Athletes try to harness this by developing “muscle memory” through practiced repetition. We can cultivate intelligent thinking in the same way so each chapter introduces “Thinking Habits” that serve as antidotes to the myths and rumors around us.
What are the dangers of sharing church history stories—including faith-promoting ones—before you know whether they’re true?
Keith Erekson: I’ll start by saying that I don’t think inaccurate stories can be truly “faith-promoting.” But it depends on what you assume “faith” to be. If faith is just some gooey abstract thing, then, sure you might try to promote it with silly stories or tear-jerker films.
But if faith is an action, if it involves mental exertion, if it is (as President Hinckley described it) like a muscle, then it is promoted by work, resistance, and training. In cognitive terms, it is promoted by conscientiously developing effective thinking habits.
What should we do before repeating a faith-promoting church history story to others?
Keith Erekson: In Chapter 11, I introduce a thinking habit for tracing stories to sources.
- First, identify specific details in the story. Specific details are most helpful for narrowing your search.
- Second, follow those details to specific sources. Third, evaluate the accuracy and authenticity of the sources.
- Finally, determine the reliability of the story. The criteria of accuracy, authenticity, and reliability are developed respectively in Chapters 9, 10, and 11.
Do you need to be a historian to fact check rumors? How can we know what sources to trust?
Keith Erekson: No. In fact, the same Internet which helps spread errors so quickly is also an extremely powerful resource for verifying information. Throughout the book, I present several “Best Resources” sections that identify websites that are useful for tracing and evaluating information. In addition to accuracy, authenticity, and reliability, I also encourage fairness (chapter 12) and comprehensiveness (chapter 13) as helpful criteria for knowing which sources to trust.
Instead of asserting that everyone should become a historian, I encourage people to watch for sniff tests, or clues that something just isn’t right. You need not become an expert on every subject to recognize when good thinking is not being used.
What did Richard Bushman say about Joseph Smith’s Wikipedia page—and how does it relate to our efforts to track down the truth about any subject?
Keith Erekson: Richard Bushman made a really insightful observation. He noted that the Wikipedia article does contain accurate facts that can be traced to nineteenth-century documents. Several content studies of the online encyclopedia bear this out as its accuracy approaches that of Encyclopedia Britannica.
However, he also notes that the entry on Joseph Smith also “lacks scope.”
He explained, “It just picks its way along from one little fact to another little fact. . . . It . . . isn’t inaccurate, but it sort of lacks depth. It ends up being shallow.”
This is an important insight because so often fact-checking exercises focus very narrowly on the specific facts. But as I develop early in the book, “facts don’t speak for themselves” (Chapter 4). They are always incomplete and therefore must be interpreted. And it’s this shallow interpretation that makes true facts ring hollow or be twisted out of context.
How can expecting perfection from Church leaders make us susceptible to false rumors?
Keith Erekson: In the first place the idea that a Church leader should be or even could be perfect is inaccurate. There is no scripture, no teaching anywhere, that proclaims that Church leaders are perfect. And those who have carried the burden of the role have always been the first to declare their weaknesses.
Most Latter-day Saints will happily state that Jesus lived the only perfect life, and yet, at some deeper level, we have elevated Wilford Woodruff ’s observation that the Lord will not permit a prophet to lead the people astray (see Official Declaration 1) into a hidden belief that prophets cannot make mistakes.
If we would read the scriptures, we’ll find 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.
This assumption of prophetic perfection makes us susceptible to errors in two ways.
On one hand, it opens us to accepting exaggerations of perfection, for example, that Brigham Young miraculously left space in the Salt Lake Temple for elevators to be added later (see Chapter 3 for more info, including that elevators were invented 100 years before the temple).
On the other hand, this assumption also sets people up for a hard fall whenever they eventually learn that Joseph Smith and every other prophet made a mistake.
Mark Hoffman has been back in the news with the release of Netflix’s Murder Among the Mormons. Is it possible for prophets to be deceived?
Keith Erekson: Of course it is. There is no teaching in any scripture that grants prophets immunity from deception. When the 116 manuscript pages were stolen, the Lord told Joseph point-blank: “You cannot always tell the wicked from the righteous” (D&C 10:37).
Not “you’ll learn later” or “keep trying.” Just a simple “cannot.”
And so there were other times later in his life when Joseph trusted people who later betrayed him. The scriptures contain similar stories. Isaac’s son Jacob came disguised as his brother Esau to receive the birthright blessing, and Jacob later interpreted animal blood on his son Joseph’s coat as evidence of his son’s death (see Gen. 27:6–10; 37:31–34).
Tell us about the girls camp quote taken out of content. How could the leaders have responded that would have strengthened the girls’ faith, and also set an example of how to evaluate the accuracy of quotes?
Keith Erekson: This is a great example of how young people can lead the way in thinking clearly. Leaders of a stake young women’s camp took a scripture passage (2 Ne. 24:14) out of context, twisting the words of Satan into a chipper slogan to “Aim High.”
Young women at the camp chose to read the entire chapter and realized that the slogan – which had been plastered all over t-shirts, water bottles, banners, and study journals – reflected Satan’s inner aspirations.
They took the finding to their leaders who sheepishly admitted that they too had figured it out, but only after they had paid for all the swag. The leaders asked the girls not to tell anyone else.
The preferred response would have been to change the slogan during the planning process as soon as someone figured it out, accepting the previous purchases as sunk costs.
Based on your familiarity with historical sources, how might Joseph Smith respond to faith-promoting rumors if he were living today?
Keith Erekson: I cannot presume to speak for him, but I will note that his history begins with the observation that there were “many reports” that had “been put in circulation by evil-disposed and designing persons” such that he felt “induced to write this history, to disabuse the public mind, and put all inquirers after truth in possession of the facts” (JS-H 1:1). Later, in the body of that history, we find the observation that “rumor with [its] thousand tongues [is] all the time employed in circulating falsehoods” (JS-H 1:61).
So I do feel confident in saying that Joseph was thoroughly invested in combating rumors and false reports. Doing so clears the way for the truth.
One part of Alma 32 that often goes under-noticed is that while the “experiment” is, on one level, a “test” of the seed, it is also a test of the soil—our hearts and minds. The experiment only works “if ye do not cast it out by your unbelief, that ye will resist the Spirit of the Lord” (Alma 32:28). We can be led to disbelieve or to resist the Spirit of the Lord because of rumors, myths, big lies, errors, falsehoods, legends, family lore, false quotes, misleading misinformation, and deliberately distorted disinformation.
The quest for faith necessarily involves rooting out myths and rumors so that we can see things as they really are, as they really were, and as they really will be.
From Chapter 3 (p. 39)
Frequently, so-called challenges with Church history stem from bad assumptions in the present. We assume that other people at Church don’t have problems, that the Book of Mormon peoples spread across the entire western hemisphere, that prophets never get tricked, or that things were simpler in the past. We assume one should never speak of Mother in Heaven or of temple ordinances or of questions that trouble us. Poor assumptions can cause error and harm. In cases like the temple elevators, a person who first feels impressed by this story may later feel betrayed when learning the truth. 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” (1 Thes. 5:21). It takes humility to change our assumptions after we learn they are incorrect.
From Appendix B (p. 256)
Assumptions frequently surface in conversations, teachings, and writings. Because present assumptions distort the past, they cause harm by contaminating thinking, provoking personal stress, and preventing people from accepting the truth (see chapter 3). This list presents common assumptions about prophets generally, Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, the Church, and history.
Real vs. Rumor is not structured around the “Come, Follow Me” curriculum, but it is filled with insights that will improve your scripture study, thinking, and discipleship. The reading for May 24-30 examines Doctrine and Covenants 58-59 and explains “When the elders of the Church first saw the site of the city of Zion—Independence, Missouri—it was not what they expected. Some thought they would find a thriving, industrious community with a strong group of Saints. Instead they found a sparsely populated outpost, lacking the civilization they were used to and inhabited by rough frontier settlers rather than Saints. It turned out that the Lord wasn’t asking them just to come to Zion—He wanted them to build it.” Chapter 3 from Real vs. Rumor show how to put this message into practice.
Applying the ‘sniff test’: 3 myths and 3 lessons for dispelling Latter-day Saint rumors
By Trent Toone May 24, 2021, 12:01pm MDT
In 2018, a television reporter wanted to produce a news story about a Book of Mormon that briefly belonged to Elvis Presley.
The light blue volume of scripture featuring the angel Moroni on the soft cover had been preserved in the historical collections of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for nearly 30 years. The book’s pages contained writing, marked passages and a signature. The book’s uplifting story was revered by many in Latter-day Saint culture.
The interview request landed on the desk of Keith A. Erekson, the director of the Church History Library. Erekson wasn’t familiar with the background, so he began researching the book’s history and provenance. But something was off.
“The very first day I opened the book, it just didn’t add up,” Erekson said.
A thorough investigation revealed that although the book was in the possession of the King of Rock ’n’ Roll for 14 days before his death, Presley didn’t write in the book and it’s very unlikely that he read and pondered its words.
“The facts are one layer of history, and how they are presented, how they are put together, is another,” Erekson said. “‘Real vs. Rumor’ is really about this other layer — how people take things out of context, how they manipulate it, how they tell part of the story. Those are the things that everybody can learn to recognize. As soon as you see those kinds of distortions, you know this stinks, this doesn’t smell right.”
Erekson has outlined what he calls the “sniff test” — “clues that something just isn’t right” — and other resources in a new book titled “Real vs. Rumor: How to Dispel Latter-day Saint Myths,” which is on sale now from Deseret Book.
The book explores myths, rumors, legends and lore related to Latter-day Saint history as a way to teach others how to think critically and navigate through misinformation to identify truth.
“The sniff tests are clues that something just isn’t right. The thinking habits are skills that combine study and faith,” he said. “Both need to become reflexes that help us make sense of the world around us.”
“Real vs. Rumor” is divided into three parts:
- The myths within us.
- How to investigate.
- Dispel this.
Erekson is the director of the Church History Library. He earned a doctorate degree in history, has researched and published on topics such as politics, hoaxes, Abraham Lincoln and church history.
He recently spoke with the Deseret News and shared three myths and three lessons discussed in “Real vs. Rumor.”
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Elvis Presley’s Book of Mormon
In the case of Elvis and the light blue Book of Mormon, the sniff test was that the donor told multiple conflicting stories about the book, the author said.
“Elvis’ father wanted the book destroyed, Elvis’ father wanted the book given to the Osmond family, or the book was sent to an auction house that decided not to sell it,” Erekson said. “All of those could not be correct at the same time.”
One thinking habit is connecting the stories to the historical context.
“The donor said Elvis read the book the last two weeks of his life, which meant he would have read and marked hundreds of pages of scripture while hosting his 9-year-old daughter, preparing to go on tour, and reeling from the publication of a damaging exposé,” Erekson said. “So those things not adding up prompted a more comprehensive investigation.”
Did a Japanese pilot try to bomb the Laie Hawaii Temple?
Going back to the 1960s, variations of a story have been told about a Japanese pilot flying over the Laie Hawaii Temple with intentions to drop a bomb only to fail when the explosive didn’t release. Some versions tell of the pilot meeting Latter-day Saint missionaries years later and getting baptized. Another version has the pilot becoming a gardener at the temple.
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Two firsthand accounts defend parts of the story. One of the witnesses was intoxicated the night of the event. The other witness was a missionary in Japan who met a man in 1957. The Japanese investigator became distraught when shown a photo of the Laie temple and confessed he tried to inflict damage on it, but the missionary and his companion admitted to not understanding Japanese fully at the time.
The two witness accounts also fail to match specific known details about the Japanese air raid following the attack on Pearl Harbor.
With multiple and differing variations of the story, another thinking habit is to ask, “Show me the evidence.” No one else in Laie saw what the inebriated man claimed to see and the missionaries’ investigator vanished, the author said.
“In this case, two firsthand testimonies emerged, but both had problems,” Erekson said. “As a rule, we prefer evidence that is closer to the participants and closer in time to the events, and we like to corroborate the facts to establish accuracy.”
Brigham Young’s hearse at Disneyland
Erekson was standing in line for the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland when he heard someone say, “That hearse carried Brigham Young’s dead body!”
The horse-drawn hearse, with sculpted white columns, mounted on large wagon wheels, seemed appropriate for a prominent, Latter-day Saint figure, but Erekson didn’t buy it.
“The sniff test was the seemingly huge coincidence that Brigham Young had a tie to Disneyland,” he said. “The thinking habit illustrated here is to ‘think the second thought’ — to verify before passing on the story.”
Young died in 1877. The company that built the hearse was established in the 1890s, more than a decade later. In another twist, Young requested in his last will that his body be hand-carried, and that wish was fulfilled.
“So not only was this not Brigham’s hearse, there is no such hearse anywhere,” Erekson said.
More warning signs
When you understand the concept of a sniff test, you don’t need to know every fact to recognize the warning signs, the author said.
“Real vs. Rumor” includes an appendix with four key points:
- Survey the situation.
- Analyze the contents.
- Connect to the context.
- Evaluate significances.
Erekson also urged Latter-day Saints to verify the accuracy of stories before sharing them in church settings. His book includes strategies for verifying information and finding the best resources.
“Pause and think before you share a story,” he said. “If you decide to share it, as teachers or speakers, it’s our responsibility to verify the information that we share.”
Originally published in the Deseret News, May 24, 2021.
This article was published in the May/June 2021 issues of LDS Living and republished on the LDS Living website on May 19, 2021.
As I wrote the book Real vs. Rumor: How to Dispel Latter-day Myths, I evaluated popular stories and quotations that circulate in Latter-day Saint talks, lessons, and social media posts. Some turned out to be real, and others—not so much. Tracing the source of a statement commonly attributed to President Gordon B. Hinckley’s wife, Sister Marjorie Pay Hinckley, proved to be an adventure with a surprising destination. Here is the quotation in question:
I don’t want to drive up to the pearly gates in a shiny sports car, wearing beautifully tailored clothes, my hair expertly coiffed, and with long, perfectly manicured fingernails. I want to drive up in a station wagon that has mud on the wheels from taking kids to scout camp. I want to be there with a smudge of peanut butter on my shirt from making sandwiches for a sick neighbor’s children. I want to be there with a little dirt under my fingernails from helping to weed someone’s garden. I want to be there with children’s sticky kisses on my cheeks and the tears of a friend on my shoulder. I want the Lord to know I was really here, and that I really lived.
A quick internet search will yield a plethora of results that attribute these words to Sister Hinckley; it took quite a bit of digging, however, to discover the surprising history of this clever and inspirational prose.
The Search Begins
By entering the words “Marjorie Hinckley,” “pearly gates,” and “peanut butter” into the internet search bar, I got thousands of hits on websites, blogs, and social media accounts. The top two links were for the website Goodreads, which isn’t a great place to end a search because it is an aggregated site where everything is copied from somewhere else. Neither page provided an original source for the quotation—only the simple attribution of Sister Hinckley’s name. The other thing that caught my eye on the pages were two basic grammatical errors.1 Every proper quotation should contain four elements—an author, the exact words, the original setting, and the source. Goodreads presented an author, but grammatical errors made the wording suspicious and it lacked an original setting and source.
Going Inside Sister Hinckley’s Publications
As I continued to search, the quotation appeared everywhere. People turned the text into cute posts, pins, and handouts with eye-catching fonts and graphics. Many added a picture of Sister Hinckley. Others added photographs of charming children or mindful mothers. The vast majority simply copied the words and repeated the same incomplete attribution from Goodreads.
Drilling deeper into the list of hits, I found a news column, written for Mother’s Day in 2016, that attributed the quotation to Sister Hinckley’s book Small and Simple Things. The author of the column did not cite a page number, so I read the entire book—and found nothing. The quotation had evidently been found on the internet, its grammar errors edited, and an incorrect attribution added.2
Now I began to search everything published in connection with Sister Hinckley. For example, the quotation did not appear in three pamphlets she authored or co-authored. It was also missing from the published collection of her letters to her family.3 It appeared Sister Hinckley never made the statement in question. No matter how many Pinterest boards or blogs or columnists recycle the words and attribute them to her, it does not change the fact that those words do not appear in her books or writings. So where did they come from?
A Promising Lead
I continued to search online, but now with specific phrases such as “a smudge of peanut butter on my shirt” or “I want the Lord to know I was really here.” Again, many hits returned Sister Hinckley, but the more specific search winnowed out enough results that I finally found a lead.
In 2013, a blogger used the quotation in a post titled “What Would Marjorie Do?”, but a commenter offered a correction that was integrated into the original post. The commenter said the quotation came not from Sister Hinckley but was included in a speech at the 1997 Brigham Young University Women’s Conference.4 I found the proceedings of the conference and, sure enough, Linda Bentley Johnson closed her remarks by saying, “In my journal I copied these words that I refer to often.” Johnson’s quotation varied from the Goodreads version, using different adjectives and containing an additional line about grass-stained shoes.5 Now, how could I find the source Johnson used to copy the words into her journal?
In hopes of finding an original source, I included Johnson’s name in my internet searches. I found evidence to suggest that Johnson did her best to correct the misattribution circling the internet—she had visited at least four blogs to leave comments about her source. “Sister Hinckley did not say or write the pearly gates quote,” she posted repeatedly. “I have done research on this for a while to find the [original] source since I used the quote in a talk in 1997.” Johnson also stated in her comment that the words had been quoted anonymously in Latter-day Saint author and public speaker Jack R. Christianson’s book What’s So Bad About Being Good? Johnson finished her comment by leaving a final exhortation to “pass it on and correct the error.”6
It turns out Christianson had published two editions of What’s So Bad about Being Good, one in 1992 and the other in 2000. I found a copy of the first edition, but the quotation was not there! So I checked the second edition of the book, and the quotation was there, but with some alterations: this car had no mud on its wheels, but there was “Boy Scout equipment in the back seat”; the dirt under the fingernails came not from weeding a garden but “from helping . . . plant a garden”; and the grass-stained shoes came from mowing the lawn of Mrs. Schenck. And with the quotation was a reference that brought me the closest so far to an original source: Christianson wrote that he obtained the words from a friend of his wife who had experienced divorce and single motherhood before passing away due to cancer. (See the original document Christianson was given at right. The notes belong to Christianson.)
I looked more closely at all of Christianson’s works and discovered he had been sharing the quotation in his speeches and firesides in the 1990s. Johnson likely heard one of Christianson’s talks before she spoke at BYU Women’s Conference and recorded the words in her journal. As far as I could tell, Christianson had never publicly named the author in his talks or writings, always describing her as a friend of his wife.8
A Surprising Discovery
As I prepared this story for publication, I reached out to Johnson and Christianson and both confirmed the reconstructed timeline I’d traced down. Christianson also identified the name of the original writer, and her family authorized me to publish her name.9 Nadine Miner Hobby of Provo, Utah, wrote these intimate and inspirational words as a parting personal testimony.The popularly-shared version of this quotation on Goodreads turns out to be a mash-up from Nadine Miner Hobby, Linda Bentley Johnson, and Goodreads editors—technically no one ever said all of the words on Goodreads. Further, Marjorie Pay Hinckley never wrote or spoke the poetic words about pearly gates and peanut butter that are so frequently—and erroneously—attributed to her. With this discovery, I now hope that people can attribute the quotation accurately and share the words in Nadine’s own voice.
Notes
1. “Marjorie Pay Hinckley” Goodreads, 2008, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/26665-idon-t-want-to-drive-up-to-the-pearly-gates.
2. Carmen Rasmusen Herbert, “For the Unglamorous Mother,” Deseret News, May 6, 2016; Marjorie Pay Hinckley, Small and Simple Things (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2003).
3. Gordon B. Hinckley and Marjorie P. Hinckley, The Wondrous Power of a Mother (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Company, 1989), 10–16; Marjorie Pay Hinckley, Mothering: Everyday Choices, Eternal Blessings (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1996); Marjorie Pay Hinckley, To Women: Is This What I Was Born to Do? (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2004); Marjorie Pay Hinckley, Letters (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2004).
4. Bonnie, “What Would Marjorie Do?,” Real Intent (blog), May 11, 2013, https://realintent.org/what-would-marjorie-do.
5. Linda Bentley Johnson, “Steak and Spam Service,” in Every Good Thing: Talks from the 1997 BYU Women’s Conference, ed. Dawn Hall Anderson, Susette Fletcher Green, and Dlora Hall Dalton (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Company, 1998), 90–91.
6. Linda Johnson, comment, November 23, 2014, “Life and Gratitude and Motherhood ~ Inspired Quotes from an Inspired Lady,” Pieces of Me (blog), April 29, 2010, http://yoga-momma. blogspot.com/2010/04/one-of-people-i-havealways- wished-i.html.
7. Jack R. Christianson, What’s So Bad About Being Good? (Salt Lake City: Shadow Mountain, 2000), 25–27.
8. Jack R. Christianson, Women of Light (American Fork, Utah: Covenant Communications Inc., 2003), 14–15 cites the second edition of What’s So Bad about Being Good? (2000), 26.
9. Jack R. Christianson, emails to the author, February 23–25, 2021; Linda Bentley Johnson, phone call with author, February 24, 2021; Anjanell Burgess, email to author, February 25, 2021.
