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.
Episode Summary: Did Joseph Smith really say that? Does the Church have the sword of Laban? How accurate was the story told in Sunday School? Should I trust the information I found online? Can I draw closer to God by learning about history? Real vs. Rumor explores Latter-day myths, rumors, and Church history to demonstrate how to think critically about the information that swirls around us. Each chapter brims with illuminating examples from scripture, history, and popular culture. By thoughtfully combining study and faith to investigate myths and rumors, you will deepen your discipleship, avoid deception, understand tough topics, and see the hand of God in history and in your own life.
Listen to Episode 516: Keith Erekson (May 7, 2021).
Every year, the quote resurfaces on Mother’s Day cards. Abraham Lincoln said, “All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.” The sentiment stirs hearts — and sells cards — because people assume they share with Abraham the exact same love for mothers. But, to paraphrase a fictional Spanish philosopher-swordsman, “Lincoln’s words did not mean what you think they mean.”
We begin first with the evidence. As it turns out, the greeting card tagline is merged from two sources. Two years after Lincoln’s death, his longtime law partner William Herndon told an interviewer that Abraham said, “all I am or can be I owe to my angel-mother.” Twenty-two years later, in his own memoir, Herndon presented a slightly more polished version: “God bless my mother; all that I am or ever hope to be I owe to her.” So the greeting card companies dropped the blessing from the later version and appended the earlier “angel mother” description. We can reasonably say that Lincoln expressed something like this sentiment in probably as many words.
To discern what Lincoln meant by these words we must put them back into context. Herndon explained that the two of them were traveling in Lincoln’s one-horse buggy around 1850 on the way to the court in Menard County, Illinois, where they would argue a case that involved the question of hereditary traits. Though they had known each other for more than a decade and had been law partners for six years, Herndon recalled that this was “the first time” Lincoln ever spoke of his mother Nancy Hanks and the only time he spoke of his ancestry. Lincoln reported that his mother’s mother Lucy was the illegitimate child of a Kentucky woman and a “well-bred Virginia farmer.” The Hankses were poor and uneducated, so Lincoln attributed to his unknown planter great-grandfather “his power of analysis, his logic, his mental activity, his ambition, and all the qualities that distinguished him from other members and descendants of the Hanks family.” Thus, despite thinking he descended from an embarrassing extramarital relationship and growing up in frontier poverty, Lincoln’s hope for his own success rested on the traits inherited through his mother’s mother. The message that “your family is embarrassing but useful” is probably not what you meant to express to your mom.
The only direct reference Abraham ever made to his mother came in a letter to a friend after a woman he was courting terminated their relationship. He felt rejected and bitter, prompting caustic commentary on the woman’s weight, age and appearance. “When I beheld her, I could not for my life avoid thinking of my mother,” he said, “from her want of teeth, weather-beaten appearance in general.” Greeting card companies will likely never adopt this firsthand statement from Lincoln!
Why would Abraham write this? Nancy Hanks Lincoln was poor, illiterate and died when he was 9 years old. His last view of her came on her deathbed, after she contracted a frontier disease called “the trembles” or “sick stomach” or the “puking illness.” Victims experienced weakness, fatigue, vomiting, abdominal pain, severe constipation and offensive breath before passing into a coma and dying. This profound childhood trauma was followed by his father’s quick remarriage, so the term “angel mother” may have been a polite euphemism for “dead mother” to differentiate from his still living stepmother. Herndon reported that Lincoln made the statement about his mother “ruefully,” before he “immediately lapsed into silence” and they “rode on for some time without exchanging a word. He was sad and absorbed.”
This Mother’s Day, let’s liberate moms from harmful cultural expectations about angelic perfection. We can question assumptions, ask for evidence and seek to understand things in proper contexts. We can embrace family experiences as they really are — imperfect, embarrassing, useful and traumatic — because they really do make us into people, like Lincoln, who can make a difference in the world. What more could we ever hope for?
This op-ed was originally published in the Deseret News on May 7, 2021.
Episode Summary: We’ve all heard them. There are pre-general conference predictions, rumors about certain celebrities investigating the Church, and sensationalized stories from Church history. How can you discern what is real and what’s rumor? On this week’s episode, Keith Erekson, director of the Church History Library, teaches how historians approach corroboration and how you can do the same in your own life.
- Listen to Episode 129: Investigating Latter-Day Saint Rumors and Assumptions (May 5, 2021).
- Read the full transcript.
- Read an excerpt on LDS Living (May 8, 2021).
Discernment a Gift and a Skill (pp. 120-121)
Because we live in a world awash with rumors, myths, hoaxes, misinformation, and lies, we must learn to investigate what we encounter. We must learn to discern, as President Russell M. Nelson taught, “between schemes that are flashy and fleeting and those refinements that are uplifting and enduring.” Elder David A. Bednar explained that discernment “helps us to distinguish the relevant from the irrelevant, the important from the unimportant, and the necessary from that which is merely nice.” The Holy Ghost helps us discern truth and error, as well as things that are cunningly crafted or just silly. Discernment is a gift of the Spirit as well as a thinking skill that we can improve. Through practice and inspiration, we can develop a discerning eye, an analytical mind, and good judgment.
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 3-9 examines Doctrine and Covenants 46-48 and explains that many early Saints “found it hard to discern which manifestations were of the Spirit and which were not.” This passage comes from chapter 9, which opens section 2 of the book and introduces a process for investigating what is real and what is rumor.
