Your question gets to the heart of what I am grappling with in this post. I really think that devotional and academic histories attempt to explore the past from two different theoretical and methodological viewpoints. The truth is that each is better than the other for undertaking certain kinds of exploration. I think that this concept will become more apparent as I continue my discussion of what academic history consists. In subsequent posts I will turn to discussions of methodology and theory. In my mind, academic history and its methods emerged from the Enlightenment tradition while the devotional history follows a much older religious world-view. Insofar as the Enlightenment was a reaction to religious ways of narrating the world, I can see a certain level of antagonism between the two approaches. But in this post-modern, post-structural world, the Enlightened, modern approach has been shown to be built on certain hidden assumptions. When we are aware of these assumptions, I think the two approaches look more like apples and oranges than two competing teams. I hope you’ll tune in for my subsequent posts.

What I’m trying to ask is whether it is simply a question of different realms or audiences, or whether these different arenas are constituted so as to be antagonistic to each other. Can we really speak of a devotional history rather than, simply, a devotional?

Second, I believe some leaders of the Church are somewhat wary of historians because of the element of “naturalizing” what they see as the miraculous. The more sterile historical treatments can cause waves if they seem to delete God from the process. This view can be tempered by keeping in mind that it is through small and simple, sometimes seemingly natural things, that God works with us and with the Church. The “large-scale miracles” so to speak seem to be reserved for monumental occasions such as the passing of the prophet’s mantle as in the case of Brigham Young, or the 1978 revelation on blacks and the priesthood. Even these, however, are often painted by the historian as natural, caused by cultural taste, political movements, etc. The suspicions aren’t likely to go away.

On thing that helped me in understanding why the Church does correlated history the way it does is reading the essay on “exemplary history.” See “Advocacy and Inquiry in the Writing of Latter-day Saint History.” Another thing was reading Ian Barbour’s Myths Models and Paradigms. When one understands the intent behind the history one can read the history keeping the intent in mind.

Lastly, what source would you advise amateur historians read? Is there a book available that talks more about these issues? Novick’s book was the one that came to mind for me, but it doesn’t talk about method as much as it talks about the historical profession.

I see what you mean. Noll, Marsden, et. al. do not have the same kind of stake in the historicity of particular historical events (except the Biblical ones, but those are outside the period they’re interested in). Perhaps a better example would have been Rick Kennedy:

“Miracles in the Dock: A Critique of the Historical Profession’s Special Treatment of Alleged Spiritual Events,” Fides et Historia, 26 (1994): 7-22.

His approach to evaluating the historicity of miracles reminds me a bit of the way Bushman treats the witnesses.

Since then I have grown up and seen the difficulties as opportunities. It has given me a chance to grow my faith in a way that also helps me to understand the issues.

In the Fall I was doing research on the 1978 revelation on Blacks and the Priesthood. It would have in the past been a hard subject. But since then I have served in councils with bishops and as a clerk in a branch presidency. I have seen how priesthood leaders make decisions and how they flow out of natural opinions, that then work in concert with revelation not against it.

So suddenly that made me understand better that the councils of the church work in a similar fashion, that they diliberate, argue, agree and pray. This for me made the actual academic research and discovery one which built my faith in the leaders of the church and common sense backed by spiritual power.

That is how I justify my fusion with both, while remembering the audience may not care like I do about the issue. Just the argument and the “facts”.

I would agree that there is really no need for antagonism between academic history and believing history. My overall argument in these next few posts will posit that the what really creates misunderstandings between both sides are the distinctive politics and purposes that motivate each endeavor. I agree with Ardis that we follow different intellectual routes/methods to derive our conclusions, but I would also argue that our motivations and destinations are often, but not always, dissimilar as well.

Chris,

I read Marsden’s first book a long time ago and haven’t read any Noll, so I can’t speak informatively about the way that they are perceived in the academy. I think I can speak a little to Bushman’s influence. Bushman allows Joseph Smith the intellectual possibility of actually believing what he said without being crazy or manipulative. On the other hand, I think that many scholars outside the field of religious history simply view the work of historians like Bushman as evidence that religion deserves to be part of the historical world. Like gender, race, and nationalism, religion is another socio-cultural factor that has caused people to act historically in irrational ways. (This is not my opinion, but it is one that I have heard before in seminars) I hope I’m wrong in my overall sense of the importance of religion to the field of American history, but that’s the story here at this Big Ten institution.

Sterling,

I love Bushman’s essays on faithful history, but I don’t know if such faithful methods would fly when trying to publish in major academic journals.

As for the problem, I think it comes in this incessant desire we have to divorce discourse from context by making all discourse withstand scrutiny in every community (a drawback to the way we have implemented the internet discourses, frankly). What I write for “historians” probably isn’t useful for “believers,” and what I write for believers is generally uninteresting to historians. This is my complaint about the oeuvre of the Tanners’ ministry–they make it difficult to allow different subcultures to engage in unfettered internal discourse. Incidentally, I think this is relevant to Obama’s recent verbal misstep in San Francisco. A phrase that makes perfect sense to one group, unless translated carefully to another culture group, has potential to offend.

The Mormon historian not fitting in would do well to remember her/his response to the wardmember aggressively encouraging the latest multi-level marketing scheme plagiarizing the Word of Wisdom. We none of us love another subculture forced upon us.

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Disclaimer: I do not always follow my own advice in this respect and am therefore susceptible to complaints of hypocrisy.