I have too many sacred Mormon narratives.  It’s a serious problem; I have more sacred narratives than any one kind of Mormon is allowed to have.

For instance, the stories about Joseph Smith are sacred to me.  The First Vision, the angel Moroni, the gold plates, the angel with a sword ordering him to practice polygamy, the saintly martyrdom in Carthage.  These stories bring the sense of God into my life.  They’re sacred and irreplaceable.

So are the other stories about Joseph Smith.  His youth as a Yankee huckster and a treasure seer, his religious career as a pious fraud, the story of him writing an anti-Masonic book of scripture and then later becoming a Mason, his irrepressible sex drive.  All of these are also sacred to me, and I hear God’s voice in them as well (although for somewhat different reasons).

Let’s take the examples of Joseph’s gold plates and the seer stones.  The traditional account of the gold plates is sacred to me as a symbol of several divine truths: as a representation of how the holy can be hidden in the mundane (like a book in a small glacial hillside), as a reminder of the links between generations (leaving behind a sacred book is, perhaps, better than leaving behind a mountain full of radioactive waste!), as an enactment of the idea that God and the things of the Spirit are incomparably more important than economic goods (the gold in the plates was worthless, after all, compared to the message on them).  The gold plates narrative brings these and other truths powerfully into my mind and heart because it is sacred; at the same time, it is sacred exactly because it reminds me of truths like these.

So what about Joseph’s seer stones?  I don’t believe the idea that Joseph never did much work as a treasure seer.  Nor do I believe that God gave Joseph (and only Joseph out of the many, many treasure seers of early 19th-century New England) the power to actually see underground in his seer stones.  So I’m left with some idea of Joseph the treasure seer as a fraud and a kind of backwoods con man.  This story is sacred to me; in fact, it’s every bit as sacred as the traditional account in the previous paragraph.  It is sacred because it connects my community with a real time and place (we came from a locale where people actually believed you could locate buried pirate treasure by looking in a rock in a hat!).  It’s also sacred because the evolution of Joseph the local con man into Joseph the religious leader is an enactment of very American ideas about self-improvement, and very Christian ideas about redemption.  Finally, it’s sacred because the Latter-day Saint scholars who first began, about twenty years ago, to acknowledge the evidence in favor of this account enacted the Socratic and Gallilean tradition of following intellectual efforts at truth in spite of community rejection.  Retelling these stories celebrates that courage and iconoclasm.

Having these different sets of sacred narratives causes a lot of social trouble for me.  There are well-defined categories of Mormons who celebrate the traditional narratives, and other categories that embrace the alternative accounts.  But each group tends to violently reject the other group’s sacred narrative.  For my traditional Latter-day Saint friends and family, it can be frightening and even demonic that I hold onto the nontraditional narratives, including the narratives about Joseph Smith discussed above and other such accounts through the entire history of the church.  Yet for my ex-Mormon and skeptical friends and family, it is a maddening conundrum that I’ve been exposed to the nontraditional accounts and yet I still hold the traditional accounts to be sacred.

What can I say?  At the end of the day, these people’s problems with my sacred narratives don’t bother me too much.  I am hurt when people try to strip part of my sacred lore from me by argumentation or by reviling it.  Hence, I react with some horror to the accounts in Our Heritage and other history publications by the church, which distort and omit some facts with the aim of denying the legitimacy of nontraditional accounts.  But I find dogmatic rejection of the sacredness of traditional accounts to be equally upsetting.  For example, Dan Vogel’s imaginative depiction of Joseph Smith scrapping together a set of “gold plates” out of scraps of tin strikes me as an aggressive attempt to overwrite the traditional narrative.  In telling this part of Smith’s life, Vogel goes so far beyond the evidence, so far beyond the intellectual call of duty, that he seems to betray a drive to destroy—and this drive is just as painful as the church’s attempt to suppress other aspects of our history.  Yet, to be honest, I don’t really need other people to accept all of my sacred stories—although I would like others to accept me.  But that’s another story.

I guess the last question is this: how can I hold sacred both the traditional and the alternative narratives of Mormon history?  After all, they are (to varying degrees) contradictory.  Isn’t it irrational to believe X and not-X?  To think of Joseph as a genuine prophet who dug gold plates out of the ground and produced authentic scripture by the power of God, and simultaneously to think of him as a con man-turned-pseudepigrapher who felt called by God to reform the world and tried to give his message added weight by making it ancient?

Perhaps it is irrational.  But the sacred isn’t the realm of the rational.  The author Karen Armstrong discusses a distinction between mythos and logos, between the sacred narratives that give life meaning and the rational, evidence-based reasoning that allows us to manipulate and control things in the world.  She suggests that both are sources of different kinds of truth, in effect that they are (to borrow from Stephen Jay Gould) nonoverlapping magesteria.

To me, this argument is sometimes misguided.  For instance, it matters a great deal to me whether the resurrection is an empirical fact or a symbol that helps us understand our ongoing contribution to humanity even in death.  While resurrection would maintain its mythical power in either case, I find a lot of emotional comfort in holding to faith in an empirical resurrection.

But when it comes to the sacred events of Mormon history, Armstrong’s approach seems about right to me.  Did Joseph, in actual fact, dig up really-existing gold plates from the Hill Cumorah?  In rational terms, I suppose, the answer has to be either yes or no.  But even asking this question collapses sacred narratives with immense mythic weight into just another intellectual conundrum from 19th-century history.  How banal!

Instead, I cling to all my sacred Mormon narratives, traditional and otherwise.  I find God more easily in a complex and contradictory mosaic of mythos-based accounts than in any sleek and linear logos-based reality.