Leonard Arrington: Why I Am A Believer

from A Thoughtful Faith for the 21st Century

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My path of commitment to and belief in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints developed around four basic religious questions I encountered as I grew up. First, is there a living God? Second, was Jesus a teacher worthy to be worshipped? Third, was Joseph Smith a prophet deserving of allegiance? And fourth, is our Latter-day Saint culture meritorious—worth defending and working for?

As these questions may reveal, I believed the intellect to be enormously important—more important than the heart, more important than tradition. If my mind could not confirm the truth of my religion, I felt I would be unsettled and apprehensive. Nevertheless, I felt very comfortable with poetry, music, art, drama, testimony, ritual, ceremony, and other expressions of religious feeling and thought. I was also comfortable with people who contended that religion was a matter of spirit, not mind, and that testimonies could come only through the assurance of the Holy Ghost.

My struggle with the first question began when I was a freshman at the University of Idaho and continued until the third year of graduate school. I acted as a believer, willing to assume there was a loving and powerful Creator. But I was not satisfied until I had studied the matter through and came to a conviction that my intellect could defend. My first satisfying experience was with Lowell Bennion’s What about Religion? This manual, used in the MIA, taught a crucial truth, namely that the restored gospel represents truth and enlightenment, not superstition and ignorance. Scholarship and education are part of the gospel; Mormonism undertakes to foster the discovery and spread of truth; God has commanded that we study and learn and become acquainted with all good books; the glory of God is intelligence; and it is impossible for a man or woman to be saved in ignorance (D&C 90:15, 93:36, 88:118, 131:6). The manual also quoted with approval Brigham Young’s statement in the Journal of Discourses that we accept truth no matter where it comes from, that Mormonism comprises all truth, and that there is an indissoluble relationship between religion and learning (JD 1:334, 11:375, 15:160). These became articles of my religious faith and continue to remain so.

When I went to the University, my roommate, anxious to test my mettle, provoked me into reading Why We Behave Like Human Beings by George A. Dorsey. This widely read treatise by a noted anthropologist and behavioral scientist gave a mechanistic interpretation of the ultimate questions–not intended to inculcate faith in religion. Man was viewed as little more than a complete biophysical machine. I vividly remember one phrase from it, suggesting that thinking was no more than “laryngeal itch.” That stimulated me to read several books on evolution, including On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin.

Dissatisfied with the superficial and uninformed views that were being conveyed in certain publications to which I was referred, I concentrated on the works of philosophers. First, I read The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant, which introduced to me the names of the most prominent persons who had pondered the great issues. I then systematically read some of the great thinkers—Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, Josiah Royce, and William James. I read some philosophical novels: Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and George Santayana’s The Last Puritan and Reason in Religion. I read the autobiographies of St. Augustine, John Henry Newman, and John Stuart Mill. I read several books that reviewed what the great thinkers had said about God, man, and the universe, and had personal experiences that confirmed their views in an intimate way. By the time I began my third year of graduate work, I had satisfied myself about the existence of God. And my religious experiences in my more mature years have merely served to corroborate what I had then come to believe. While philosophers have not always argued that the existence of God is demonstrable, they have presented arguments that have been persuasive to me. My experience suggests that Francis Bacon was correct when he contended that “a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.”

My conceptions of Jesus emerged when I was still in high school. I must confess that I read the Bible through when I was thirteen but, country boy that I was, I was turned off by the King James Version, which was to me a strange and unfamiliar idiom. When I went to the University, George Tanner, my LDS Institute instructor, gave direction to my search for Jesus as a person, as a leader. He introduced me to new translations of the Bible. These were helpful and I still often use them. At his suggestion I also read Shirley Jackson Case, Jesus: A New Biography; Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus; Albert Schweitzer, The Quest for the Historical Jesus; and James E. Talmage, Jesus the Christ. I came away persuaded that Jesus was, indeed, a historical figure (some historians had expressed doubt on this point), that the values He taught were superior to anything mankind had ever devised, that Jesus was indeed a divine person, and that His life provided a model worth imitating in meeting today’s difficult problems.

As to Joseph Smith, I hear many assessments that clash with the impressions I have acquired and confirmed in my years of research in the Church Historian’s Office. Unquestionably Joseph had a marvelous intellect and also acute spiritual sensitivity. He honestly sought to resolve the many intellectual, spiritual, social, and personal problems that arose in his lifetime. He was an imaginative thinker and leader. He accepted truth from many sources. And he had good values: people were more important than money, and the law of eternal progression pointed us all in the right direction.

What about the Prophet’s accounts of his own experiences: the First Vision? the visit of the Angel Moroni to tell him about the golden plates? the return of John the Baptist to confer the Aaronic Priesthood and of Peter, James, and John to confer the Melchizedek? Can one accept all of the miraculous events that surrounded the restoration of the gospel? I was fortunate to have read George Santayana’s Reason in Religion before confronting these historical problems. I do not say that I fully understood it or that I agreed with his basic premise, but the book gave me a concept that has been helpful ever since—that truth may be expressed not only through science and abstract reason, but also through stories, testimonies, and narratives of personal experience; not only through erudite scholarship, but also through poetry, drama, and historical novels. Santayana used the term “myth”—a term well understood in recent religious literature—to refer to the expression of religious and moral truths in symbolic language.