One form of stories that people relate to each other is legends. Legends come in many shapes and sizes and from many places. There is the legend of Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe. There are Pecos Bill and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. There is George Washington cutting down the cherry tree.
As moderns, living in the latter part of the 20th century and into the new millennium, we have developed the impression that legends are a thing of the past. Legends are something our great-grandfathers shared around the campfire. Egotistically, we consider ourselves wiser and more sophisticated than our forebears. We have TV.
In the 1970's, several researchers began studying modern legends and their transmission. In contrast to the rural lives of our ancestors, these modern legends became known as "urban legends" (ULs). In their studies, these researchers learned that urban legends share many similarities with their previous counterparts. Some ULs are merely modern adaptations of earlier legends. Indeed, once stripped of their external aspects, their clothing, urban legends are no different from older legends. Human nature has not really changed much.
In the early 1990's, the term and concept of urban legends had not yet fully reached the public consciousness. (I don't know how widespread it is even today, however in the late 1990's there was a Hollywood movie of the name and many people seem familiar with the concept.) Jan Harold Brunvand, a professor at the University of Utah, had collected urban legends for years. In the 1980's, he published many of these legends in a series of enjoyable books. These were provocatively titled after names he gave to some of the ULs, such as The Vanishing Hitchhiker and The Choking Doberman. These books led urban legends out of the alleyway and into the light.
I ran across Brunvand's books and found them a delightful read. I encountered tales I had heard before, told around the campfire at Scouts, passed from missionary to missionary, or shared in many other settings. It was fascinating to read of stories I had been assured were true and see how they had morphed as they passed from person to person.
At that time, the internet was still largely unknown also. It was available only at select research institutions, including universities, military laboratories, and other U.S. governmental entities. A few other geeks had managed to find their way on. (Coincidentally, the University of Utah again figures into the early days of this, being one of the eight original internet sites in the 1960's.) I first got on the internet while working at MITRE (a quasi-governmental research agency in Washington, D.C.) during the summer of 1988. When I returned to BYU, the university had just obtained an internet feed from the University of Utah. After graduation, I worked for a navy research lab that had long been on the net.
In those days, USENET was the big "place" for community discussions. Even then there were thousands of discussion groups. One of these, which I started regularly following, was alt.folklore.urban (AFU), for the discussion of urban legends. A frequent abbreviation there was FOAF, standing for "friend of a friend". Someone would relate a real, true, honest-to-goodness account and aver that it really happened to a friend of their friend. Or they might claim it had happened to their friend, but when they went back to the friend to confirm it, the friend would respond that it hadn't really happened to themselves but one of their friends. I learned to recognize the lead-in, "This really happened to a friend of my friend", as a definitive marker that I was about to hear an urban legend.
The folks at alt.folklore.urban were investigating legends and checking their veracity, accumulating a Frequently Asked Questions list. One of the most adept at researching legends was a fellow known as "snopes", or David Mikkelson. Nowadays, when people want to check the veracity of a legend they've just heard, their first thought is to check what the Mikkelson's have to say about it on snopes.com.
A legend is not necessarily false. Brunvand established this in one of his seminal books. He related one legend he had heard about a mathematics student who arrived late to class one day. The student discovered four problems written down on the board. Assuming they were homework, he copied them down and set to work. Later in the week he consulted with the professor. The student informed the professor that he had solved one of the problems, but try as he might, he could not solve the other three. The professor, amazed, told him that he had written those problems on the board as examples of unsolved problems and that the student had solved one of these problems that had long perplexed mathematicians. Brunvand traced this legend back to its beginning and discovered that a variation of it really did happen to the accomplished mathematician George Dantzig, when he was a student. Brunvand still considered this an urban legend because of the way it passed from person to person and morphed in the telling.
Similarly, sometimes definite legends have real instances. Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy and other works, related how he once accosted a stranger, accused him of stealing his wallet, stuffed the wallet in his pocket, and, upon returning home, discovered he had left his own wallet lying on his dresser. Later it was pointed out to Adams that this was a well-known urban legend and could not possibly have happened. He accepted that it was an urban legend but solemnly affirmed that it had indeed happened to him.
Brunvand pointed out that the veracity of a legend is tangential to whether it is a legend. Some legends have a basis in fact. Others, like the prelude to this work, present a story with some element of truth hidden within. This truth may not be obvious, perhaps it may be well cloaked, but it is the reason why we share these stories one with another.
When my faith died, I presumed it must be some temporary setback. I saw others with faith and wondered how it worked for them. The things I had learned at church, I just accepted. Undoubtedly they must be true. As I became more familiar with urban legends, I began to see how many of the things I had been taught at church shared similar natures.
I discovered that much of church history, as shared at church, is legendary. The stories have been passed from person to person or time to time. They have morphed from their original form. At some point they have gotten institutionalized into their present form. But even still, those continue to change.
As a simple example, Primary children learn how the seagulls saved the pioneers' crops the first summer they were in the Salt Lake valley. A statue at Temple Square commemorates the Miracle of the Seagulls. However, a careful examination of the historical record reveals a somewhat different account. No record from the original time contains the miracle of the seagulls. It was not until at least a decade later that some mention can be found, and then it spreads in legendary form. In short, the seagulls may have been doing what seagulls do, but their contribution was not significant.
This is but one example among many. Others include Joseph Smith's different, contradictory accounts of his first vision, the transfiguration of Brigham Young after Joseph's death, the reasons for, practice of, and termination of polygamy, and the institution of the Word of Wisdom.
Not only is church history legendary, but also church doctrine is. As I studied, I learned how doctrine rose in legendary form, passed from one person to another until it became accepted and established. When I was asked to give a talk on testimony, I carefully researched the topic in the scriptures and the words of church leaders. It was fascinating to discover that "testimony" is barely mentioned in the scriptures and when used it has little relevance to the way it is used in the church today. Its rise in prominence can be traced primarily to Bruce R. McConkie, whom a fellow member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles once described as "always certain, but not always correct", and to his father-in-law before him. In contrast, the scriptures emphasize faith. The things that we are certain we know have been passed to us in legendary form rather than from unequivocal revelation of God.
This does not imply that the history or the doctrines of the church are false. Rather, as in the prelude, these stories carry truth wrapped within them. However, instead of proving the simple ideas that the approved stories carry, the more complete accounts reveal a richer, more complex, fascinating array of truth and ideas. I find the ideas and questions raised by these faceted views much more enriching than the simplistic answers. For example, the real Joseph Smith is far more fascinating, far more human, than the cardboard cutout promulgated at church.
Learning about urban legends showed me how difficult it is to dissuade someone from what they know to be true. Even if it is demonstrably false. On alt.folkore.urban, we would repeatedly have someone show up and proclaim that something listed as an urban legend with no factual basis really had happened to his friend. The regulars in the community would suggest he check back with the friend to verify. The few that would bother would storm back in a huff saying, "Well, it didn't happen to my friend, but it really did happen to his friend". In real life, when someone would tell me an urban legend, I would try to tell them about its legendary nature. Once in a copy shop in San Diego, I encountered a woman photocopying fliers (in the days before email was widespread to accomplish the job for her) trying to solicit business cards for the dying boy, Craig Shergold. I tried to suggest that she research it because it was an urban legend and he really didn't want any business cards. (In fact it had been get-well cards, but that had been cancelled years previously, Shergold had fully recovered, and the Atlanta Make-A-Wish Foundation wasted substantial money dealing with these misguided efforts.) The woman's response was that the City Council was supporting the effort and so it had to be true. Eventually, I learned it often wasn't worth the effort to dissuade people of their erroneous beliefs. It had much the same results as teaching a pig to sing. All it accomplished was to make a fool out of you and to annoy the pig.
As time progressed, I came to the same conclusions with regards to religious belief. I enjoy trying to tweak people to think more widely or reconsider something. However, if the tweak doesn't catch their attention, I don't have much interest in dissuading them. My days of being a missionary, converting others to my beliefs, are past.
Copyright 2005-2006 by Jeff Thompson.