The Sacred Records That Deepened This Church Historian's Faith (with Keith Erekson)

The archivist reached into the collection and lifted out a single sheet of paper. It was a business letter, dictated from a jail cell in Carthage, Illinois, in the summer of 1844. At the bottom, in a different hand, were a few lines the writer had added himself. He told his wife he had done his best. He sent his love to the children. It was the last thing Joseph Smith ever wrote to Emma. The moment the letter passed into the next set of hands, two people in that room in Independence, Missouri felt the same thing at once. Both had to stop and gather themselves before they could keep working.

The man holding the letter was Keith Erekson, and authenticating sacred records is his life's work. For seven years he directed the Church History Library, the official archive of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and he now serves as its director of historical research and outreach. He has handled millions of documents. That morning in Independence, he was certifying more than a thousand pages, one by one, before they crossed the country under guard. The letter to Emma was one of them, and it stopped him cold.

In a recent episode of Why We Believe, host Nathan Gwilliam sits down with Keith to ask a question he hears all the time. With full access to the archive, has anything ever shaken his faith? The answer Keith gives is not the one most people expect, and the stories behind it reach from a sick boy in Baltimore to a dream in Brazil to a single word spoken in a temple.

The Myths We Tell Ourselves

Keith made his name writing about the stories Latter-day Saints get wrong. There is the tale that Brigham Young left spaces in the Salt Lake Temple for elevators, proof, people say, that he could see the future. Keith points out that elevators existed before the temple was built, that the finished building already had three of them, and that saving on construction is not why God calls prophets. There is the Book of Mormon donated in 1989 with Elvis Presley's signature inside. For thirty years members repeated that the King had read it, until Keith was asked to review the handwriting and found every word of it forged.

What interests Keith is not the individual rumors but the habit of mind underneath them. We like to force rich questions into narrow boxes, he says. Is the prophet called of God, people ask, or just a man? Keith's answer is both, and a little more. And we reach for famous names and tidy proofs because they make our faith feel less strange. A celebrity who secretly believes, a clever construction trick, these give us cultural validation. They let us feel accepted. The trouble is that they put our confidence in the wrong place.

A Testimony With a Biography

Keith does not describe his belief as a single moment. He borrows a phrase from President Gordon B. Hinckley, who once asked permission to share the evolution of his testimony, and he prefers the word biography. His faith was young once. It grew up. It met hard seasons and came through them.

The earliest chapter came when he was six or seven and gravely ill. He received a priesthood blessing, fell asleep at once, and woke with every symptom gone and a ravenous appetite. It was his first brush with something larger than himself. At twelve, after his family finished reading the Book of Mormon together, his father told each of them to find out for themselves. Keith went to a quiet place and prayed, and a witness came that he knew was not his own thought. He describes it the way Joseph Smith described the First Vision: he knew it, he knew that God knew it, and he could not deny it.

A Dream in Brazil

On his mission in Brazil, Keith learned that the Spirit often works in ways his American upbringing had not prepared him for. One woman the missionaries were teaching met them at the door before a planned lesson on the plan of salvation. She had dreamed the night before of a dark, sad place where her deceased relatives could not speak to her and looked away in pain. She woke with the certainty that the elders would explain it.

They barely had to. She already understood the urgency and the sorrow; they only supplied the names for what she had seen. When she learned about vicarious ordinance work and read of the Savior opening the doors of the spirit prison, she knew she wanted it for her family. She was baptized and became the start of a quiet transformation across her family line. God taught that lesson better than we could, Keith says. He was simply glad the missionaries were there to fill in the details.

The Word That Was Hurry

Years later, deep in a doctoral program, Keith felt one of those promptings again. The average history PhD in the United States took more than eight years to finish. On a research trip he stopped at a temple, and the message that came was a single word: hurry. It made little sense. He had funding and time, and a young family to support. He obeyed anyway and finished in six years.

He went on the job market and secured a tenure track position in 2008, the year the economy collapsed. Within months, most of the jobs posted in his field were rescinded, and the following year there were almost none. Had he finished on the normal schedule, there would have been nowhere to go. It took a year and a half before the meaning of that one word became clear. He could not have planned it, he says, and he is grateful he was not the one running his life.

Prophets Point to Christ

Keith worries that the culture around the faith sometimes obscures its center. He returns to the story of Naaman, who arrived at the prophet expecting a grand gesture and left angry when he was simply told to wash in the river. Many of our frustrations with leaders, Keith suggests, come from cultural expectations the scriptures never set. We sing that we should follow the prophet, yet he notes that no prophet in history has ever taught people to follow him. They point past themselves to Jesus Christ.

That is finally where Keith lands when asked who the Savior is to him. At one level Christ is beyond comprehension, the Creator of the earth who conquered death and carried the sins of every person. At another, He is close and personal. Keith has felt His love, His grace, and His mercy. The God of the universe, he says, is also the One who brings the mercy he needs every single day.

Keith's story is not really about archives, even though he has spent his life among them. A testimony rooted in direct experiences with heaven cannot be argued away by a stray fact, because it was never built on facts to begin with. God speaks through dreams, blessings, and quiet promptings, and each one is His voice. The myths we cling to tend to meet a need for validation rather than a search for truth, and prophets, every one of them, point us toward Christ rather than themselves. Across the whole sweep of history, Keith has watched the same thing happen by the millions: Christ heals, restores, and strengthens His people in every generation.

Thank you for reading this week's blog post inspired by the Why We Believe show. If you are interested in more stories like this, you can check out our other blog posts and episodes at WhyWeBelieve.com.

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