Holy Records, Unholy Record-keeping
Adapted from Redeeming the Dead, by Amy Harris, in the Maxwell Institute’s Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants series.
Joseph Smith’s teachings and revelations uniquely connected the seemingly mundane tasks of record-keeping to the theological bedrock of the Atonement and its ability to save each priceless soul. On one hand, this is not particularly surprising, given that Joseph’s first major revelatory action was to produce the Book of Mormon—a sacred text that emphasizes the importance of record-keeping as a bulwark against spiritual decay. Early sections of the Doctrine and Covenants mention that the Book of Mormon’s existence was evidence that God did not forget promises to redeem Lehi’s family and that redemption of the long dead was an important component of the newly restored Church. Sections 3 and 10 explain that the purpose of the Book of Mormon is to remind the descendants of Lehi and Sariah that the Lord’s promises to them would be fulfilled.[1]
Building on that experience, Joseph’s initial revelations on record-keeping were inextricably connected to revelations on redeeming the dead.[2] Record-keeping became a sacred practice, a practice consecrated because it represented our love of God and others, a place where Saints could “find eternity in a ledger.”[3] Joseph’s revelations also placed the burden of record-keeping on people keeping actual books, not just in a metaphorical heavenly book kept by God. The opening line of revelation received on the day of the Church’s founding, April 6, 1830, instructs that “there shall be a record kept among you.”[4] There is a genius in this formulation; by making humanity responsible for the books where the records of saving rituals are kept, individuals are both participants in and witnesses to God’s redemptive work, individually and collectively.
At the end of section 128, Joseph exhorted, “Let us, therefore, as a church and a people, and as Latter-day Saints, offer unto the Lord an offering of righteousness; and let us present in his holy temple . . . a book containing the records of our dead, which shall be worthy of all acceptation.” This followed on section 127’s instructions on proper record-keeping and witnesses of baptisms for the dead. This was not a simple matter of orderly filing but a manifestation of the sealing power. “That in all your recordings it may be recorded in heaven; whatsoever you bind on earth, may be bound in heaven; whatsoever you loose on earth, may be loosed in heaven,” according to 127:7. The book worthy of all acceptation records not only the names of individuals baptized but becomes a mechanism for binding all of God’s children across time. This holy book was to “be held in remembrance from generation to generation” (127:8).
Such sacred record-keeping also has the potential to correct today’s commercialization and commodification of bodies and souls. Record-keeping becomes a way of capturing a lived, embodied sacred moment and relationship that transcends the constraints of time. Before any text or record is produced, a ritual is experienced—like Jane Neyman in September 1840, striding into the cool Mississippi River while it rippled around her skirts, her friend Vienna Jaques, witnessing from atop a horse, feeling the warmth of the animal breathing in the autumn air. A man, Harvey Olmstead, performing the baptism bracketed by the two women as he prepares to say the holy words. All three, inspired by Joseph Smith’s first sermon on baptisms for the dead a few weeks before. All three brought together in an embodied, lived experience that bound them to each other and to Cyrus, Jane’s deceased son for whom she was being baptized.[5] The record of that event, made some fourteen years later, culminated the sacred moment and expanded it through time to include those who would experience it vicariously by reading.[6]
But human record-keeping untethered from its sacred purpose is limited, even destructive at times. The potential harm that flawed record-keeping practices might create struck me strongly one day as I walked to teach a class on genealogical research and analysis. I was prepared to discuss United States census records, including what are termed slave schedules—census reports of slave-owners with the age and gender demographics of the people they enslaved. I have taught this topic many times, but this would be the first time I would teach it with an African-American student in the room, one who had ancestors who had been enslaved. Thinking about how she might experience the lecture and thinking about what those records reveal about her ancestors’ lives, I had a heart-turning moment as I contemplated an experience so different from my own. I felt my heart turn to that student, to what she might think or feel as we talked about records that simultaneously record the oppression of her ancestors and are the means we use to seek them out. The phrase “these are unholy records” came to my mind. That moment reshaped my thinking and my teaching. Not just that day but forever. The promise of the Restoration is that human records will enable the redemption of the entire human family, but we must not close our eyes to the signs of human evil that we may encounter in them.
Although we aim to create a book worthy of all acceptation, we often have to rely on less acceptable records when we seek after our dead, and we should be aware of the great power of historical records, either to do good or to do harm. For instance, during the same era Joseph Smith was extolling the sacred importance of record-keeping, several secular records were being constructed that produced disturbing outcomes. The 1840 United States census recorded, for the first time, the number of people with mental and intellectual disabilities classified as “insane” or “idiots.” Due to errors in counting, northern populations of free Black people showed astronomically high rates of mental disability, especially when compared to enslaved people in southern states. A dedicated statistician noticed the errors—including that some counties in New England had counted more “insane” free Blacks than the total number of Blacks in the county and Worcester, Massachusetts’s report of 133 insane free Blacks was actually the number of white patients in the state mental hospital.[7] The statistician’s efforts to have Congress retake the census in those places or disavow the conclusions were unsuccessful, however, as pro-slavery congressmen were thrilled to use the “scientific” evidence that proved Black people were more suited for slavery than freedom. Without slavery’s structure, they argued, Black people were likely to become mentally unstable.[8] Furthermore, later in the century, census schedules about people with intellectual disabilities as well as deaf, blind, and mute people, the so-called “defective schedules,” and censuses of Deaf marriages were grounded in eugenic ideas of “breeding out” deafness from the population.[9] When Joseph wrote the letter that would become section 128, he described the dead being judged by the records kept of their mortal acts. Contemplating how humanity could be “judged out of those things which were written” in those census records is disquieting at best.[10]
As those brief examples illustrate, few historical records are neutral; many preserve not only the names of our ancestors but also their suffering and oppression at the hands of other ancestors. Records of enslavement, imprisonment, injustice, genocide, forced migration, abuse, sexual violence, and war are unholy records. They record unholy things, things created by humans “without affection” who “hate their own blood.”[11] They record the unholiest and filthiest of behaviors, wicked often in motivation and always iniquitous in outcome.
But Joseph’s vision of the power of holy record-keeping reverses that unholiness. Like Mosaic sacrifices that symbolically cleansed collective and individual misdeeds that threatened the people’s peace and unity, we can acknowledge our unholy records and plead that the books of redemption might take their place. The book worthy of all acceptation, the holy records of our dead––of all humanity we have sought after, that we have seen like ourselves, that we have loved like ourselves—are the records that will last. These records report our collective and individual redemption, the records whose holiness will blot out all the unholiness of mortal records and all the stains of mortal enmity and cruelty they contain. In their place will be a holy record, a manifestation of our love of God and each other, an offering that we believe in the power of the Atonement to reach each one of us, the oppressed and the oppressor, and render us holy, sanctified.
[1] Doctrine and Covenants 3:18–19; 10:45–70.
[2] This is also evident in the Book of Mormon. See Sharon Harris, Enos, Jarom, Omni: A Brief Theological Introduction (Provo: Neal A. Maxwell Institute, Brigham Young University, 2020).
[3] John Durham Peters, “Recording Beyond the Grave: Joseph Smith’s Celestial Bookkeeping,” Critical Inquiry 42 (Summer 2016): 344.
[4] Doctrine and Covenants 21:1.
[5] Simon Baker, statement, in Journal History, August 15, 1840, Journal History of the Church, CR 100 137, Church History Library; Letter to Quorum of the Twelve, 15 December 1840, 6, The Joseph Smith Papers, josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-quorum-of-the-twelve-15-december-1840/6; Brent M. Rogers, “Vienna Jaques: Woman of Faith,” Ensign, June 2016; Cyrus was baptized by proxy again in 1878 in St. George, potentially at his mother’s behest.
[6] Joseph Smith history documents, 1839-1860; materials used by Church historians, 1854-1856; Jane Neyman statements, 1854 November 29; Church History Library, catalog.churchofjesuschrist.org/assets/f5b85ffb-5200-45c7-9fb0-c504cde587f6/0/0#churchofjesuschrist.
[7] Albert Deutsch, “The First U.S. Census of the Insane (184) and Its Use as a Pro-Slavery Propaganda,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 15, no. 5 (May 1944): 475.
[8] Paul Schor, Counting Americans: How the US Census Classified the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 30–42.
[9] Jaipreet Virdi, Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 12; Jaipreet Virdi, “Measuring the Science of Hereditary Deafness,” National Institutes of Health keynote address, 2022, genome.gov/sites/default/files/media/files/2022-10/NIH_Keynote_VIRDI_Measuring_the_Science_of_Hereditary_Deafness.pdf.
[10] Doctrine and Covenants 128:7.
[11] Moses 7:33.