MIPodcast #176: Redeeming the Dead (Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants) Featuring Amy Harris

Rosalynde Welch: Today I’m joined by Dr. Amy Harris, a professor of family history in the department of history at Brigham Young University. Amy studies families, women, and gender in early modern Britain, and she’s written a number of books on some fascinating topics including the dynamics of singleness and siblinghood in 18^th-century England. She’s also an expert in the ethics, theology, and techniques of family history and genealogical research, and so she was the perfect person to write Redeeming the Dead. Her recent book for the Maxwell Institute, part of our Themes in Doctrine and Covenants Series, Amy had some great insights to share. I didn’t realize for instance, that the church’s focus on genealogy only began in 1894, 60 years after its founding, or that in the Doctrine and Covenants, Baptism for the dead is the primary form of baptism, not just an optional extra. Dr. Harris jokes that family history is not just a hobby but a subversive power to bring on the revolution, because it can help us relate to all human beings as children of God, not objects to be used. She believes that even the most disturbing historical records can be redeemed through temple work, but only if we focus on relationships rather than just names and dates as we do family history. This discussion will change how you think about family history and its role in the restoration, I hope you enjoy it.

Dr. Amy Harris, welcome to the Maxwell Institute podcast!

Amy Harris: Thank you.

Welch: I am thrilled today to introduce readers to your book, Redeeming the Dead, part of the Maxwell Institute's Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants series. It's a wonderful book, really one of the gems of the series. I can say there are seven gems of the series because there are seven volumes in the series. They're all so good, but I really love yours. Before we jump right into the book though, I'm curious how you came to love family history. What are the origins of this overriding interest that has come to define your professional life?

Harris: So it's one that's shared by a lot of folks who are really into genealogy, but not one that's shared by most people in the church or academia. I just came with it. I have distinct memories of sitting by my dad in his office is what we called it, but it was like where the water heater was. There was a little extra space and he'd jerry-rigged a desk in there. And having one of those long, was it? 11 by 8, or sorry, 8 by 14, or 14 by 11, whatever it is, pedigree charts. And filling it in and having him tell some stories of those, some of those people on that list. And I have a copy in my office of the oldest one I've been able to find, which is a little later because it's in cursive. But we moved from that house when I was seven, so I don't know, you know. I tell people I've been into it since I could write, since I learned how to write, because I remember him having to spell names like Robert for me or Daniel. So it wasn't advanced. And you'll hear some people say that they get into family history because they really start digging into the stories of their great-grandparents or something when they're a teenager. And that wasn't true for me. It was more my immediate family because I'm the youngest of nine. After a bit of a gap, my parents were in their late 40s when I was born. So my, three of my four grandparents were gone before I was born and the surviving one was not communicative and died when I was six. My aunts and uncles, my oldest uncles were born in 1907, right? My grandfather was 101 years older than me if he'd been alive. So I felt like my family had this story that was much closer to me in time, like the living people I knew had all this backstory. So for me, it was more photos and stories of those folks that just got me interested. I spent a lot of time identifying family photos and then I majored in family history in college and then it became a profession and a vocation and not just a personal pursuit.

Welch: Well, readers can see in the book you actually include an image of one of those pedigree charts that you filled out in your childish scrawl. I think this was, I love seeing it. So it's clear that it's been, the practices of family history have been a kind of part of the way that you relate to your family because of its unique sort of generational structure. It sounds like in a lot of ways you are an ideal version of Moroni's restatement of Malachi's prophecy, right? That the prophet Elijah will come to “plant in the hearts of the children the promises made to the fathers and the hearts of the children shall turn to their fathers.” You came with that love already planted there. And as you point out, it's different from the way other Latter-day Saints might approach family history because for you, it wasn't about taking names to the temple, right? That work had already been done. So it was more about coming to know who these people were, coming to make sure that they weren't forgotten and that every single one of them was known, their names were known, their stories were known, as far as you could recover them.

Harris: Yeah, and I think, I mean, I don't want to overstate my technological knowledge of all my ancestors. I mean, you can't retain the stories of, I if you just take my great-great-grandparents who all came to Utah, between them, I mean, there's a hundred children, right, and then their descendants. So you can't retain all those stories at equal levels. But yeah, it really was started more like I needed to, my sibling's backstory. I needed to know what that was. I needed to know my parents' backstories. And then that grew. And I'd have experiences in the temple that weren't about doing temple work, because these were the people that did their temple work in Nauvoo and are the reason I'm in the church, right? So, but I would feel connected to them as a group, even if I don't know the nitty gritty of all those people's stories for the past 150 years. And I think what it did was inspire me to enjoy, not just care about, but enjoy the stories of other people.

And a lot of my historical work tends to be kind of more obscure, not necessarily the person themself is obscure, but they're just the obscure pieces that, like people who don't have descendants, right? That die without children or outlive their children. And who's gonna go looking for them, right? But you wanna tell the story of their whole family, not just the ones who happen to have living descendants. Because most people in the history of humanity did not make it to an age where they could have had descendants. So I think it made me attuned to those stories writ large, not just my own.

So some of it is...intellectual curiosity and the puzzle solving and mystery solving that appeals to a lot of people, right? And then it has this overlay of these people matter to me even if I only know bits and pieces of their story. Like one Christmas, I made my family do a Boxing Day family history activity, and so I'm from Ogden in northern Utah and we have generations from Northern Utah, but there were these parts of our family we just don't know the story as well. So I looked up the census records of where the families lived and some property records or something. And we just drove to their addresses and drove and just told a little bit of their story of these parts of our family we didn't know as well. And to me, that was equally satisfying of doing this massive biography on all of those folks. It was just to connect a little bit like, this little physical space that's now like, you know, the back of a warehouse parking lot or something.

But this physical space was occupied by our ancestors. These are the jobs they did here. This is the life they had there. So, yeah.

Welch: Yeah, well, that points to something you show us here, which is that family history has the potential to create communities, not just across the veil, not just these communities with our progenitors. But it also, I think when it's done right, it creates communities among the living as well, right?

Harris: Absolutely.

Welch: As we come together, whether because we share a common lineage and descent, or whether we're just involved in the common project. You point to, you describe in beautiful detail what it was like when the saints first acted on Joseph's revelation about baptism for the dead. And Jane Neyman was the first to be baptized in these chilly waters of the Mississippi, but she was followed by groups of people. You imagine how they would have come together, they would have acted together, where would they have dried off, where would they have written down the names? It brought them together as a community, even as it linked them to those who had gone before.

Harris: Yeah, yeah, and I think that's where I'm gonna be careful how I say this, but I sometimes feel like in the church, just, you know, practices develop over time. And I feel like sometimes we slip into having a form of godliness and denying the power thereof of family history. And we forget that it's about relationships and heart turning. And so that's gotta happen to the living, too. You can't build Zion just by having warm feelings about your dead ancestors, like that's not enough, right? how does this build community now? How does this connect me? Or how does this help me see the people around me as connected? How does this help me see the living more compassionately? Cause I've learned how to see the dead more compassionately and try to understand them on their own terms. So that's where I think its real power lies.

Welch: Yeah. So, so family history is, it can be enjoyable, intellectual detective work. It can be a deeply felt mode of connection with those who have gone before and those who are with us now. And it's also a really central part of our doctrine, right? A really distinctive and core part of the Restoration. And one thing that you do in the volume is kind of straddle all those three aspects of family history, the doctrinal part of it, the relational part of it. And you really don't go too much into sort of the technical part of it, but you give us a nice overview of how that's developed in the Church near the end of the book.

One thing we've returned to a couple times in this conversation so far is the idea that redeeming the dead is fundamentally about relationships rather than about tasks or about numbers. It's a relational work. I wanted to give you the chance just to kind of walk us through that, through that core argument of your book and kind of tell us precisely what you mean that family history should be relational.

Harris: So you had me talk about my early leanings and that's in the book because I feel like with time and maturity I've reflected back on my childhood impulses and seen those were all about relationships. There was no temple work involved because what had not been done by the living people, I had the stereotypical an aunt and a great aunt, right, that had done--or aunts and great aunts--that had done all the work that was available to do, right, in the middle of the 20th century. But those relationships are really important. And I don't think I was super conscious and insightful about that in my 20s, know, sort of going to school and thinking about it. But what I see happen sometimes, and I try to be very careful about this in my teaching, because we'll be in the middle of a classroom time about footnotes, right? And why they matter and have to be constructed a certain way. Or we'll be talking about, you sort of get into this mode of objectifying because the student will say, well, here's the possibilities for this ancestor and here's this. And we'll say, well, you have to eliminate the multiple candidates to see who's left standing to be the most likely candidate. So you have to marry and bury people off, right?

And I'll hear myself say something like, well, so we need him to die, you know, before 1850 or whatever it is. Or we need them to … and I'll try to catch myself in the moment and be, I'm being flippant. We don't actually, we know that, you know, I'll try to remind them and me, we're talking about a person who lived through time and people lost that person. And when we say we need them to die, you know, sort of things you would say you can joke about in the group that you can't joke about outside of your group was just a shorthand for did somebody have one of these names die in this timeframe? Right.

But it's so easy in the sort of nuts and bolts of the record keeping and the technology of is the algorithm gonna catch this? How do I search for it so the algorithm will bring up what I want? I need somebody to die before 1850. You start thinking in these kind of objectifying, kind of crass terms. And then I can see it at church sometimes. And I think we all have that impulse because we get told to do this work. There's sometimes a disconnect because you have all the stories and memories of your own and then on FamilySearch, FamilyTree and those are all great. And then the next thing is we have to produce names for the temple in the tens of thousands or something, right? There's a kind of, people kind of try to balance that all the time. And so I keep trying to-- I noticed that impulse in myself and in others, right, where you sort of lose sight of what you're really doing and that you're talking about people. And so as I got older and had more experience and I was more in front of a classroom where I'm trying to get them to see that, that I thought we cannot, if souls are of great worth, you cannot objectify them. You cannot treat them like an inanimate object you use to accomplish a goal, to solve a puzzle, to show your righteousness, to answer the question on the quiz, whatever it is, right? And for me that's an ethic that pervades all relationships to recognize the humanity and the bodily autonomy of others, that others are not objects for you to use. And that's a sexual ethic that you would think of other people, no matter what your relationship to them is, is there a person first. And that can be an economic object, right? They're a person, not somebody who works for me, quote unquote, right? Or whatever it may be, it can be economic, can be emotional, sexual, genealogical, whatever it is. And if at every moment you remind yourself, these are people, these are God's children, then everything you do is relational. It's not about satisfying a goal or desire or looking good or solving the puzzle, right, or answering the question. It's about: there's a person here. And now when I teach, I tell the students there's a Hippocratic Oath for genealogy. And some of this is because of so many records being digitized and so much DNA testing that we can know lots of stuff about the past that no one is prepared populations for dealing with. But I say to them, the Hippocratic oath is first, do no harm to the living. And second, do no harm to the dead. And we have to start with the living because we have to trust God with the dead, right? We don't know what their day-to-day experience is like. So I feel like if it's relational based, if you go into family history thinking about heart turning, right? And then I'm gonna connect to this person in some small way. It doesn't matter if they're related to you. It doesn't matter if they were great people. That you can think about them. This is a person. This is a person that God has accounted for. This is a person that's redeemed through Christ. This is a person who lived a life confined by their time and place and that limited their agency and options. There's just a sort of recognition of your own small place. Your place matters, but it's, you're not as important as you think you are sometimes. And so these other people matter, right? They matter more than your grade or your stacks of temple names or whatever it is we try to use other people to satisfy. So I feel like family history has taught me how to do that better with the living, how to think of the living in their context, in their space, and not as something I use or something that does something for me.

Welch: That is really powerful. I appreciate the way you formulated that, that keeping in mind the relational character of family history is an antidote to objectification or instrumentalization of human beings, right? And that keeping at the forefront the worth of souls, the fundamental humanity of each human being, is an ethic that should guide us not only in family history, but in our relationships with the living every day, our sexual ethics, our business ethics, right? Of course, our spiritual ethics at church. That is really powerful and family history can be a kind of tutorial in doing that because it's a realm where it would be especially easy, it seems, to kind of turn these just into objects, right? Or names or something that's useful for me to do my work. But we're constantly brought up against their humanity. And if we can practice that kind of humanizing impulse in family history, maybe we'll be able then to exercise it more fully in other realms of our life as well.

So I'm really struck by the power of that relational model in the practices of family history. And it seems that it also has a kind of doctrinal basis as well, right? The relational character of redeeming the dead flows from the relational character of salvation itself in the Restoration, right? One of the central teachings of Joseph Smith that differentiate us from other Christian traditions is the idea that Christ wants to share his saving power with us, right? We are saviors, small-s saviors, on Mount Zion. And so for us as Latter-day Saints, both salvation and exaltation in the form of, of course, baptisms, proxy baptisms for the dead for salvation, and then the sealing, the welding link of sealing and exaltation. These are the mechanisms by which Christ can save us, right? Salvation in Christ flows to us through relationships with other people, not exclusively through God. And that's a pretty revolutionary change from the way I think that historic Christianity has seen it. Although I'm quick to concede, as you helpfully point out, many Christians and Christian traditions in all times and places have felt this yearning towards a connection with our dead. We don't have a monopoly on that sort of yearning.

But you make the really fascinating point that when you read sections 127 and 128 of the Doctrine and Covenants very slowly and carefully, what it shows us is that baptism for the dead is actually the fundamental and primary form of baptism. And baptism for the living was instituted to form a relationship with baptism for the dead. So from the beginning, baptism for the dead is not a stopgap solution to a problem. I've been guilty of calling it a kind of theological solution. It's not that at all. It is the plan. Baptism is meant to create these intersubjective relationships between people across the veil and between people among the living now. So tell us a little bit about Baptism for the Dead as a work of heart turning.

Harris: So first ,we have to give Jenny Webb credit for her essay because I don't know how many times I have read and taught section 128 and sailed right past that. And I read Jenny Webb's essay about Section 128. And she makes that so clear that I went, wait a second, I got to go open Section 128 to see. And it's right there. It's in black and white.

And she's the one who says this was the plan, that most people would come to earth and never know Jesus, and God had already figured it out. And it gives me perspective on what mortality is and isn't, what it is for most people, and that, that's already baked in to provide all the justice and mercy necessary for this life and beyond. Sorry, you asked me heart-turning, right, about baptism for the heart-turning. So yeah, I was just really struck by that, that baptism for the living is supposed to remind us of baptism for the dead. And I love that image that you put it quite beautifully. I don't know if I drew the connected the dots in quite that way in the book, but that baptism is symbolic of Christ saving us, right, and us joining in as a follower of Christ. But that if it's supposed to be a reminder of Baptisms for the Dead, that at the same time it's supposed to remind us of our connection to other humans and our responsibility to other humans. Like you said, to be little saviors.

So I think, I mean, for the early saints, it's so clearly heart-turning. I mean they're just, I can't imagine, like you said, this yearning. And it's not just Christians, right? Traditions all across the world, you know, ancestor worship or ways of remembering ancestors, this desire to have something that transcends death. So I cannot imagine hearing that sermon from Joseph. And it must have been powerful because he's experienced that, right? He's thought about that. He's had the revelation already about Alvin and the Celestial Kingdom, but no mechanism for how it does that. You know, I can't imagine sort of that moment of that fall of 1840, sort of as that trickles out and as people's, the letters, like we don't have a text of the sermon, right? We just have people talking about it. And so you can see there's sort of, this is the most beautiful thing I've ever heard. And I can't imagine, because it's just so baked into my way of seeing the world. I had a brother who died before I was born, but just before his eighth birthday. So my parents could turn to our own scripture to comfort their children about his fate and our fate, right? And my mom also said he had to convince me and my sister to come to our crazy family. So, but that's really powerful if it's not just your parents saying that you go to church and you get this constant, what's the word, know, sort of.

Welch: Reminder or reinforcement. Yeah.

Harris: Reminder and reinforcement. That's what I'm looking at. Reinforcement that this is real and this is true and then you're reading it in seminary and there's that verse that says, you know, your brother's with you forever. I should ask my siblings who remember him, right, how that worked for them, like how they, if that comforted them as they got old enough to understand that.

So for them I just think the early saints, it was so powerful because these were people they knew and had wondered about, you know, they just missed out on the restoration by a week or something. I have ancestors who joined the church in England, and one of whom got baptized in Nauvoo, I don't think in the river, but in the the font the following year, for her brother who died, I don't know, a few weeks before Wilford Woodruff showed up in town, preaching the gospel, right? And so how powerful that must be to be that person it's not like every time you got baptized for someone you had to have this incredibly spiritual experience for it to be overall heart-turning. But I think it was so instinctual for them, because these are people they knew. One of my favorite stories, because I have students and I were looking through all the people who went down to the river and got baptized. I'm fascinated by these people now, right, as I think these are these are the… Even if you joined the church two years ago, these are your people, right? These are your people that, this is where it started and this lived experience, not just the sermon, but walking down to the river, right? And taking a witness with you and bringing some pen and paper. And I just think, you know, to capture that now is maybe a little trickier because if now, if you're a convert, doing your parents or your grandparents, I think it's instinctual. I think it comes.

But if you're two generations down or somebody's done a fair amount of the easy stuff, right, the close to you stuff, it can be harder to capture that.

Welch: Well, that's a nice transition into something else I wanted to ask you about, which is how the early saints might have seen the work of redeeming the dead differently from the way that we modern saints do. Certainly, the newness of the Restoration and the salience of death in their milieu, both of those things would have given this doctrine and these practices a real immediacy.

Would you point to anything else as sort of a key difference in the way that early saints versus contemporary Latter-day Saints approach the work of redeeming the dead?

Harris: I would say one of the biggest is they don't think about genealogy. Right? Like, genealogy is not a part of the church for the first 60 some odd years. Yeah, individual members kind of in the 50s, know, the Pratt brothers and Wilford Woodruff and stuff, do some, but it's not a church program. And of course you can only do baptisms for the dead until 1877. So that's almost four decades of church growth. They're not doing proxy ceilings for the dead. You can do adoption ceilings, right? And so there's dead and living combo, but not like go and do work for all of your deceased ancestors. And so that's a very different mindset. And that's a lot of years. That's until 1894, right? That's 60 plus years of the church

Welch: Yeah, so so to clarify they would--early Saints would certainly be thinking about people who had died and had gone before them and would, you know, would feel connected to them. But the idea of being focused on your own lineage and trying to trace back as far as you can your own sort of pedigree chart that wasn't a part of the way they thought about this about this work?
 
Harris: No, not at all. I mean, I think some people aside, right, I think we know early examples of that, but as a group, as a part of your religious community's way of being, no. So when they were doing it, it was people they knew. And it would be friends too, right? They could do friends or family. And then because of adoption sealings, the adoption theology was about we needed to be sealed into a priesthood lineage of the idea was they would seal themselves all basically to Joseph as a kind of dispensation leader, as children to Joseph through various links, maybe not maybe directly, but also maybe through another church leader, like an apostle church leader, not just anybody.

So they were thinking communally, they were thinking about their kind of network of relationships in interesting ways, and then of course, Jonathan Stapley and Sam Brown have talked about all of this stuff quite beautifully. But they weren't, it wasn't, what about my 17th-century ancestor?

Welch: Yeah. So it's in 1894 that Wilford Woodruff has a revelation that ends the practice of ritual adoption and instead focuses the Saints on searching out their ancestors and doing proxy baptisms and then proxy sealings to one's own progenitors. Susie Young Gates was very instrumental in helping the Saints understand how this new approach to family history and redeeming the dead could play out. And she was one of the key church members who introduced the saints to practices of genealogy.

And in a way, that's been a beautiful thing, right? It's allowed us to hasten the work and to feel more connected to our ancestors. And the reality is that our material bodies really do matter. And so our biological descent makes a difference in our lives and it can make us feel grounded and connected here to this material world by being aware of that.

But there are cautions as well, right? When we make that switch to a genealogy mindset, there are pitfalls that can pop up. So talk us through some of the ways that we need to bring this relational mindset to the idea of genealogy.

Harris: Yeah, that was, well first I want to say something about, so I mean Wilford is, Wilford Woodruff was, you know, creatively opened to lots of stuff and he loved adoption stuff, right? And so to give that up is, you know, to get a revelation that goes against everything you had practiced for, let's see, if we take it from 1840 to, you know, for 50 years and say, there's this other way to do things, it's quite remarkable, right? This kind of major, I want it to be canonized to Section 139, because there's a huge impact on how the church after 1894 manages things, thinks about salvation, day-to-day lives in the church. But anyway, that's my own little special wish for the future.

But, you know, so Joseph F. Smith, of course, and Susan Young Gates, and of course they were friends and they both cared about genealogy as a practice of the church. But it was an uphill battle to [get the] membership to care, right? Or to do that work. They're like, this is too hard. And bless them. It would have been hard in the 1890s and 19-teens to do that kind of work. But there's this kind of resistance, right? I mean, even when Susa Young Gates is running the Relief Society and her own Relief Society board's like, can we get rid of this? Can we be done with these lessons? No one wants to do this work. This is hard. You know, so I sort of feel like, you know, Family history: 130 years of resistance from the membership. Not temples necessarily, but the nitty-gritty of genealogy, right?

But I think the problem is in the 19th century, genealogical practices, and this is just difficult for Christians, this is just difficult for humanity, is how do you take your higher virtues, your higher inspired or revealed truth and kind of transcend your cultural barriers that might keep you from pursuing those? So in this specific context, in the 19th century, genealogical practices in the English-speaking world, shall we say, right, sort of Britain and its exported culture, and in America, is very classist, sexist, and racist. I mean, it's just explicitly eugenic. Susa Young Gates's stuff is just explicitly eugenic. It's great. It's got all this how-to. She writes the first how-to manual in the country about how to do genealogy. It's “how to” and then there's the like rank of races, you know, so it's all there. And genealogy's history is much older than Latter-day Saint reasons for doing it and it's tied up with aristocratic conceits and property ownership. It's not--and even sometimes when it's wrapped up with identity, the identity is about sort of I'm superior to you, right, or I'm a special identity. I have access to special privileges or whatever, that is so easy, that is such an easy slope to go down when it comes to genealogy.

And I feel like the revelations coming in the middle of the century, and then again at the end of the century, and then again at the 20th, know, early 20th at the end of World War I with Joseph F. Smith and Section 138, are reminders that we are--cautionary tales to pull us back those impulses. And if we can keep that relational perspective in mind, I just think of Joseph, like you said, with Alvin and his and Emma's children, and we think of Joseph F. and the loss of his children. I just read that biography of Joseph F. and just how much the loss of his children, the children he outlived, adults, right, just how that tore him up. And this is somebody who already believes in their eternal connection.

So those revelations, and there's this great essay by Rick Turley about Joseph Smith and death and how that shaped his feelings about work for the, know, the questions he was asking God of that led to revelation. Revelations coming out of death and loss and sorrow because you're related to those people, you're connected to those people, and that leads to revelation. Just sort of doing genealogy doesn't lead to revelation.

Maybe it can, right? But it doesn't have the same power of… Genealogy is a tool. Doing pedigree charts and footnotes are tools and the relational is the end point. And so I think now we don't, I think we're more aware culturally of the racial and class component somewhat. I mean, genealogy is kind of a privilege of those with money. Other than members of the church who the church subsidizes our access to things. But you still have to have a computer and a Wi-Fi connection and you know there's still a sort of material resource necessity that the church works to ameliorate, right? They try to build family search centers and do printed booklets for places without Wi-Fi. You know they're aware that they don't want that to be a barrier. It is a barrier in the industry and for most people in the world. And so I think the revelations and the relational aspect of those can hopefully prevent us from making the mistakes the industry makes

And so I feel like the Restoration pushes against all of those, resists those very human us versus them proclivities and says, no, this is not why we're doing this.

Welch: Yeah. You make that case compellingly, I think, both showing us the dangers of instrumentalizing--there's that word again--instrumentalizing the practices of family history and genealogy to serve this kind of intrinsic desire of the natural man for status, right, and to achieve superiority. So we're tempted, we're tempted to look back at our ancestors for those who may have impressive pedigrees, right? And use that to kind of burnish our own social status. Or we might see that in the church, right? Where maybe there's a sense that if you descend from a well-known church leader that gives you a kind of spiritual superiority. We're tempted in all sorts of ways to use and to co-opt or to hijack this saving and beautiful teaching and use it to kind of build our own petty little status hierarchies.

But you make the point very compellingly that the restoration pushes against that strongly and that the restoration of these teachings about family history and sealings are rooted precisely in Joseph's revelation of a universal salvation for all people or a universal opportunity for salvation for all people. Beginning in section 76, where we see that God's mansions are much more expansive than we understood and that he has prepared a place for almost every member of the human race.

And then if you look at the history over time, for instance, of temple access from the 1978 revelation, that allows Black members to enter the temple and hold the priesthood, to increasing access for women who are unmarried or married to a non-member, to very recently we've seen a real opening of the temple doors to young people, right? You don't have to just wait until you're getting married or going on a mission, but young adults are encouraged to approach the Lord and to discern carefully in their own lives if they're ready to take out these, make these sacred covenants with the Lord.

And then of course, just the increased availability of temple worship to Saints all over the world. These all push toward this very expansive view of God's love and the way that God wants to hoe every single furrow and clear every single channel to get his love out to every member of the human race. These more exclusive kind of superior, superiority-based approaches to lineage absolutely don't fit into that view of who God is and who we are in relation to him.

Harris: Right. Right. I mean, he says, you say you're the children of Abraham, so what? Right? Like I can make rocks the children of Abraham. I, you know, I need, I need your hearts, not your DNA.

We objectify, we commercialize, we commodify human beings, and it has real damage to the living. And if you can learn how to break that cycle by engaging with family history, that's kind of easier, right? Because the dead can't fight back. So you can learn to kind of argue with them or forgive them, but it's a simpler, less complicated, even when they do horrible things, it can be really hard. But you're not in the wake of that experience. You get to kind of deal with it a little bit removed. And so if you can do that there, then it should be a little easier to be like, okay, what do I do in my lived relationships that contributes to the trafficking of human souls, right? Or to the objectifying or the exploitation of others that I could stop in some way.

Welch: I'm really compelled by that argument that family history is a kind of laboratory for developing an ethics of humanizing the other and that then we can live out those ethics more fully in other aspects of our life. That's something I'm really going to take away. Another way that you approach this question... Yes.

Harris: So can I just say something there real quick? This is my favorite line and I'm afraid to put it out there because then I can't use it as much because it carries a little more of a punch when I say it in certain, you know, very particular settings. But I really, and I say it as a joke, but I mean it too, that I think from the outside people think family history is a hobby. Even in the church sometimes I think people are like, well, you know, there's people who will help me do it when I want it, but I just go to the temple. Other people do family history so I can go to the temple. And that's fine. I'm not trying to say that's a bad thing to do. But I think we undersell the power of what it can really do. We think of it, we flip the script and we think the technology is the power instead of the family history is the power. The technology is a tool for family history and then family history is a tool for the heart-turning, right? We kind of get lost in those steps sometimes.

So I think, and especially from outside the church, at least inside the church, even if we do some of that, we still think of it in a kind of bigger scope of what we're really engaged in, right? What the work is. But especially from outside, this sort of like, well, it's a hobby or it's a job. And I say to people, like, no, it's a subversive power to bring on the revolution. Like, it's not some Grandma hobby, right?

You just have to tap into its revolutionary capacity to remake human relations that are closer designed, but that's just my own little personal… That's all that's all it is.

Welch: That's all...that’s all it is.

Harris: It's built from the foundation of the world so that we can revolutionize the world and make it worthy of Jesus's return, but sure it's a hobby.

Welch: Just my little hobby, yeah. Well, that's so important. It's not that technology is across the board bad, right? On the contrary, we're grateful and we can see it actually as a gift from God, but it's whether the technology is driving what we do or it's whether the technology is put in service of a sacred vision of the human family. And in some ways it seems like the same thing happens with the most basic of all technology, which is writing. Right? Writing down records, keeping records is a kind of technology in and of itself. And one of my favorite parts of your book is where you look at the way that this technology of record keeping is sacralized, right? It's made sacred, especially in sections 127 and 128, we see Joseph working toward this idea of keeping records as more than just an administrative or clerical task, but something that has enduring spiritual power. So walk us through that idea.

Harris: Yeah, so I got to give Robin Jensen, who's at the Church History Library, credit for putting me onto an author.

Welch: John Durham Peters, yes.

Harris: John Durham Peters, there we go, yes. We called it celestial bookkeeping, right? The Joseph Smiths. And I love it because of course from the New Testament, you have the idea of the book of life, right? That things were recorded in a book, but it's kind of, yeah, but that's kept by angels or somebody, right? And that Joseph's revelatory insights are, no, we're going to keep those books. We're going to make physical books. Right? They're real books. Well, not anymore, not since 1970. Now they're, now they're, data, but the same concept, right? They're physical books or they're physically backed up on some servers, right? Multiple backups, just to reassure everybody. That how we record that is a gesture. It's not just, I recorded it, so it's fine. And I also like, mean, if you think about Joseph's first revelatory action is the Book of Mormon. And that's a record of dead people. Right, being saved by the record itself. It's just so explicit. And so the idea that, like you said, 127, 128, so you need recorders and you need witnesses and it needs to be this kind of clerical efficiency is what it sort of sounds like on one level. But there's something about trying to make those records accurate, well recorded, that the ordinance was done properly.

So the books matter because not because God's actually not going to save you if you're not in the book. Right? But because they show our belief in what we're doing is real. It's a physical, we're good with physical stuff, we need physical stuff to remind us. That's why we have ritual. It's where our body does something and that symbolically represents the spiritual work being done. So I love this like, no a human wrote this down, a human witnessed this. Now it might be human typed it in or scanned it, but a human did that work, right? Sometimes Family Search, Family Tree people talk about it's like it's some mystical entity that produces content. I'm like, no, humans entered that data. Humans created the algorithm and build the website. Like people, your fellow saints that you were bound by covenant to are doing all that work.

Welch: Yeah. And that means, and that means it'll be imperfect sometime, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Harris: And yes, it's going to be super messy. It's crowdsourced. So it's super messy, but God's clearly okay with that. Sometimes I'm frustrated by it, it's part of a bigger project. So I think there's a sort of beauty in that messy, kind of mundane, detail that's echoed in lots of things we do in life. Like you get up and you make breakfast for your kids. That's sacred work. Any work is consecrated work when it's done that way, right?

Welch: That is so powerful. And yeah, I mean, if we think of heaven as a network of sealed relationships, this is an argument that historians like Sam Brown and J Stapley and Amy Harris have made. If for Joseph Smith, for the Restoration, heaven is a network of sealed relationships, then these records that record those sealed relationships, they are building the blueprint of heaven. They are building the foundations. In fact, they're building the walls of heaven right here and right now. And to me, that is so powerful and so meaningful. And we could spend another hour just on the ramifications of that, but I won't.

But the reality is that there is another side to human records as well. There's this beautiful, redemptive side, but there are also many situations where human record keeping not only records but actually perpetrates incredible harm and atrocity. So there's a downside to record keeping as well. You share an incredible experience that you had with a student in the book. Will you share that experience and talk a little bit about the dark side of record-keeping?

Harris: Yeah, so I teach beginning students how to use the US census records or other census records, and then they're usually somewhat familiar with that, but they're not familiar with what's called the non-population schedule. So all the things that are counting like agriculture or industry, and among those are slave schedules from 1850 and 1860 that record the enslaver's name and then just tick marks for gender and age groups for the people they've enslaved. So, but these are an important record for people who have enslaved ancestors because you can sometimes piece together the named individuals formerly enslaved from an 1870 or from property documents of the enslaver and put it together those little tick marks and be like that's my ancestor and maybe push it back a little further and maybe get some names from other records. So as I was walking to class to teach about slave schedules plus some other things. There's tribal censuses that are about the removal of Native and Indigenous populations on the reservations. There's what's called the defective schedules. That's what they're called. It's horrific. It's about those with intellectual disabilities or blind or deaf. So these are all just, they're great because you're like-- my ancestors, why are they in these records?

Welch: Yeah, to find them in these records, yeah.

Harris: Right. these records. And so as I'm walking to class and I realize for the first time I'm gonna have an African-American student in class who has enslaved ancestors. I can't just get up there and be like, so this is how you find the record and this is how, you know, I can't just talk about search engines. And I was, I got a pass because she wasn't in class that day, but I thought about it and this felt like an inspired or revelatory moment for me when the phrase came to me. “Those are unholy records.”

And that was very helpful phrase for me to think about, okay, that's something if she'd been in class, I could have said, be like, these records, and said to the group, because we also read deaf schedules and deaf marriage censuses in the late 19th century. Like these records are wicked because they're objectifying and dehumanizing God's children. But we, this is your small-s saviors, we can redeem those records because we pull out of them one of those souls of great worth. And we identify them by their name, by their place and time, and by the web of their relationships and perform work on their behalf that says, is a child of God, this is not a slave. And I purposely use that term instead of our more current term, right? That's how the 19th century would have called that person as a slave.

Welch: Yeah, enslaved person. Yeah.

Harris: This isn't what the 19th century would have called an idiot or an imbecile, right? Or dumb. This is a child of God who experienced gross injustice in their mortal life. And so we, that was a really important moment for me to sort of think of how I teach students about these horrific records. And it's almost all of you, you've been record keeping at some level, right? You're like, well, reading about military service, that's not easy to read, to see what had happened to your ancestor in a war or a genocide or, you think of the Holocaust Museum, those are not records one would want to have of one's ancestors. But they are the record of the ancestor. They're the way you know that person, you know anything about that person. So I think that was really beautiful to me to think through how the Atonement saves these people. We participate in and witness that. And then we turn these physical objects that are horrific. And through the alchemy that is God's love and salvation, they become this holy sacrifice. The Doctrine and Covenants calls it a “book worthy of all the acceptation” that we will offer as a sacrifice. And I sort of see that also as symbolic, like we're offering our sins, right? We're offering up kind of in the way the Israelites would offer up, know, collectively, yeah, the blood and sins of this generation, right? The way we have enslaved and abused and exploited hurt one another. We're gonna give that up and we're gonna we're gonna offer this book, this book that's about us doing redemptive work. Will you please let the judges from this book and not all those other books.

Welch: To me, that is the essence of what we mean by restoration. Yes, it's a set of teachings, it's the restoration after the apostasy, it's those things, but really restoration is about mending what was fractured or broken, redeeming what was evil. Beauty for ashes, right? What was red as scarlet can be as white as snow. This is what restoration is about and this is why it matters, right? This is the only reason why it matters. It's not about us as a people. It's about getting God's love out to the whole human family. And so that realization of yours, that these unholy records can be put on the altar, I hope to be burnt, right? And to be transformed in the process into something holy and something that we can with confidence offer to the Lord and offer to our own brothers and sisters was moving and powerful to me. So thank you for sharing that. Amy, this has been such a great conversation. We're getting to the end of it now. This podcast series, I call it “The Questions We Should Be Asking.” And so typically I ask my guests to close us out by sharing with us the best questions that you think Latter-day Saints should be asking themselves and each other about family history.

Harris: Well, I mean, it's going to be kind of obvious now that we've had this conversation, but I think we should ask ourselves when we're engaged in the work, does this turn my heart? Does this help others turn their hearts to other people? And then how you answer that question can drive just about anything you do. I think it would also reduce people who feel guilty for not doing family history, that going to visit their great aunt and asking her about her childhood, even if they don't record it. Right? Would it be good if they recorded it? Absolutely. But even if they don't record it, they're like, that was heart-turning. Hmm, maybe I don't need to feel guilty the next time someone gives a talk about family history at church, because I'm turning my heart to my kin, and I'm turning my heart to God's kin. So I think that fundamental question is this heart-turning, or will it help others turn their heart? Like if you're running an activity or something, right, to ask is this going to help people turn their hearts? We can't guarantee they will, they have agency. But would this help them or make it harder for them to turn their hearts to others?

Welch: I think that is the most important question, not only in family history, but in almost every realm of our religious lives. Thank you, Amy Harris, for being with us today on the Maxwell Institute Podcast.

Harris: Thanks for having me. It was great.