Joseph Merrill was an apostle who died in the 1950s. He advocated strongly that science & faith need not be in conflict. A former VP of the U of Utah, he advocated for theological training for LDS Seminary teachers, and he was the person who hired the first seminary teacher. Thomas Yates was the first seminary teacher in an experiment that became a staple of LDS education of high school students. Joseph Merrill was not only the science apostle, but was the first person to conceive of released-time seminary in the Granite Stake on the west wide of Salt Lake County. Dr Casey Griffiths shares more of Joseph Merrill’s life and his leadership over the LDS Institute of Religion. Check out our conversation…
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Thomas Yates, 1st Seminary Teacher
GT 00:32 What I thought we could do, because I want to talk about your other book, too. There was–Rusty Yates that kind of ties your two books together.
Casey 00:42 Oh, Thomas Yates.
GT 00:44 Thomas Yates.
Casey 00:44 Thomas Yates. Okay. So, the other book that came out about a year ago was..
GT 00:49 No, wasn’t there one in your Fifty Relics about…
Casey 00:51 There is, in Fifty Relics. This is another thing that I may have slipped in, personally. I worked for Seminaries and Institutes. And before I came to BYU, I got brought into the Church Office Building to write the Centennial History of Seminaries & Institute. So, Seminaries and Institutes had their centennial in 2012. And they wanted a big book to basically [remember the] first century of seminaries and institutes. And Cannon Audrey Godfrey had written a draft. I got brought in to shape up the draft and add to it. Randy Hall, who’s one of the administrators of Seminaries & Institutes helped. But even before we got to that, the 2012 anniversary was coming up. And the book wasn’t going to be done. In fact, the book came out in 2015, three years late, but they wanted something. So, they had me write a 40-page summary that you can still find on Gospel Library of the history of the Seminary program.
Casey 01:45 I’m trying to track down the very first seminary teacher. I found his memoirs, which are in the Church History Library. He’s a guy named Thomas Yates, a fascinating guy. Thomas Yates was educated at Cornell at a time when not a lot of Latter-day Saints went back East. Thomas Yates, you’ve heard that story about Leo Tolstoy and the American religion. Have you heard this before?
GT 02:10 I don’t think so.
Casey 02:11 It’s in “A Marvelous Work in a Wonder,” by LeGrand Richards. Andrew White, who’s the president of Cornell University…
GT 02:16 I only read that 20 years ago.
Casey 02:18 Okay, so Andrew White is the president of Cornell University, and he visited Russia. And while he was in Russia, he talked to Leo Tolstoy and Andrew White said that Tolstoy came up to him and basically said, “I want you to tell me about the American religion.”
Casey 02:35 And Andrew White said, “We don’t really have a state religion in America.”
Casey 02:39 And Tolstoy goes, “No, I want to hear about the American religion.” And it turns out Tolstoy was talking about Latter-day Saints.
Casey 02:48 And Andrew White `dismissed him and said, “Well, all I know is that they’re in the west and that they’re kind of weird, and they practice polygamy.”
Casey 02:56 And Leo Tolstoy, this is being filtered through Andrew White, apparently said, “I’m surprised that you’re so dismissive. A religion with these kinds of foundations, if it can endure through its first generation, unchanged, is destined to become the greatest force in the history of the world.” Well, that story, which is in A Marvelous Work and a Wonder, it turns out, was told to Thomas Yates. Thomas Yates was a was a student at Cornell when Andrew White was the president. And, apparently, because of Leo Tolstoy, Andrew White took a particular interest in Thomas Yates and took him aside and told him this story. Thomas Yates publishes it in The Improvement Era, and then it gets put into LeGrand Richards’ book. And now it’s sort of folklore in the Church that—we take it so far as to say Tolstoy was a closeted Latter-day Saint.
GT 03:45 A dry Mormon.
Casey 03:46 In reality, it’s a third hand story, filtered through two people. But I don’t have any reason to believe that it isn’t true.
GT 03:51 Right.
Casey 03:52 So Yates comes back to Salt Lake and is the engineer working on the Murray powerplant. The Granite Stake that Joseph Merrill is the counselor in the stake presidency, over, [Merrill] recruits him [Yates] to be the first seminary teacher. And why Yates? Well, he’s really educated. He’s really smart. It seems like he was a pretty funny guy. He talked about pranks where he’d tip over the outhouse in his hometown of Scipio.
GT 04:16 Where somebody was inside.
Casey 04:17 Yeah, somebody was inside. One of his teachers, he said that they disassembled his wagon and put it on top of the shed. They reassembled it there and just messed with him. It seems like he was a really funny guy. He gets recruited to be the very first seminary teacher. So, there’s only two classes the very first year. The building isn’t done. The building, by the way, of the first seminary they build, it looks like one of those bungalow houses you’d see in Salt Lake, in an old neighborhood. They built it so that when the seminary failed, they could sell the building as a house.
GT 04:46 (Chuckling)
Casey 04:47 So 2500 bucks, the Granite Seminary ponies up 2500 bucks to build the seminary building. And Thomas Yates goes and teaches two classes. Now, in those first two classes, Thomas Yates teachers Howard McDonald, who’s one of the presidents of BYU, and a young girl named Mildred Bennion. Mildred Bennion was raised in a semi-active home and a year after she joined the first seminary class, her father passed away. If the name Mildred Bennion rings a bell with you, she is Henry B. Eyring’s mother.
GT 05:19 Oh.
Casey 05:20 So, Henry B. Eyring, actually, when he became commissioner of the Church Educational System, somebody brought him the roll book from the very first seminary that Thomas Yates presided over. And he opened it up and he’s looking through it, and he saw his mom’s name there. And he realized that a program that opened in 1912, had a connection to the Church Commissioner of Education in the 2000s, basically. So, we wanted to find out more about Thomas Yates. He only serves for a year. And then he said it was too much. He had to ride his horse from the powerplant to teach class. I think they paid him 100 bucks or something like that to do this. And he retires, basically, and sort of fades into obscurity.
Casey 06:05 And so we wanted a photograph of him for the centennial. Boyd K. Packer was going to give a big speech to the youth. And we wanted to show the first seminary teacher. So, I tracked down his daughter, it was his granddaughter, actually. And it one of the most special experiences in my life. I came there and found out that his granddaughter, her daughter had just died five days before I got there, and she was going to have to adopt a grandchild. And nobody had ever reached out to the family. And she was so excited. She opens up this photograph book, and there’s photograph after photograph after photograph of Thomas Yates. [These were the] very first images we couldn’t really find of him and who he was. I mean, this is three days before the centennial. I got to go to the centennial and [on the] big screen in the Conference Center, there’s the picture of Thomas Yates.
GT 07:00 Wow.
Casey 07:01 They, actually, had made a movie of Thomas Yates where President Eyring talked about his mother and the guy that they cast, who was Dallin Bales, looked like Thomas Yates. It all work together really well.
GT 07:10 Oh, wow.
Casey 07:11 Thomas Yates is a faithful church member, but really doesn’t do anything of historic significance after that. You could make the case. In the 1950s, they wanted to commemorate the first Granite Seminary. And so they commissioned Mahonri Young to make a statue. No, it wasn’t Mahonri Young. It was Avard Fairbanks. I think it was Avard Fairbanks. Avard Fairbanks does a bust of Thomas Yates. And this is in the Granite Seminary for years. I have heard students that went to the Granite Seminary tell me that Thomas Yates had a huge nose. And the students passing by the statue would rub the nose for luck, on their way up. It’s kind of like John Harvard at Harvard University, his foot is bright because students rub his foot for luck.
GT 07:59 It’s like a rabbit’s foot.
Casey 08:01 If you were at Granite Seminary on your way out of the building, you’d rub Thomas Yates’ nose for luck. So, they tore down the Granite Seminary in the 1990s. I mean, the original building, or at least parts of it were there from 1912 into the 1990s. And they built a new Granite Seminary.
Casey 08:15 So I went to the new Granite Seminary to see if the Thomas Yates statue was there. And they were like, “We don’t know where it is.” So, I started to check around Church headquarters to find Thomas Yates. And I found him. He was at the Church History Museum. In deep storage in the Church History Museum, they pull out the statue of Thomas Yates. And I’m happy to say his nose was bright and shiny, just like somebody had sat there and polished it until all of the Brown was rubbed off. And that was just another one of those, “Hey, this is a guy nobody’s heard of.”
GT 08:34 Right.
Casey 08:45 His family sees him as a great man. And I mean, he’s really closer to what a seminary teacher today is, where most seminary teachers are part-time. They get up in the morning. They teach early morning seminary to a bunch of kids who are really tired. That was more Thomas Yates than a guy like me. Because Thomas Yates was a volunteer, who wasn’t a professional, who just loved the gospel and wanted to teach it. And so I’m happy to say that there’s a picture of him in the book.
Casey 09:16 While I worked for Seminaries and Institutes, I really leaned on Chad Webb, who’s the head of Seminaries and Institutes to move the statute to the offices of Seminaries and Institutes. But I got shot down. Maybe the book will move the move the meter a little bit there, and they’ll pull the old guy out of storage and put him on the floor again. I was just really touched that, for me, it seemed like the day I visited his granddaughter was one of the worst days of her life. And three days later, she was given a VIP ticket to the Conference Center and got to see that video and see the photograph of her father or, I guess it’s her grandfather on the screen.
GT 09:57 Right.
Casey 09:58 And it was a really, really touching moment where you realize, “Hey, we like to joke and laugh about people. But these are real individuals who devote their heart and soul to what they do.” So, he’s another one of those people that I’m glad is going to get a little recognition.
Apostle Joseph Merrill
GT 10:13 That’s cool. Well, that leads us to another book[1] about the guy who hired Thomas Yates. Why don’t you tell us about that?
Casey 10:21 Yeah, this is another, again, passion project. There’s nothing commercial about this. But this is another guy who not very many people know about, but I think more people should. This is Joseph F. Merrill. Joseph F. Merrill is an apostle from 1933 to 1952. But prior to that, Elder Merrill is the father of the seminary program. In fact, you can make the case he’s the father of religious education in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was his idea to start the first released-time seminary, which in turn leads to early morning seminary. He’s the Church Commissioner of Education when the first Institute [of Religion] opens in Moscow, Idaho. He writes a ton of letters explaining what he thinks, and Institute should be. And he’s probably best known in the Church today is his name pops up in relation to Gordon B. Hinckley. He was Gordon B. Hinckley’s mission president.
GT 11:16 Right.
Casey 11:17 So, he’s the guy that sends Gordon B Hinckley back to Church headquarters to get a job. But the reason why President Hinckley was sent was because Elder Merrill felt like the Church’s proselyting materials were just way out of date. And he wanted to send President Hinckley to beg for them to update their media. And that starts the whole media approach to the Church, which President Hinckley is the father of. His papers are here at BYU. And I wrote my master’s thesis on him. My master’s thesis was just the five years he was Church Commissioner of Education. After that, I started to explore his life further, and realized there’s enough here for a full biography, and a really important biography, because this is a guy who was born when plural marriage is happening. He’s the first son of the fourth wife of Apostle Marriner Merrill, who, boy, we’ve got to have another conversation about him. And he ends with the Church being in its modern David O. McKay setting. So, his life really spans this transitional period where he grows up in a polygamous household, and tell stories about a secret hideaway where his dad can jump into if the feds came looking for him. And he ends with a worldwide church, post-World War II era that, really, you could argue [that] we’re still in right now. And so, I just think he’s a really fascinating figure. And not only that, he leaves behind this historical record that was deeply personal, too. [There are] a lot of letters to and from his wife while he was in graduate school. He’s the first Latter-day Saint from Utah to get a Ph.D.
GT 12:50 Was it geology, if I remember, right?
Casey 12:51 A Ph.D. in chemistry.
GT 12:53 Chemistry.
Casey 12:54 And then he was a professor of physics at the University of Utah. [There were] all these letters back and forth with his wife. His wife is the granddaughter of John Taylor and Orson Hyde, Annie Laura Hyde Merrill. She goes by Laura. And she, also, was a great discovery, too. She is lively and political. And she’s like, telling him…
GT 13:14 She turned him into a Democrat.
Casey 13:16 Yes! “I can’t marry a Republican. I can only marry a Democrat.” Basically, she gives him an ultimatum in one of his letters. But they, also in the 1890s, are having all these really smart, sharp conversations about women and the priesthood, and plural marriage and a bunch of things that we think they just didn’t think about back then. So, he writes her and basically says, “Yeah, women can hold the priesthood, with their husbands.” Which is the standard line you still hear in the church today.
Casey 13:41 And she’s writing back and saying, “No, women can go to the temple without their husband. So, isn’t that priesthood?” Like, “Can’t they hold the priesthood?”
Casey 13:51 And she’s familiar with the Relief Society. And that’s where Joseph Smith is saying, “I’m going to give you authority to heal. I’m going to ordain you to the priesthood and everything like that.” So, she is remarkable.
Casey 14:02 And part of the theme of the book, too, is that Merrill was a scientist, and he approached religion scientifically. He has two major spiritual experiences in his life. The second one, he’s on a train coming back to Utah. And he has just decided, “Okay, I’m going to go to church, but I’m going to sort of be neutral.” And he opens up a newspaper where his friend, Richard Lyman, had just been made a Sunday School president.
GT 14:31 General Sunday School president, right?
Casey 14:33 I don’t know if it was a general Sunday School presidency, but he gets this electric feeling. “You’re going to be one of his counselors.” And he describes it as the second spiritual experience of his life. The first one happens right before he goes to college. And he’d literally wrote up like, here’s the sensations I felt, and sends it to a scientific conservatory in Boston for their analysis. Like, “Can you tell me what was happening physiologically, with me at this moment that I felt the spirit?” And that becomes one of the funnest aspects of his character is this is a guy who, when he bore his testimony, was more prone to talk about the laws of physical science than he was to talk about the scriptures. I think he loved the scriptures and was familiar with them. But, to him, the real evidence that God exists was the world around us.
Casey 14:35 But the point is he also was really, really almost fanatical about the Word of Wisdom. And his first wife, Laura gets cancer. And she passes away. He does everything you can and including radiation therapy, which is radical in the nineteen-teens. But he loses her.
GT 15:20 Right, which is a huge, emotional loss for him.
Casey 15:43 Yeah, there’s this poignant theme throughout the rest of his life where he keeps writing things like, “If I had understood the Word of Wisdom, maybe I wouldn’t have lost her.” And the Word of Wisdom…
GT 15:51 But, she obeyed the Word of Wisdom. Right?
Casey 15:53 She obeyed the Word of Wisdom. She wasn’t smoking and drinking all the time. But, in his life, it came down to maybe the principles of the Word of Wisdom that we don’t appreciate. He’s the last apostle to give a speech on eating less meat in General Conference, the most vegetarian General Conference talk ever given. And throughout his life, there’s the statement, “Maybe if we’d lived the Word of Wisdom a little bit more, I wouldn’t have lost my wife.”
Casey 16:18 He gets married again. His second wife is a convert to the Church, who, it seems like she got baptized and then three days later, they got married. He loses her as well. She’s remarkable in her own right, a German Lutheran convert to the church. She accompanies him on his service as mission president.
Casey 16:35 And then his youngest daughter, he doesn’t have any children with his second wife. This is the last one of his first wife, who’s named after her. Laura also gets cancer. And the last few years of his life, “Oh, here’s my chance. I can implement all the principles in the Word of Wisdom, and it will prevent her from dying of cancer, too. I lost my first Laura. I’m not going to lose my second Laura.” And there’s this poignant thread in his journals where he has to watch her waste away, too. He puts her on this restrictive no-meat diet, is using grape juice and a bunch of other things to try and fight cancer. And there’s just nothing he can do. She wastes away. And he has to lose her. And it’s another great crisis of faith in his life, and yet he never loses his faith.
Casey 17:24 So, he spent his entire life trying to find this sort of harmony between science and religion. And the Word of Wisdom seems like, for him, this is both. This works on both levels. But it also seems like he was an individual who was concerned with control. You know, “If I can just understand the laws of the universe well enough, I can control things. And in the last few years of his life, it feels like the last great lesson that he learned was, “I can’t control everything. You know, I can live the Word of Wisdom perfectly. But that might not stop my wife and daughter from getting cancer.” And he doesn’t die of cancer or anything like that. He just dies peacefully in his sleep in advanced age. But there’s a poignance, really that I found that him that made me just really come to love him deeply for his faults and his weaknesses, but also for his goodness, where he was just a person that genuinely thought there’s a way to solve every problem.
Casey 18:18 And when it comes to the institutes, that was another interesting thing was, he writes a letter to the first institute director Wylie Sessions and says the reason Institute exists is to reconcile what they learn in college with what they learn in church. So rather than a religion teacher getting up and saying, “Your biology teacher is often left field, and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Joseph Merrill would say, “Sit down and explain to them how what they just learned in biology shouldn’t weaken their testimony. It should strengthen it. Science, if it’s properly understood, is truth.” The quote that shows up in his writings again and again was this little couplet, “The truth is truth where ‘ere it is found on Christian or on heathen ground.” And so, I titled the book, Truth Seeker, because that’s the name he actually chose for the one gospel book, he published, the Truth Seeker and Mormonism, but it was because this was a guy who got just as excited to learn about the laws of conservation of matter, as he was to learn about the moral laws of the universe. So, it’s a beautiful and a poignant story, and it’s been well received. It got nominated for best biography. I didn’t win.
GT 19:27 Is that at Whitmer or MHA or both?
Casey 19:29 It was nominated at MHA and Whitmer.
GT 19:32 Okay.
Casey 19:34 I didn’t win. It got beaten by the same book both times which is Sally in Three Worlds, which I haven’t had a chance to read yet.
GT 19:41 I haven’t read that, either.
Casey 19:42 It’s about Sally Kanosh, which again, that’s a Millard county story. I knew about Sally Kanosh.
GT 19:45 So, she’s an Indian. Well, Kanosh was an Indian chief. Right?
Casey 19:51 Kanosh was an Indian chief. Sally was a captive. She was a Shoshone that was captured by the Utes.
GT 19:58 Is she the one with the tattoo on her chin?
Casey 20:01 I don’t think so. I don’t think so. But she was raised in Brigham Young’s household. And I haven’t read the book, but apparently it deals with all those issues of–that we’ve got to civilize Sally and yet they still marry Sally to an Indian Chief, Chief Kanosh, who converts to the church. I wasn’t sad to lose to her. It sounds like a remarkable book. I haven’t read it yet. But, boy, this is probably the most personal thing I’ve written.
GT 20:25 Well, and I loved it because, especially, I interviewed Shannon Caldwell Montez just recently. Are you familiar with her?
Casey 20:32 I’m not, no.
GT 20:33 She wrote a thesis on the 1922 secret meetings with B.H. Roberts and all the problems with the Book of Mormon.
Casey 20:42 Oh, yeah.
GT 20:42 And the anachronisms and things and, so she referred to, in 1922–and it’s funny, because Joseph Merrill, it sounds like he just missed that. He was like, right after that, because there was a lot of meetings where B.H. Roberts got all of these, as Shannon calls them, Mormon intelligentsia, to talk about anachronisms in the Book of Mormon, and languages and everything. And I don’t think Joseph Merrill was in those meetings, but he was right after. And the thing that I loved about your book, because it seems like, well, she talked a little bit about BYU and the problems with evolution and BYU. Whereas, he taught at the University of Utah, and they have a lot of the same problems. Utah was too controlled by the Church, which I was like, “Well, you don’t hear that anymore.”
Casey 21:45 Yeah, I mean, I’m one of the undiscovered stories in the book was that—so Merrill’s uncle is Joseph Kingsbury.
GT 21:50 Right.
Casey 21:51 Kingsbury Hall and everything. And it seems like it wasn’t a case of nepotism. Merrill was one of the only people that had a Ph.D. But Merrell was on track to take over the U.
GT 22:00 Right.
Casey 22:01 Like, if everything had gone according to plan, he would have been the president of the U, after Joseph Kingsburg. But in 1915, there is this explosion at the University of Utah. And the accusations are that the Church has too much influence.
GT 22:14 Right.
Casey 22:14 At the University of Utah, and a whole bunch of faculty members resigned. John Dewey comes to Utah as part of the American Association of University Professors to investigate malfeasance.
GT 22:27 Is the Dewey Decimal System guy?
Casey 22:28 This is the Dewey Decimal System guy. This is the father of modern education in America. He is here in the middle of this, smack dab. Again, this is a story I didn’t know anything about. Merrill’s right in the middle trying to satisfy all parties, because he’s an active Church member. He’s a professor at the University and he’s on track to become the next president of the University. By the time it was over, a whole slew of faculty members resigned, and Joseph Kingsbury was just left devastated and had to resign as President of the University, too.
GT 22:28 He was kind of the vice president of the University, right?
Casey 22:53 Joseph Merrell is, arguably, the Vice President and now he’s shoved off to the side. And John A. Widtsoe becomes president of the University.
GT 23:10 Another apostle.
Faith vs Science
Casey 23:11 Another apostle, and so all this is weaved together. But, boy, a book project I’d really love to pursue is that, in the 1930s, you have James E. Talmage, John A. Widtsoe, Richard Lyman, Joseph Merrill, all professors at the University of Utah, all scientists, who all migrate to the Quorum of the Twelve. And this is, we’re talking, around the same time as the Scopes Monkey Trial, when Christian fundamentalists are basically saying, no science, no evolution. It’s faith-destroying. In our Church, for some reason, it was like, “Hey, there’s a great chemist at the University of Utah. Let’s put him in the Quorum of the Twelve.” It seems like you still had your Joseph Fielding Smith, who was a scriptural fundamentalist too. But the leadership of the Church saw the scientists as great leaders and great advocates for the gospel. And that’s another place where a statistic from A Marvelous Work and Wonder that struck me as a kid, LeGrand Richards is touting Utah. He says Utah, per capita, produces more scientists than any other state in the nation. Now, I don’t think that’s true anymore. But the statistics he quotes there are from the 1930s. And there’s this scientific flowering, where Latter-day Saints really ran contrary to the national trends, in that we just didn’t see science and religion as opposed to each other. And I tried to find a place where Merrill dealt with evolution. It seems like every time the question was brought up, Merrill would be like, “Why are you playing around in the mud? Like, look at the stars? And look at the order of the universe? Of course, there’s a God who cares how he created our bodies,” basically, was the gist of the message I got from him. He just didn’t engage, basically, on that question, because to him…
GT 23:17 It just wasn’t an issue.
Casey 24:40 The planets and physics were evidence enough for him that you know what? If we if we came from evolution, who cares? That’s how God created our bodies. And it feels like a lot of the solutions that he presented in the 1930s are the sorts of things we could still use today to reconcile faith and science to basically say, “Hey, do we really have to argue over how old the Earth is? Or, if humans evolved from lower orders of creation, when we’ve got this big, bright, beautiful universe to explore.”
Casey 25:25 There’s this quote by Carl Sagan that Neal A. Maxwell liked to quote a lot where he said, “Science has surpassed religion in delivering awe.” He said, “You’d think the religions would grasp onto science and say, ‘God is greater and more powerful than we thought he was.’ But, instead, religions will say, ‘No, no, no. My God is a small God, and I want him to stay that way.'” Then Carl Sagan said, “A religion old or new that embraced science as evidence of God’s majesty, would really be able to do some amazing things.”
Casey 25:53 And I think you can see in the 1930s, guys like James Talmage, and John Widtsoe, and Richard Lyman and Joseph Merrill, breaking that ground, basically saying, “Why are we fighting against science? Why aren’t we using it as evidence?
GT 26:06 Right.
Casey 26:07 I mean, you could argue that the Book of Mormon does that. Alma, when he’s talking to Korihor says that the evidence that God exists, to me, is the scriptures, the testament of these brethren and the planets that do move in their regular form of creation. They all witness that there’s a divine creator. And maybe instead of being defensive about this or that aspect of science, we ought to be more projective in saying, “Hey, take a look at this. Look at what the Webb telescope is doing right now. How cool is that? And how much does this witness to us of the order and grandeur of the universe?”
Casey 26:37 And when I got into the literature, one of Merrill’s talks was actually called Nature is Kind to Man. He was responding directly to Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison’s a famous atheist during this time. And when a newspaper asks him, “Why are you an atheist?” Edison’s one line response is, “It doesn’t appear that nature is kind to man.” In other words, there’s so much in the universe calculated to kill us and destroy us, it doesn’t seem like we’re really supposed to be here.
Casey 27:04 Merrill, on contrary, goes through and says, “No, nature is kind to man. Look at all the things that had to come together, precisely and perfectly for the human race to exist, where it does. Nature is overwhelmingly kind to man, so kind that you can’t attribute it to random chance. You have to say there’s some sort of benevolent overseer that set everything up for us here.” Like I said, I just feel like, this guy got me through graduate school.
GT 27:30 (Chuckling)
Casey 27:31 I wrote my master’s thesis on him. And then I wrote my Ph.D., and I wasn’t doing anything, that should really rock my foundations. It was just the general cynicism that pervades higher education that would bring me down. And he sort of was giving me pep talks, saying, “Hey, it’s okay that you’re learning this stuff. You just learned something you didn’t know. That’s not a bad thing. That’s a great thing. Embrace that and incorporate it into your life and use it as evidence that God is more powerful and more wonderful than you ever imagined he was.” So, it’s deeply personal in the sense that I see Elder Merrill as a personal mentor to me, as somebody that really took me by the hand, and led me on my faith journey through those difficult areas to the point where now I give this speech every semester to my kids to say, “Hey, go and study biology. It’s cool. And if you find something we can’t reconcile the scriptures, big deal.”
GT 28:27 (Chuckling)
Casey 28:29 It reconciles with the glory and majesty of God. And I mean, take the scriptures for what they are, and take science for what it is. Let’s meet somewhere in the middle where we can all just look around and say, “The universe is beautiful and wondrous.”
GT 28:42 See, because we always hear about all of the [BYU turmoil.] Because you teach in the Department of Ancient Scripture. Right?
Casey 28:47 I teach in Church History and Doctrine.
GT 28:49 Oh, Church History and Doctrine.
Casey 28:50 Yeah.
GT 28:51 But you’re in the building with the Department of Ancient Scripture. Right?
Casey 28:53 I am, yeah.
GT 28:54 Because we always hear that there’s this battle between the Church Education people at BYU that are, like anti-evolution, and “don’t believe any of that stuff,” and then the scientists who teach evolution.
Casey 29:08 Yeah.
GT 29:09 Especially, it seems like in the 90s, they were really battling. But it seems like you’re like, “Why do we need the battle?”
Casey 29:16 I don’t see why. I think it’s a false dichotomy. Like I said, Joseph Farrell would say, “Truth is truth where ‘ere it is found, on Christian or on heathen ground.” So, I work in the religion department, and I’m trying to find truth. A person that works in the physics department or in chemistry or in biology, I think they’re trying to find truth. And honestly, that may have happened here. Like you can document a pretty robust history of that conflict that happened in every Christian university. But I think it doesn’t have to happen here. And in the time I’ve been at BYU, I’ve never once really run into it, to where, you know…
GT 29:55 Is there a peace treaty now between the biologists and the Church Education System?
Casey 29:58 I don’t know if there was. I mean, if there’s a war, I missed it.
GT 30:02 Okay.
Casey 30:02 Because, honestly, I just love what they do. And when they come up with a new study, I’m usually the first to post it on social [media.] When the vaccines were being distributed, a guy at BYU wrote a whole thing on how mRNA vaccines are safe, and here’s the history of it. And I sent it to everybody I could find. I was like, “Alright, read through this.” I don’t think anybody read it because nobody reads more than 240 characters anymore.
GT 30:29 (Chuckling)
Casey 30:30 But I was super thrilled about that. I was excited. When you think about it, the head of the Church right now is a scientist.
GT 30:35 Right.
Casey 30:36 You know, Russell M. Nelson was a medical researcher.
GT 30:39 Although sometimes he doesn’t seem to like evolution, though, it seems like.
Casey 30:41 Maybe, maybe. And I mean, maybe we need to keep a more open mind there, before we embrace every scientific theory. At the same time, too, I don’t think that we have to get knocked off our chair every time something new has come along. I think there’s a–Joseph Merrill would say that there is a glorious, wondrous universe around us, for us to explore. And that’s what we are, is explorers. There’s religious truth, there’s scientific truth. But truth is truth where ‘ere it is found on Christian or heathen ground. So, just embrace truth. And that doesn’t mean that you accept everything wholeheartedly, without being skeptical of using the scientific process, whether it’s religious or scientific truth. But there’s a way to make it all work. And I feel like I identify with this guy, because that was the great quest of his life. And I feel like it’s been the same with mine.
Theologically Trained Seminary Teachers?
GT 31:30 I know we talked a little bit about this last time. But he was the one who wanted to get seminary teachers theologically trained at the Chicago Divinity School.
Casey 31:39 Yeah, one of the teachers, George Tanner said, “Joseph F. Merrill had so much faith in the gospel, he didn’t think that anything we learned at Chicago would harm our testimonies.” And in reality, it did. But I also think that’s a false dichotomy too. Like, there were some people that went to Chicago, and learned there and apostatized from the Church. But for every one of them, there’s a Sidney Sperry, who learned the tools of scholarship and used it to bolster the Church. He used it to explore. And like I said, I think that ultimately what happened at Chicago and Joseph Merrill’s influence–because all Joseph Merrill was saying is like, “If we’re going to have a religion department at BYU, we’ve got to have experts in religion.
GT 32:24 Right.
Casey 32:24 He writes a letter…
GT 32:25 Like experts in science.
Casey 32:26 Yeah. He writes a letter where he says, “Would you have somebody teach physics that doesn’t have a Ph.D. in physics? We need to have Ph.D.’s in religion.” And for a long time, we were really uncomfortable with that, because we have a lay clergy. The head of the church isn’t a professional religion scholar, which is totally fine. It’s actually really healthy. But, nowadays, we’re more comfortable with the idea of religious scholars. We have rigorous projects like the Joseph Smith Papers. We have great scholars in places like BYU, and BYU-Idaho, who are experts in their field. One of the reasons why Joseph Merrill wanted to keep BYU around was he said, “We need to have experts in every field, including religion, that are familiar and conversant with the wider conversation about each one of these subjects, including religion, so that they can speak for the Church in those areas.”
Casey 33:13 And just because the head of the church isn’t a Ph.D. in theology, doesn’t mean that we don’t need Ph.D.’s in theology that can translate when we’re talking to other faiths. So, I just think he had a far reaching vision. And I mean, one of the reviewers for the book, I hope I’m not bragging here, says it seems like Joseph Merrill did for education in the Church, what Reed Smith did for politics in the Church, where he just dragged us into the wider world and said, “We’ve had our own cool little thing going on here. But we’ve gotten to engage with other people, if we really want to be the kingdom of God and influence people.”
GT 33:47 Well, the one question I had for you, though, was, it seems like Joseph Merrill said, “Let’s get this divinity training going with University of Chicago,” and then they called him on a mission. And then it seems like J. Reuben Clark became a little bit concerned about some of this, and then it seems like Merrill sided with Clark. So, I was wondering, if he hadn’t gone on that mission, which was important because he was President Hinckley’s mission president, but it just seemed like he kind of changed a little bit. He became a little bit more conservative, a little more concerned about the religious training.
Casey 34:28 Yeah, some of the Chicago boys come back and they start to make waves. And J. Rueben Clark gives the speech called The Charted Course of the Church in Education, where he basically says, he lays down the law and says that you might have advanced training. That doesn’t take precedence over the leaders in the Church who don’t have advanced training. And there’s some battles that happen there. And Merrill, like I said, is a mediative force. He participated in some of these things, him and John A. Widtsoe got pulled into J. Rueben Clark’s orbit, and they helped pull back some teachers who were at BYU who were disturbing people’s faith. But, at the same time, too, I mean, and this is secondhand by George Tanner, who was one of the Chicago scholars, too, who’s the head of the Moscow Institute for 30 years or something like that. He, by the way, is Leonard Arrington’s teacher. Leonard Arrington said George Tanner was the first person to show them an alternative translation of the Bible and introduce them to religious studies. George Tanner said he ran into Joseph Merrill near the end of his life. And I have to pull up the source, but he asked something like, “Do you regret sending us to Chicago?”
Casey 35:36 And Merrill said, “No. I’m not afraid of any kind of learning.” And I mean, you could argue that biblical scholarship has either hurt the Church or injured it, but I just don’t think it has. I mean, I think it’s part of our growing up process where we start to listen to the voices of other people. And we don’t have to accept everything they say. But think of all the good Sidney Sperry or Hugh Nibley did to where we’d often be embarrassed about the Book of Mormon, like we’ve got a historically defensible case for the Book of Mormon.
GT 36:00 We’ve even got a Pentecostal scholar that’s president of Book of Mormon Studies Association.[2]
Casey 36:03 We’ve got a Book of Mormon Studies Association that brings together people from all over the place. I think Joseph Merrill played a big role in that. And it was because he just wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t afraid to go out and say, “What’s everybody talking about?” Whether they were Church members or not. And “What’s the conversation?” He wanted us to be a part of that conversation. So, there’s these two impulses to separate ourselves from the world, and then to be a light to the world. And I think Joseph Merrill was very much, “We’ve got to be a light to the world,” type of person. The idea that we separate ourselves from the world is totally valid. It’s scriptural. Some people have emphasized that, but Joseph Merrill was saying, “How can we light the world, unless they can see us, and we can see them?” And so, I think that’s a really useful philosophy for members of the Church to adopt today. Basically, before you get defensive– and there are some times where being defensive is merited–listen to what they have to say, and try and find places where you can agree. And then go from there. Defend what you have to defend. You don’t have to roll over and die every time somebody brings something up. You also don’t have to put on your boxing gloves in every conversation you have with someone who’s on a different path.
GT 37:20 Which happens way too often.
Casey 37:21 Yeah, we get way too defensive, right? And even in the Religion Department, someone comes in and presents a new study and we’re like, “Oh, my gosh. Is this guy apostate?” We ought to at least listen to what they have to say before we make judgments, because a lot of times they’re coming from a good place, too. And honestly, my conversations with other faiths have been incredibly meaningful.
GT 37:42 Well, very good. I know I need to let you go. Do you have any last thoughts before I let you go?
Casey 37:44 I’ve got to go to class. They’re going to kick us out of here.
GT 37:46 All right.
Casey 37:48 Last thoughts, I love Church History. And I hope we take that same fearless attitude with Church History to just, when you learn something you don’t know, don’t freak out. Say, “Hey, I didn’t know this. I’m going to explore this for a little while.” If we take that idea that when we get into new territory that feels unmapped to us, it’s not something to panic about. It’s something to celebrate. I think it becomes a lot more fun for us. And we get to stop constantly feeling like we’re in a castle under siege and feel more like we’re an explorer walking through this beautiful country.
GT 38:24 Explorer is where I’m at.
Casey 38:26 Seeing and hearing all these wonderful voices and seeing how it affects us. I like that.
GT 38:32 Yeah, me too. Alright, Whitmer is in September 2023.
Casey 38:36 Yes, John Whitmer, John Whitmer, yes, usually held…
GT 38:37 People can fly into San Antonio, right?
Casey 38:39 It’s the last weekend in September in Fredericksburg. Everybody’s welcome. Everybody come and just experienced this great world that you and I have experienced.
GT 38:50 And don’t forget to purchase your copy of Truth Seeker and…
Casey 38:53 50 More Relics of the Restoration. I’ve got another book we didn’t even get to talk about which is A Dialogue with Scholars of the Community of Christ, but we’ll have to do it another time. I’ll send someone your way and you can interview them.
GT 39:04 Alright. Well, thanks again. Dr. Casey Griffiths, I really appreciate it.
Casey 39:07 Thank you very much.
…
[1] The book is titled “Truth Seeker : The Life of Joseph F. Merrill, Scientist, Educator, and Apostle “ and can be purchased at https://amzn.to/3GgbRFs
[2] Dr Christopher Thomas has been president for the past 3 years. See out interview at https://gospeltangents.com/people/chris-thomas/
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