Devout: Were Our Ancestors "Godly"?

Thinking about Hermeneutics in genealogy

Stop and think before you read on:

Did you answer the title question based on what you think “godly” means, or did you answer based on what your ancestors thought “godly” meant? Once you’ve fixed your answer in your mind, read on!

The question in the title isn’t really about your ancestors. It’s about you and how you (inevitably, like a human being) project your understanding of the world onto them.

Branching Fields of Study

Genealogy is a field of study that sometimes demands that you become an expert in unexpected, additional areas. You may not be mechanically inclined, but learning about your great-grandfather’s career on the railroad may require studying a bit about running trains. Understanding your great-aunt’s medical career may lead you to digging up turn-of-the-century medical texts. And it never hurts to learn more about farming.

But religion raises the difficulty. A while ago, I talked about how knowing about your ancestors’ faiths can be both useful and difficult:

Religion: Tool and Problem

Learning about the faith of your ancestors can be tricky because you not only have to find out what religion your ancestors (most likely) practiced, but you have to figure out what that religion taught, what the disagreements and divisions within it were, and where your ancestors aligned with those divisions. This will never be obvious.

How someone practiced their religion can either explain or be explained by their choices, so you sometimes have to dig a little deeper to understand what choices they were facing. There is a name for this kind of academic inquiry.

What does “Hermeneutics” mean?

Well, here’s the definition:

That might require some unpacking.

I am an atheist/secular humanist now, but I was raised in a Southern Baptist family in suburban Arizona. Most people who learn I am an atheist now don’t realize that I read the Bible extensively in my youth and still read and study religion and religious history today. Their assumption that “atheist” means “ignorant of the scriptures” is a common mistake and is an example of one way we project our assumptions onto others.

Growing up, my evangelical Christian community was “us,” and everyone else was “the world.” I remember attending week-long seminars in the summer explaining the flaws of the other religions that “claimed to be Christian” and why (in our view) they weren’t. One year, we spent one night each week on a different sect. We covered Catholicism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, “The Occult” (because it was the 1980s and we were in the middle of the Satanic Panic), and two nights discussing the Church of Latter Day Saints.¹

When I learned the word “hermeneutics,” I was horrified by the thought that my faith might be treated as just another point of view, the same as these other faiths that I had been taught to avoid and fear. It was offensive to imply that they were all equally valid, academically. I’ve outgrown that impulse, but I remember it, and I recognize it when other people are confronted with thinking about religion (especially their own) in a neutral, academic way for the first time.

Common Southern Baptist hermeneutics for interpreting scriptures might sound familiar to American Christians. We called ourselves a “Bible-believing faith” and emphasized that the Bible was the literal Word of God. We talked a lot about interpreting the Bible “literally,” but we downplayed the fact that none of us were reading the original text in the original languages.

Not being “orthodox” was very important to us, as well; we made a point of putting our conscience above any “earthly authority” such as a priest. Our pastors were sometimes more educated than we were, but were expected not to hold that against us. “Orthodoxy” vs “Heterodoxy” is just one fault line that can divide believers even within the same faith or sect.

Two hundred years ago, whether members were “abolitionist” or not could be so divisive that groups might separate violently—one such conflict led to the establishment of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845.

These days, “progressive” vs “conservative” may be a more prevalent divider. One of my favorite writers on the subject, Fred Clark (known as The Slacktivist), has a handy post, “Shellfish Hermeneutics,” that illustrates some of the problems that even people of the same faith can have in understanding their hermeneutics.

The Faith of Our Fathers

Both of my grandfathers were ordained Southern Baptist ministers, but they were very different in their outlook. Grandpa Bob was a public school teacher who retired in the mid-1980s and went on to perform weddings at my Aunt Vickie’s bed and breakfast in his later years. In contrast, I wrote extensively about Grandpa Russ’s fiery iconoclastic approach to faith about ten years ago:

A Fire in the Desert

The fact that everyone in the family and both grandfathers were Southern Baptists led me to take for granted that “we have always been Southern Baptists.” Only later did I learn that neither Bob nor Russ was raised in a church like mine. When my mom read an earlier version of “A Fire in the Desert,” she pointed out that she and her mother had urged Grandpa Russ to ‘get saved’ - and before she died, Grandma implied to me that she threatened to leave him in the 1950s if he didn’t stop drinking and join a church.²

Grandpa Bob talked warmly about his family. In his view, they had been respected and well-to-do for several generations: teachers, businessmen, and “godly,” meaning that whatever church they were associated with, grandpa saw them as reverent believers. Grandpa Russ, in contrast, talked about his large family, then living mostly in Kentucky and Arkansas, as “not very good people” - meaning that they had problems with drinking and smoking³ and (when no other adults were around) infidelity. And yet, of all the ancestors I’ve studied, Grandpa Russ’s people had more people with “Reverend” prefixed to their names than any other branch.

As I began to build my genealogical knowledge, I found references to the different faiths that my forefathers practiced. Their names didn’t tell me much about their beliefs: United Brethren, Presbyterian, Disciples of Christ, Quakers, German Reformed Church, and later, Methodist. But as I studied the Protestant Reformation and the waves of revivalist movements that swept the early United States, I learned about some of the deep divisions that plagued these different groups.

Some of these were critical, opposing philosophical differences involving the nature of free will. Some were more symbolic, like how and when people should be baptized. “Infant baptism with confirmation later in life” v. “a commitment to raise a child to be baptized at some later time when their conscience moved them” seems like a cosmetic difference to some people, but it meant the world to Granpa Russ.

Tips For Parsing Your Religious History

You don’t need to attend a seminary to figure out what your grandparents believed. That might not help, anyway, since even a very orthodox religion will have differences of opinion and interpretation, and your folks could be on either side of any controversy. You might be lucky enough to find writings that give you an insight into what they believed.

More often, you will get the name of their pastor and/or their congregation in an obituary. If you have the pastor’s name and a date range, you can search in newspaper databases or look for them in Google Books/Internet Archive-like sources, and see if they left writings that describe their teachings.

You probably noticed my Wikipedia links to the different denominations above—I find Wikipedia is a great starting point for getting a neutral overview of the general history of a church. The bibliography on those articles can lead you to more sources; I like to look there for books with deeper information, or for collected writings by clergy of that denomination.

If you are new to the study of religion in general, you could do worse than reviewing the Crash Course series on Religion:

On Open Mindedness

In my last post, about the career of Dr. Carolyn Putnam, I talked about the conundrum of honoring her as an independent professional woman at the turn of the 20th Century while also not lending credence to the field she worked in. Evidence-based medicine has discredited much of homeopathic medicine since Dr. Putnam’s time, but a lot of people still practice homeopathic medicine. Since you don’t know how your audience may react to having you call it “discredited,” you want to avoid bringing that up unless it is necessary to understand Dr. Putnam’s story.

It is vital not to let your personal beliefs shape the research that you do. Your job is to follow the evidence where it leads and document your findings. Thinking critically may require you to ask “What does that mean?” and “How do I know that?” several times before you begin to make sense of the information. Take your time to question your assumptions.

When you write about what you learn, stick to what you can prove. If you can’t prove a point or you have to make an educated guess, make it clear in your writing which parts of the story you are speculating about.

There will be times when you must record thoughts and feelings attributed to your ancestors that you would rather erase or condemn. You might uncover something painful, and someone may be hurt or offended by what you have learned. Stick to what you can prove, and make it clear when you are expressing an opinion (either yours or your ancestors).

The best advice I can offer is to avoid putting judgments into your writing unless necessary. Stick to the facts, and be open to learning more about the nuances of the human experience.

Be patient with each other—even with the dead.

1. I am aware that since 2018, they have officially preferred to be called "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints," or "the Church" for short. They also prefer their members to be referred to as "Latter-day Saints" or "members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints," rather than "Mormons" or “LDS”. I try to respect that preference in my writing, and I encourage “the Church” to show that same respect to others.

2. I don’t know whether she did—that’s just something she told me once.

3. Smoking was considered an offensive practice and a grave sin in my family. Calling someone a “smoker” was almost always shorthand for saying they had no class, no impulse control, and no moral compass.