This article was published in the May/June 2021 issues of LDS Living and republished on the LDS Living website on May 19, 2021.
As I wrote the book Real vs. Rumor: How to Dispel Latter-day Myths, I evaluated popular stories and quotations that circulate in Latter-day Saint talks, lessons, and social media posts. Some turned out to be real, and others—not so much. Tracing the source of a statement commonly attributed to President Gordon B. Hinckley’s wife, Sister Marjorie Pay Hinckley, proved to be an adventure with a surprising destination. Here is the quotation in question:
I don’t want to drive up to the pearly gates in a shiny sports car, wearing beautifully tailored clothes, my hair expertly coiffed, and with long, perfectly manicured fingernails. I want to drive up in a station wagon that has mud on the wheels from taking kids to scout camp. I want to be there with a smudge of peanut butter on my shirt from making sandwiches for a sick neighbor’s children. I want to be there with a little dirt under my fingernails from helping to weed someone’s garden. I want to be there with children’s sticky kisses on my cheeks and the tears of a friend on my shoulder. I want the Lord to know I was really here, and that I really lived.
A quick internet search will yield a plethora of results that attribute these words to Sister Hinckley; it took quite a bit of digging, however, to discover the surprising history of this clever and inspirational prose.
The Search Begins
By entering the words “Marjorie Hinckley,” “pearly gates,” and “peanut butter” into the internet search bar, I got thousands of hits on websites, blogs, and social media accounts. The top two links were for the website Goodreads, which isn’t a great place to end a search because it is an aggregated site where everything is copied from somewhere else. Neither page provided an original source for the quotation—only the simple attribution of Sister Hinckley’s name. The other thing that caught my eye on the pages were two basic grammatical errors.1 Every proper quotation should contain four elements—an author, the exact words, the original setting, and the source. Goodreads presented an author, but grammatical errors made the wording suspicious and it lacked an original setting and source.
Going Inside Sister Hinckley’s Publications
As I continued to search, the quotation appeared everywhere. People turned the text into cute posts, pins, and handouts with eye-catching fonts and graphics. Many added a picture of Sister Hinckley. Others added photographs of charming children or mindful mothers. The vast majority simply copied the words and repeated the same incomplete attribution from Goodreads.
Drilling deeper into the list of hits, I found a news column, written for Mother’s Day in 2016, that attributed the quotation to Sister Hinckley’s book Small and Simple Things. The author of the column did not cite a page number, so I read the entire book—and found nothing. The quotation had evidently been found on the internet, its grammar errors edited, and an incorrect attribution added.2
Now I began to search everything published in connection with Sister Hinckley. For example, the quotation did not appear in three pamphlets she authored or co-authored. It was also missing from the published collection of her letters to her family.3 It appeared Sister Hinckley never made the statement in question. No matter how many Pinterest boards or blogs or columnists recycle the words and attribute them to her, it does not change the fact that those words do not appear in her books or writings. So where did they come from?
A Promising Lead
I continued to search online, but now with specific phrases such as “a smudge of peanut butter on my shirt” or “I want the Lord to know I was really here.” Again, many hits returned Sister Hinckley, but the more specific search winnowed out enough results that I finally found a lead.
In 2013, a blogger used the quotation in a post titled “What Would Marjorie Do?”, but a commenter offered a correction that was integrated into the original post. The commenter said the quotation came not from Sister Hinckley but was included in a speech at the 1997 Brigham Young University Women’s Conference.4 I found the proceedings of the conference and, sure enough, Linda Bentley Johnson closed her remarks by saying, “In my journal I copied these words that I refer to often.” Johnson’s quotation varied from the Goodreads version, using different adjectives and containing an additional line about grass-stained shoes.5 Now, how could I find the source Johnson used to copy the words into her journal?
In hopes of finding an original source, I included Johnson’s name in my internet searches. I found evidence to suggest that Johnson did her best to correct the misattribution circling the internet—she had visited at least four blogs to leave comments about her source. “Sister Hinckley did not say or write the pearly gates quote,” she posted repeatedly. “I have done research on this for a while to find the [original] source since I used the quote in a talk in 1997.” Johnson also stated in her comment that the words had been quoted anonymously in Latter-day Saint author and public speaker Jack R. Christianson’s book What’s So Bad About Being Good? Johnson finished her comment by leaving a final exhortation to “pass it on and correct the error.”6
It turns out Christianson had published two editions of What’s So Bad about Being Good, one in 1992 and the other in 2000. I found a copy of the first edition, but the quotation was not there! So I checked the second edition of the book, and the quotation was there, but with some alterations: this car had no mud on its wheels, but there was “Boy Scout equipment in the back seat”; the dirt under the fingernails came not from weeding a garden but “from helping . . . plant a garden”; and the grass-stained shoes came from mowing the lawn of Mrs. Schenck. And with the quotation was a reference that brought me the closest so far to an original source: Christianson wrote that he obtained the words from a friend of his wife who had experienced divorce and single motherhood before passing away due to cancer. (See the original document Christianson was given at right. The notes belong to Christianson.)
I looked more closely at all of Christianson’s works and discovered he had been sharing the quotation in his speeches and firesides in the 1990s. Johnson likely heard one of Christianson’s talks before she spoke at BYU Women’s Conference and recorded the words in her journal. As far as I could tell, Christianson had never publicly named the author in his talks or writings, always describing her as a friend of his wife.8
A Surprising Discovery
As I prepared this story for publication, I reached out to Johnson and Christianson and both confirmed the reconstructed timeline I’d traced down. Christianson also identified the name of the original writer, and her family authorized me to publish her name.9 Nadine Miner Hobby of Provo, Utah, wrote these intimate and inspirational words as a parting personal testimony.The popularly-shared version of this quotation on Goodreads turns out to be a mash-up from Nadine Miner Hobby, Linda Bentley Johnson, and Goodreads editors—technically no one ever said all of the words on Goodreads. Further, Marjorie Pay Hinckley never wrote or spoke the poetic words about pearly gates and peanut butter that are so frequently—and erroneously—attributed to her. With this discovery, I now hope that people can attribute the quotation accurately and share the words in Nadine’s own voice.
Notes
1. “Marjorie Pay Hinckley” Goodreads, 2008, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/26665-idon-t-want-to-drive-up-to-the-pearly-gates.
2. Carmen Rasmusen Herbert, “For the Unglamorous Mother,” Deseret News, May 6, 2016; Marjorie Pay Hinckley, Small and Simple Things (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2003).
3. Gordon B. Hinckley and Marjorie P. Hinckley, The Wondrous Power of a Mother (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Company, 1989), 10–16; Marjorie Pay Hinckley, Mothering: Everyday Choices, Eternal Blessings (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1996); Marjorie Pay Hinckley, To Women: Is This What I Was Born to Do? (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2004); Marjorie Pay Hinckley, Letters (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2004).
4. Bonnie, “What Would Marjorie Do?,” Real Intent (blog), May 11, 2013, https://realintent.org/what-would-marjorie-do.
5. Linda Bentley Johnson, “Steak and Spam Service,” in Every Good Thing: Talks from the 1997 BYU Women’s Conference, ed. Dawn Hall Anderson, Susette Fletcher Green, and Dlora Hall Dalton (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Company, 1998), 90–91.
6. Linda Johnson, comment, November 23, 2014, “Life and Gratitude and Motherhood ~ Inspired Quotes from an Inspired Lady,” Pieces of Me (blog), April 29, 2010, http://yoga-momma. blogspot.com/2010/04/one-of-people-i-havealways- wished-i.html.
7. Jack R. Christianson, What’s So Bad About Being Good? (Salt Lake City: Shadow Mountain, 2000), 25–27.
8. Jack R. Christianson, Women of Light (American Fork, Utah: Covenant Communications Inc., 2003), 14–15 cites the second edition of What’s So Bad about Being Good? (2000), 26.
9. Jack R. Christianson, emails to the author, February 23–25, 2021; Linda Bentley Johnson, phone call with author, February 24, 2021; Anjanell Burgess, email to author, February 25, 2021.
Episode Summary: Did Joseph Smith really say that? Does the Church have the sword of Laban? How accurate was the story told in Sunday School? Should I trust the information I found online? Can I draw closer to God by learning about history? Real vs. Rumor explores Latter-day myths, rumors, and Church history to demonstrate how to think critically about the information that swirls around us. Each chapter brims with illuminating examples from scripture, history, and popular culture. By thoughtfully combining study and faith to investigate myths and rumors, you will deepen your discipleship, avoid deception, understand tough topics, and see the hand of God in history and in your own life.
Listen to Episode 516: Keith Erekson (May 7, 2021).
Every year, the quote resurfaces on Mother’s Day cards. Abraham Lincoln said, “All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.” The sentiment stirs hearts — and sells cards — because people assume they share with Abraham the exact same love for mothers. But, to paraphrase a fictional Spanish philosopher-swordsman, “Lincoln’s words did not mean what you think they mean.”
We begin first with the evidence. As it turns out, the greeting card tagline is merged from two sources. Two years after Lincoln’s death, his longtime law partner William Herndon told an interviewer that Abraham said, “all I am or can be I owe to my angel-mother.” Twenty-two years later, in his own memoir, Herndon presented a slightly more polished version: “God bless my mother; all that I am or ever hope to be I owe to her.” So the greeting card companies dropped the blessing from the later version and appended the earlier “angel mother” description. We can reasonably say that Lincoln expressed something like this sentiment in probably as many words.
To discern what Lincoln meant by these words we must put them back into context. Herndon explained that the two of them were traveling in Lincoln’s one-horse buggy around 1850 on the way to the court in Menard County, Illinois, where they would argue a case that involved the question of hereditary traits. Though they had known each other for more than a decade and had been law partners for six years, Herndon recalled that this was “the first time” Lincoln ever spoke of his mother Nancy Hanks and the only time he spoke of his ancestry. Lincoln reported that his mother’s mother Lucy was the illegitimate child of a Kentucky woman and a “well-bred Virginia farmer.” The Hankses were poor and uneducated, so Lincoln attributed to his unknown planter great-grandfather “his power of analysis, his logic, his mental activity, his ambition, and all the qualities that distinguished him from other members and descendants of the Hanks family.” Thus, despite thinking he descended from an embarrassing extramarital relationship and growing up in frontier poverty, Lincoln’s hope for his own success rested on the traits inherited through his mother’s mother. The message that “your family is embarrassing but useful” is probably not what you meant to express to your mom.
The only direct reference Abraham ever made to his mother came in a letter to a friend after a woman he was courting terminated their relationship. He felt rejected and bitter, prompting caustic commentary on the woman’s weight, age and appearance. “When I beheld her, I could not for my life avoid thinking of my mother,” he said, “from her want of teeth, weather-beaten appearance in general.” Greeting card companies will likely never adopt this firsthand statement from Lincoln!
Why would Abraham write this? Nancy Hanks Lincoln was poor, illiterate and died when he was 9 years old. His last view of her came on her deathbed, after she contracted a frontier disease called “the trembles” or “sick stomach” or the “puking illness.” Victims experienced weakness, fatigue, vomiting, abdominal pain, severe constipation and offensive breath before passing into a coma and dying. This profound childhood trauma was followed by his father’s quick remarriage, so the term “angel mother” may have been a polite euphemism for “dead mother” to differentiate from his still living stepmother. Herndon reported that Lincoln made the statement about his mother “ruefully,” before he “immediately lapsed into silence” and they “rode on for some time without exchanging a word. He was sad and absorbed.”
This Mother’s Day, let’s liberate moms from harmful cultural expectations about angelic perfection. We can question assumptions, ask for evidence and seek to understand things in proper contexts. We can embrace family experiences as they really are — imperfect, embarrassing, useful and traumatic — because they really do make us into people, like Lincoln, who can make a difference in the world. What more could we ever hope for?
This op-ed was originally published in the Deseret News on May 7, 2021.
Episode Summary: We’ve all heard them. There are pre-general conference predictions, rumors about certain celebrities investigating the Church, and sensationalized stories from Church history. How can you discern what is real and what’s rumor? On this week’s episode, Keith Erekson, director of the Church History Library, teaches how historians approach corroboration and how you can do the same in your own life.
- Listen to Episode 129: Investigating Latter-Day Saint Rumors and Assumptions (May 5, 2021).
- Read the full transcript.
- Read an excerpt on LDS Living (May 8, 2021).
Discernment a Gift and a Skill (pp. 120-121)
Because we live in a world awash with rumors, myths, hoaxes, misinformation, and lies, we must learn to investigate what we encounter. We must learn to discern, as President Russell M. Nelson taught, “between schemes that are flashy and fleeting and those refinements that are uplifting and enduring.” Elder David A. Bednar explained that discernment “helps us to distinguish the relevant from the irrelevant, the important from the unimportant, and the necessary from that which is merely nice.” The Holy Ghost helps us discern truth and error, as well as things that are cunningly crafted or just silly. Discernment is a gift of the Spirit as well as a thinking skill that we can improve. Through practice and inspiration, we can develop a discerning eye, an analytical mind, and good judgment.
Real vs. Rumor is not structured around the “Come, Follow Me” curriculum, but it is filled with insights that will improve your scripture study, thinking, and discipleship. The reading for May 3-9 examines Doctrine and Covenants 46-48 and explains that many early Saints “found it hard to discern which manifestations were of the Spirit and which were not.” This passage comes from chapter 9, which opens section 2 of the book and introduces a process for investigating what is real and what is rumor.
From “Introduction. Our Day of Rumors” (pp. 1-2)
The rumors shot through the crowd like lightning. Murder! Enemy infiltration! The tyrant got what he deserved! Each newcomer gaped in horror at the motionless bodies scattered on the ground—the king, the queen, their servants, and also . . . the foe. Nasty outsider! Evil specter! More like a monster! Speculation mounted into sharp contention as a woman arrived. Everything was wrong! She had seen what really happened; it was she who had run excitedly to call the crowd. Knowing she could only quash the rumors with something real, Abish reached out and took the queen by the hand (see Alma 19:17–29).
We, too, live in a day when rumors and myths mingle with reality and cause confusion, concern, and contention. To survive, we must find and grab hold of the real from amid the rumor, but frequently the two are closely entangled. Forgers write fake words on actual historical paper; con artists couch a long lie in many short truths; spokespeople offer finely parsed words that sound like a lot but commit only a little. Today rumors appear as errors, falsehoods, legends, family lore, false quotes, lies, misleading misinformation, and deliberately distorted disinformation. Sometimes the word myth is used to describe simple errors that stand in opposition to facts. But a myth can also be a sweeping cultural story that lives deep in our minds and underlies our actions. Surrounded as we are by myths and rumors, the best protection lies not in memorizing every possible fact or in debunking simple errors but rather in knowing how good thinking works. Just as Adam and Eve needed to “taste the bitter, that they may know to prize the good” (Moses 6:55), so can we dissolve rumors by recognizing what is real.
Real vs. Rumor is not structured around the “Come, Follow Me” curriculum, but it is filled with insights that will improve your scripture study, thinking, and discipleship. The reading for April 26-May 2 examines Doctrine and Covenants 45 and explains “We live in perilous times, and that can be troubling. Even Jesus’s disciples, when they heard Him prophesy of the calamities that would occur in our day, ‘were troubled.’ The early Saints in Kirtland, Ohio, were also troubled by the perilous times in which they lived. Among other things, there were ‘many false reports … and foolish stories’ that were undermining the gospel message. But the Lord’s response, then and now, is ‘be not troubled.’” The first two paragraphs from Real vs. Rumor show how to put this message into practice.
