Why Church History Matters

How a Documentary on Wyatt Earp reminded me of the importance of narrative versus fact

Documentaries are my jam. I have both exposed and dated myself through that statement. I say exposed because there’s a certain kind of person who thinks a documentary is awesome. I say dated because I don’t think ‘my jam’ is cool or hip enough to say anymore.

All that to say, I watched an ENTIRE documentary on Netflix with my wife yesterday about Wyatt Earp called Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy War. Having loved the movie Tombstone since I first saw it in high school (again, dating myself), this was a story I believed I knew.

1909 Panoramic of Tombstone, AZ from Library of Congress

Man, was I wrong.

Spoiler alerts for a 31-year-old movie below.

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So, you know Doc Holliday is portrayed as a drunk and an amazing shot in the movie?

What I didn’t know was that Doc Holliday was an actual doctor, a dentist who received his degree from the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery. He drank, at least in part, because of the consumption that was slowly killing him and on the order of doctors who believed it would keep him from dying as quickly.

You know how Ike Clanton is portrayed as a coward in the movie?

What I didn’t know was that Ike was also a master manipulator, convincing local Tombstonians (?) within 72 hours of the Battle of the O.K. Corral that Wyatt and his brothers were murderers though Ike’s Cowboys had actually begun the shootout, manipulating the media at nearly every turn of events, and fanning the existing tensions that remained after the Civil War to rally many to the Cowboys cause under a banner of us versus them rhetoric that was simply brilliant.

You know how Wyatt Earp is presented on the ‘right side’ of every decision during the movie?

He wasn’t. My own interpretation of the facts as they were presented is that many of Wyatt’s decisions were short-sighted, with Ike outmaneuvering him on many occasions both with the press and even in the courtroom.

In addition, and totally unknown to me, Wyatt went to jail under presumption of murder due to the O.K. Corral gunfight, partially because of a love-triangle between him, the sheriff of Tombstone, and a local actress named Josephine Marcus. No idea this was even a thing.

You know how everything in the movie appeared confined to this one small town, both in terms of the actions and their consequences?

Actually, the Cowboy War gained national attention, Chester Arthur followed it's events closely and financier J.P. Morgan became personally involved in the back and forth on what to do about the entire fiasco. Beyond just the involvement of powerful people, the situation in Tombstone (particularly the reporting on Ike’s rhetoric and the trial of Wyatt Earp and his brothers) stirred up tensions between the North and the South reminiscent of the Civil War. Other famous names I had no idea were involved included Sherman (yeah, THAT Sherman) being sent to report on the situation in Tombstone, and Wells Fargo (yeah, Wells Fargo) financing Earp’s ‘Vendetta ride’ for a portion of time. This was not a situation confined to Tombstone, Arizona in 1881; instead, there were national implications and some of the most famous people and organizations in history had a personal involvement.

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OK, you’re safe from spoiling a movie that’s three decades old now.

The things I thought I knew about this story but were wrong about, could fill a book.

In addition to encouraging you to watch this amazing documentary, I suppose I should get to my point. Until watching this documentary, I had little idea how much of the narrative I knew about Tombstone differed from the actual facts. And I think this says something about our Christian faith if we’re not careful; we can replace facts (admittedly, these are difficult to piece together thousands of years after the events took place) with narrative, and the results can be a faith that would be unrecognizable to the early followers of Jesus.

This, then, is my caution when I tell you about the impact on my beliefs regarding Tombstone, Arizona in 1881. I believed the narrative I took from a 31-year-old movie, but later learned, watching this Netflix documentary, that much of what I believed about this story was, frankly, wrong. Narrative itself is powerful; it’s the thing that sticks in our minds because it’s well-packaged, it’s got a rhythm we recognize and respond to, and it seems true because we experienced it with our own eyes or ears. ¹

Facts, on the other hand, can be difficult to discern years after the fact. You can’t experience them, they can be ‘dry’ and might not always move you in the way that narrative often does. It takes work to confirm facts, you have to lean in past easy narratives and allow yourself to sometimes be uncomfortable because you aren’t sure where the story is going to take you.

The fact is, none of us were alive when Christ walked the dusty streets of this world. None of us heard his words first-hand, smelled the sea as he walked on it’s waters, or tasted the bread after he broke it and gave thanks for it. We are forced to experience these things through our interpretation, years after they happened, of what we have records of. And this is where the danger lies as our faith is ALWAYS filtered to us through many mediums: the passage of time, the interpretation of scholars, the textual translations of linguists, and the words we hear from those who wish to tell us what the words we read mean.

It is this filter of our faith that I think we should be most cautious of. Most of us aren’t theologians. We typically accept what our preferred scriptural authority figures tell us. We lack the context of the original writers’ world. We accept ideas and we’re not always sure where they originated. We say the snake in a thousands-year-old text is a demonic being because that’s what we’ve been told. We talk about Testaments as ‘Old’ and ‘New’ because an authority figure from our past used those terms. We repeat creeds without knowing where they came from or why they were crafted, we infer things about what the early Christians believed but we can never be sure we fully understand them because we are reading without a full understanding of the context of 1st Century Judea. It is this filter that influences the facts as we understand them or even as we are exposed to them, and is a danger that we all must be aware of when we are listening or engaging with the modern Christian worldview.

Research for yourself what really happened en route to Christianity as you experience it today and ensure you aren’t trading narrative for fact.

1. And yes, I am aware, that the Netflix documentary is STILL a narrative re-telling of what happened in Tombstone. My point is less about trading one narrative for another and rather about the power of story and what we think we know versus the facts themselves. The facts are always harder to discern and the narrative is always so much easier to experience and often to remember.