Review of:
Saints—The Story
of The Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days, Volume 3: Boldly, Nobly, and
Independent, 1893-1955 (Salt Lake
City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2022)
Firstly, I would like to thank the
Church History Department for sending me an Advance Review Copy of this book.
As one who is engaged in Latter-day
Saint apologetics and scholarship, one always appreciates Church history and
other issues being more accessible to non-specialists. While, alas, many
histories of the Church would fall more under the label of “historiography” and
faith-promoting material that ignores many issues (often “difficult” issues),
it was refreshing to read this volume, as it presents early LDS history during
the Joseph Smith era, “warts and all,” in a way that will be accessible to all
members of the Church, not just nerds like me who love delving into the complexities
of various issues and love pursuing dusty old manuscripts. I plan on loaning
this copy out to the young men in my branch and others.
As one who is a firm believer in
inoculating church members by discussing, in an open and faithful way,
“difficult” issues, I look forward to the remaining volume in this 4-volume
series.
Here are some important excerpts that
show, among other things, the very open manner the Church now discusses
difficult church issues and other topics those engaged in LDS apologetics will
appreciate:
1893 and Changes
to the Adoption Ceremony
[I]n Salt Lake City, Wilford Woodruff
announced to his counselors and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles that he had
received a revelation on the law of adoption. “I have felt we are too strict in
regard to some of our temple ordinances,” he declared on the eve of the April
1984 general conference. “This is especially the case in regard to husbands and
parents who are dead.”
“The Lord has told me that it is right
for children to be sealed to their parents, and they to their parents just as
far back as we can possibly obtain the records,” he continued. “It is also
right for wives whose husbands never heard the gospel to be sealed to those
husbands.”
President Woodruff believed they still
had much to learn about temple ordinances. “God will make it known,” he assured
them, “as we prove ourselves ready to receive it.”
The following Sunday, at general
conference, President Woodruff asked George Q. Cannon to read a passage from
section 128 of the Doctrine and Covenants to the congregation. In the passage,
Joseph Smith spoke of Elijah turning the hearts of the fathers to the children
and the hearts of the children to the fathers in the last days. “The earth will
be smitten with a curse,” the prophet Joseph had declared, “unless there is a
welding link of some kind or other between the fathers and the children.”
President Woodruff then returned to
the stand. “We have not got through revelation,” he declared. “We have not got
through the work of God.” He spoke of how Brigham Young had carried on Joseph
Smith’s work of building temples and organizing temple ordinances. “But he did
not receive all the revelations that belong to this work,” President Woodruff
reminded the congregation. “Neither did President Taylor, nor has Wilford
Woodruff. There will be no end to this work until it is perfected.”
After noting that the Saints had acted
according to all the light and knowledge they had received, President Woodruff
explained that he and another Church leaders had long believed that the Lord
had more to reveal about temple work. “We want the Latter-day Saints from this
time to trace their genealogies as far as they can, and to be sealed to their
fathers and mothers,” he declared. “Have children sealed to their parents, and
run their chain through as far as you can get it.”
He also announced an end to the policy
that prevented a woman from being sealed to a husband who had died without
receiving the gospel.” Many a woman’s heart has ached because of this,” he
said. “Why deprive a woman of being sealed to her husband because he never
heard the gospel? What do any of us know with regard to him? Will he not hear the
gospel and embrace it in the spirit world?”
He reminded the Saints of Joseph
Smith’s vision of his brother Alvin in the Kirtland Temple. “All who have died
without a knowledge of this gospel, who would have received it if they had been
permitted to tarry,” the Lord had taught, “shall be heirs of the celestial
kingdom.”
“So shall it be with your fathers,”
President Woodruff said of those in the spirit world. “There will be very few,
if any, who will not accepted the gospel.”
Before closing his sermon, he urged
the Saints to ponder his works—and seek out their kindred dead. “Brethren and
sisters,” he said, “let us go on with our records, fill them up righteously
before the Lord, and carry out this principle, and the blessings of God will
attend us, and those who are redeemed will bless us in days to come.” (pp.
31-33)
April 1896 and
the “Political Manifesto”
. . . at the April 1896 general
conference, Heber J. Grant read the statement to the Saints. Every general
authority of the Church had signed it except Anthon Lund, who was still in
Europe, and Moses Thatcher, who had refused to reconcile with the First
Presidency and his fellow apostles.
Called the “Political Manifesto,” the
statements affirmed the Church’s belief in the separation of church and state.
It also required all general authorities who committed themselves to full-time
service in the Lord’s work to secure the approval of their quorum leaders
before seeking or accepting any political office. (pp. 47-48)
1898 and Lorenzo
Snow’s trepidation about becoming President of the Church After Wilford Woodruff’s
Death
. . . Lorenzo was worried about taking
on the office, especially when he thought about the state of Church finances.
Despite the efforts of Heber J. Grant and others, the Church was still mired in
debt, and some people were speculating that it owed at least a million dollars
to creditors. Lorenzo himself feared the debt was as high as three million.
In the days following President
Woodruff’s death, Lorenzo directed Church business as president of the Quorum
of the Twelve Apostles. yet he felt deeply inadequate. On September 9, the day
after the funeral, Lorenzo met with the Twelve. Still feeling unequal to the
calling, he proposed stepping down as president of the quorum. The apostles,
however, voted to continue sustaining him as their leader.
One evening, around this time, Lorenzo
sought the will of the Lord in the Salt Lake Temple. He felt depressed and
discouraged about his new responsibilities. After changing into his temple
clothing, he pleaded with the Lord to enlighten his mind. The Lord answered his
prayer, clearly manifesting that Lorenzo needed to follow President Woodruff’s
counsel to reorganize the First Presidency immediately. George Q. Cannon and
Joseph F. Smith were to be his counselors. (pp. 71-72; note: 1 million US
dollars in 1898 would be approx. 34.18 million; 3 million would be 102.54
million)
Second Manifesto
on Polygamy (1904)
Although some of what the newspapers
reported [re. B.H. Roberts and LDS polygamy] was inaccurate, they were correct
on the basic point: plural marriage still existed in the Church. And it was not
simply that men and women maintained their plural marriages after the
Manifesto. Having lived, taught, and suffered for plural marriage for more than
half a century, many Saints could not imagine a world without it. In fact, some
members of the Twelve-acting with the approval of George Q. Cannon, Joseph F.
Smith, or their intermediaries—had quietly performed new plural marriages in the
eight years since the Manifesto. During that time, four of the apostles had
also married plural wives themselves.
Saints who married after the Manifesto
did so believing the Lord had not completely renounced plural marriage but had
simply removed the divine command for the Saints to sustain and defend it as a
practice of the Church. In the Manifesto, moreover, Wilford Woodruff had
advised the Saints to submit to antipolygamy laws in the United States. He had
said nothing in the document about the laws of Mexico or Canada, however. Most
of the new plural marriages occurred in those countries, and a small number had
been performed in the United States. (pp. 85-86)
1904 and Reed
Smoot Hearing
Robert Tayler, the lawyer representing
the Ministerial Association, opened the inquiry with questions about President
Smith’s life. Turning his attention to revelation and its influence on the
individual decisions of Church members, the lawyer then asked the prophet to
explain when Church members might be obligated to obey revelation from the
Church president. If he could get the prophet to admit that all members were
required to obey his revelations, Tyler could show that Reed Smoot was not true
free to make his own decisions in the Senate. . . . “You have revelations, have
you not?” questioned the committee chairman. He was asking when a revelation
from the Lord’s prophet would be considered a fundamental doctrine of the
Church, something a faithful Latter-day Saint like Reed Smoot would feel
obliged to obey.
President Smith chose his words
deliberately. He had often received personal revelation through the Holy Ghost.
As the prophet, he had also received inspired direction for the Saints. But he
had never received a revelation for the entire Church in the Lord’s own voice—the
kind of revelation found in the Doctrine and Covenants.
“I never said I had a revelation,” he
told the chairman, “except so far as God has shown to me that so-called
‘Mormonism’ is God’s divine truth. That is all.”
President Smith continued answering
questions until the committee adjourned late that afternoon. When the hearing
resumed the next day, the committee focused their questions ore and more on
plural marriage and the Manifesto. While he sought to respond accurately to
their questions. President Smith avoided disclosing what he and other Church
leaders knew about new plural marriages. He knew Congress would condemn him and
the Church if this information to light in the investigation.
Furthermore, his guarded answered to
the committee’s questions were based on his understanding that Saints who
practiced plural marriages after the Manifesto did so at their own risk. For
this reason, he believed the Manifesto had not forbidden him and his wives, or
any other plural couples, from discreetly continuing to honor their sacred
temple marriage covenants to each other.
When Robert Tayler asked him if he
thought it was wrong to continue living with a plural wife, President Smith
said, “That is contrary to the rule of the Church and contrary as well to the
law of the land.” But he then spoke openly of his refusal to abandon his large
plural family: “I have cohabitated with my wives,” he said. “They have borne me
children since 1890.” . . . President Smith clarified. In making this statement,
he was not denying the existence of post-Manifesto plural marriages. Rather, he
wanted to draw a subtle distinction between practices the Church and its
councils sanctioned and those that individual Church members chose to follow
according to their consciences. The Saints had indeed sustained the Manifesto
in 1890, so the plural marriages performed by Church leaders had taken place
without the consent of the Church as a whole. (pp. 103, 104-5, 106)
April 16, 1908:
Death of Jane Manning James
President Joseph F. Smith spoke at the
funeral. Over the years, Jane had sometimes sought his help in receiving temple
ordinances for herself and her deceased family members. She particularly longed
to receive the endowment and be sealed to a family. But since the early 1850s,
the Church had restricted Saints of African descent from holding the priesthood
or receiving any temple ordinance except baptism for the dead. Explanations for
the restricting varied, but they were speculative, not the word of God. Brigham
Young had promised that all Saints, regardless of race, would one day receive
all the ordinances and blessings of the gospel.
Like other Black Saints, Jane had done
baptisms for her kindred dead. She had also asked to be endowed and then be
sealed by proxy to Walker Lewis, one of the few Black Saints to hold the
priesthood before the restriction took effect. On later occasions, she asked to
be sealed by adoption into the family of Joseph Smith. But teach time she
petitioned for an endowment or sealing, Joseph F. Smith or another church
leader had upheld the Church’s restriction.
With the help of Relief Society
general president Zina Young, however, Jane had received permission from Church
leaders to be joined for eternity with Joseph Smith’s family. In response to
her request, they had prepared a vicarious ceremony that joined Jane to the
family as a servitor. Zina Young had acted as Jane’s proxy in the ceremony
while Joseph F. Smith stood in for the prophet Joseph Smith.
And although she felt dissatisfied
with the ceremony, Jane had continued faithful. “I pay my tithes and offerings,
keep the Word of Wisdom,” she said, “I go to bed early and rise early. I try in
my feeble way to set a good example to all.” (pp. 132-33; if I could lodged a
complaint, Young did say that, but qualified it: not until all the other Sons
of Adam received the priesthood)
The Priesthood/Temple
Restrictions and African Ancestry Issues
Beginning in the early 1900s, Church
leaders taught that any Saint known to have Black African ancestry, however
small, would be restricted. Yet the uncertainty about some Saints’ racial
identity created inconsistencies in how the restriction was applied. Nelson
Ritchie, the son of a Black woman and a white man, knew little about his
parents’ history when he and his wife, Annie, a white woman, joined the Church
in Utah. He had light skin, and many of his children were thought to be white.
When two of his daughters were ready for marriage, they entered the temple and
received the endowment and sealing ordinances.
Later, however, when Nelson and Annie
desired to be sealed in the temple, their bishop questioned Nelson about his
ancestry. Nelson told him what he understood about his parents, and the bishop
took the case to the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, who
sent the question back to the bishop to decide. In the end, the bishop affirmed
that Nelson and Annie were good Latter-day Saints, but he declined to issue
Nelson a temple recommend because of his ancestry.
While many Saints shared the racial
prejudice of the time, most disapproved of organizations that used secrecy,
lawlessness and violence to oppress others. After the Ku Klux Klan spread to
Utah in the early 1902, President Grant and other church leaders denounced it
in general conference and used their influence to stop it. Few Church members
ever joined the group. When a Klan leader sought a meeting with Church leaders,
President Grant refused the request.
“It is beyond my comprehension,” the
prophet noted in April 1925, “how people holding the priesthood will want to
associate themselves with the Ku Klux Klan.” (pp. 246-47)
Other Examples of
the Church’s Struggle with Race and Racism
As strong as the Cincinnati Branch
was, its members remained divided over racial segregation. Len and Mary Hope,
the only African American couple in the branch, continued to hold monthly
meetings in their home because some branch members till did not want them
attending regular Church services. The gatherings had grown to as many as
thirty people . . .(p. 535)
South Africa and
the Priesthood/Temple Restrictions:
This system of laws, known as
apartheid, had made strict racial segregation to South African society. As
President McKay pondered the problem, he had to consider the Church’s practice
of operating within the existing law of a nation. He also understood that even
an inspired change to the priesthood and temple restrictions might draw the ire
of white Church members and others outside the faith. . . . On Sunday, January
17 [1954], he spoke about the priesthood and temple restrictions at a
missionary meeting in Cape Town. While he offered no definitive statement on
the origin of the practice, he acknowledged that several Black men had held the
priesthood during the presidencies of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. He also
spoke of the past struggle to uphold the restrictions during his 1921 world
tour, recounting the time he petitioned President Grant in behalf of a Black
saint in Hawaii who wished to receive the priesthood. (pp. 582, 583)
Church’s Attitude
Towards WW2 (before and after 1941 when the U.S. entered)
The conflict had caused heartache and
suffering in the lives of Saints around the world and impeded the Church’s
growth. The Saints in Europe and the missionaries who served among them had
spent the two decades since the last war spreading the gospel and building up
the Church. Now many branches were struggling to stay together.
The Saints in the United States
struggled as well, though not to the same degree. Government rationing of
gasoline and rubber restricted how often the Saints could meet together. All
men between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four had to register for military
service. Soon far fewer young people were available for missionary work to
North and South America and the Hawaiian Islands.
As much as the First Presidency
opposed war, they also understood that Latter-day Saints had a duty to defend
the countries where they lived. And despite the painful loss of his son-in-law
to a sudden enemy attack, President Clark emphasized the Saints on both sides
of the war were justified in answering the call of their respective nations.
“This Church is a worldwide Church. It
devoted members are in both camps,” he said. “ON each side they believe they
are fighting for home, and country, and freedom. On each side, our brethren
pray to the same God, in the same name, for victory. Both sides cannot be
wholly right; perhaps neither is without wrong.”
“God will work out in His own due time
and in His own sovereign way the justice and right of the conflict,” he
declared. “God is at the helm.” (pp. 425-26)
Helmuth Hübener
and his being (wrongly) excommunicated
Branch president Arthur Zander
believed he had to act quickly to protect the members of his branch and prove
that Latter-day Saints were not conspiring against the [Nazi] government. Not
long after the boy’s arrest, he and the interim mission president, Anthony
Huck, had excommunicated Helmuth. The district president and some branch
members had been angered by the action. Helmuth’s grandparents were devasted.
(p. 439)
[President Joseph F. Smith] After
learning that Helmuth Hübener, the young German Saints executed by the Nazis,
had been wrongly excommunicated form the Church, he and his counselors reversed
the action and directed local authorities to note this fact on Helmuth’s
membership record. (p. 518)
The Church coming
to grips with modern science
At the heart of [John A. Widtsoe’s]
unease was Elder [B.H.] Roberts’s effort to harmonize the scriptural account of
the Creation with scientific theories about the origins of life. Elder Roberts
believed that fossil evidence proved humanlike species had lived and died on
the earth for millions of years before God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of
Eden. Elder [Joseph Fielding] Smith, however, argued that such beliefs were
incompatible with scripture and Church doctrine. He believed these species
could not have existed before Adam’s Fall introduced death into the world. . . The
First Presidency reminded the quorums of Joseph Smith’s teaching: “Declare the
first principles, and let mysteries alone, lest you be overthrown.” They warned
that preaching personal opinions as if they were Church doctrine could cause
misunderstanding, confusion, and division among the Saints. “When one of the
general authorities of the Church makes a definite statement in regard to any
doctrine,” they said, “whether he express it as his opinion or not, he is
regarded as voicing the Church, and his statements are accepted as the approved
doctrines of the Church.”
They urged the men to preach the core
doctrine of the restored gospel. “While we magnify our calling in the realm of
the Church,” they said, “leave geology, biology, archaeology, and anthropology,
no one of which has to do with the salvation of the souls of mankind, to
scientific research.” As far as the origins of life were concerned, they had no
more to say than the First Presidency had already said in their 1909 statement,
“The Origin of Man.” (pp. 319, 321)
