Saints, Volume 4: A Review

The fourth and final volume of Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days was published today. This newest book, Sounded in Every Ear, tells the story of the Latter-day Saints from 1955 to 2020, bringing the history up nearly to the present day. It discusses an era in which conversion rates exploded in South America, the Pacific islands, eastern Asia, and Africa. The 1978 revelation that ended the priesthood and temple ban was an important event enabling that growth. Temple construction to support membership across the world became a big deal, with the number of temples jumping from 9 functioning temples in 3 countries in 1955 to 197 dedicated temples in scores of countries today.

As with previous entries in the series, Saints 4 has a lot of different goals, sources, and subjects to juggle. As an institutional history, it needs to inspire faithfulness and belief in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

• First, this includes a focus on Jesus Christ and the impact involvement in the Church has on the lives of those who embrace it as well as sustaining the positions the Church takes on hot-button social issues. It also has to work to cultivate a positive image of the Church for any non-members who happen to read the books.
• Second, it is a historical work that has positioned itself as a true account of the history of the Church, with painstaking efforts to research and present that history accurately. On this account, it needs to hold up under the scrutiny of the academic fields of history and religious studies.
• Third, it tries to present that historical information in an engaging, narrative format that is appealing to people across many different education levels.
• Fourth, this volume is about history that people who are alive and remember experiencing the events described within (historians aren’t usually writing about subjects that can talk back at them).

Those goals don’t always fit nicely together and create some tensions in what they were aiming to achieve. But Saints 4 does a good job of balancing and compromising between them while achieving the core of each of the goals.

The history does very well at representing members of the Church around the world who go through a variety of circumstances. I was impressed to find that issues like depression, infertility, displacement as refugees during wartime, and lifechanging injuries received during missions were discussed in an authentic way that also provided good modeling on how to handle those situations. They also include a lot of very inspiring stories of faith in face of tribulation, conversion, missionary work, and service. Humanitarian efforts of the Church were an important theme throughout. These types of stories are what I think the book does best (even in comparison to other volumes in Saints, which seemed to get better at doing this with each volume) and will make it a great resource for teaching and preaching in the Church.

As far as narrative goes, it does okay at keeping the book engaging. One concern I have shared about these later volumes is that as the Church continues to expand, there becomes more and more threads to follow, leading to less focus in the narrative. They didn’t do quite as well in Volume 4 at this as they did in Volume 3. There were a lot of people that they followed, and it got to be too much to keep track of. They did include reminders each time someone resurfaced to help jog the memory on what they were doing last time they showed up, which helped. Some characters carried over from Volume 3, such as Henry Burkhardt in East Germany, Gordon B. Hinckley, and the Vojkuvková/Vojkuvka family in Czechoslovakia. Surprisingly, Neal A. Maxwell didn’t feature as a main character, even though he was a notable person in Volume 3. There was a new cast of families and people who did come to the fore, including the following, to name a few:

• Darius Gray (African American member in Utah)
• Ardeth Kapp (Utah)
• Angela Peterson Fallentine (United States)
• The Osmond family
• Emma Acosta Hernandez (Guatemala)
• Jeff and Silvia Allred (Guatemala, San Salvador)
• Joseph William Billy Johnson (Ghana)
• Willy Binene (Democratic Republic of the Congo)
• Helio de Rocha (Brazil)
• Marco Villavicencio (Brazil/Ecuador)
• Juliet and Iliesa Toro (Fiji)
• Hwang Keun Ok (South Korea)
• Nguyen Van The (Vietnam)

There were a lot of powerful and important stories, but there was also too much going on to follow easily.

The history brought up and addressed many of the controversial issues in this era of history. A lot of my predictions came true from my post last year. We can turn to that list for easy reference:

• Priesthood ban / revelation: They covered the basics of the topic, discussing some of the problems it caused with establishing missions in Africa, ordination and temple work in South Africa and Brazil, etc., then discussed Spencer W. Kimball and the Twelve seeking and receiving revelation to lift the ban in 1978. This is history embraces the idea that God is real and interacts with people, so it differs from more secular histories like Second Class Saints in how it discusses the revelation occurring, since it allows the Holy Spirit to have a direct role in the process. It also differs, however, in that it avoids discussion of conflicts like Hugh B. Brown’s efforts to lift the ban in the 1960s, etc. (which Second Class Saints does a much better job at discussing). In addressing the church’s establishment in Africa following the ban, they focused on congregations of unbaptized converts led by men. In doing so, they avoided any discussion of the congregations led by women and the marginalization those women leaders experienced once missionaries and priesthood leadership arrived. So, it gets through the most important points, but doesn’t delve into the full details of this history.
• ERA and Women’s Rights: The Equal Rights Amendment was a hot topic in the 1970s, with Church leaders coming out in direct opposition to the efforts to guarantee women’s rights. They only briefly discussed this as an issue, focusing on Spencer W. Kimball’s stance on the topic and the efforts of one woman in Washington D.C. to share that standpoint with some important figures. Sonia Johnson and her conflict with church leaders made no appearance at all, which is a glaring absence in any history of the church during that era. Responses to teachings about a mother in heaven in the early 1990s or the Ordain Women movement in the 2010s were completely absent, though they did discuss Rusell M. Nelson and Dallin H. Oaks’s efforts to re-expand the role of women in the church and their relationship to priesthood authority.
• LGTBQ+: This an important topic during the era covered in Saints 4, with aspects of it surfacing in things like The Family Proclamation, Prop 8 in 2008 California, and the policy of exclusion that lasted from 2015–2019. They mostly discussed this issue in Saints 4 in the context of Prop 8, framing it as the church standing up for its belief in traditional families while putting emphasis on the church’s teachings about treating people respectfully and the condemnation of bullying LGTBQ+ individuals. The policy of exclusion was not mentioned, and no viewpoint characters were individuals who were navigating church membership and being part of the LGTBQ+ community. As a no-win topic, however, I think they handled it pretty well.
• Ezra Taft Benson’s politics: Ezra Taft Benson is infamous for his right-wing political activity, including his open support for the John Birch Society and opposition to the Civil Rights movement. He was probably the most ignored of the presidents of the Church relative to his activities as a church leader in the book, however, with the discussion about him revolving almost completely around his emphasis on the Book of Mormon and Jesus Christ rather than politics. Which makes sense in that they were trying to make the history less U.S.-centric and putting the Church in a good light.
• Leonard Arrington’s History Department: The efforts to professionalize historian’s work in the Church being first embraced and then shut down by Church leaders during Leonard Arrington’s tenure as Church Historian was a topic that wasn’t addressed beyond a passing reference to Joseph Fielding Smith professionalizing the church’s departments. The Saints series has had little focus on Latter-day Saint historiography, so this wasn’t surprising at all. Oddly, however, they did bring up historiography in the form of talking about Truman Madsen and his associates researching the First Vision in response to critical historical works on the topic (which is where the only passing reference to Arrington came up). It was an opportunity to discuss the multiple accounts of the First Vision, which is probably why they brought it up, but it felt odd since they’ve avoided historiography outside of that discussion.
• Mark Hofmann: They brought this up and addressed it.
• September Six: Perhaps one of the most significant moments of the Church’s history in the 1990s was the excommunication or disfellowshipment of six high-profile intellectuals within one month in 1993 and the shockwaves it sent through the intellectual Latter-day Saint community. This didn’t come up at all in Saints. Notably, that is in line with the church’s general sensitivity towards talking about disciplinary action (which could also explain Sonia Johnson’s absence in the volume).
• Indian Placement Program: From 1954–1996, the Church developed a program that brought Native American children into Euro-American homes in an effort to convert and assimilate Native Americans, especially from among the Diné. While the general concept was well-intended, it proved controversial, since it was essentially a colonizing effort that weakened ties to their ancestral cultures. It also provided an environment wherein some of the children involved were subjected to abuse of various kinds. This was discussed, though the story shared was a best-case scenario, where the Diné woman lived with a family that supported her and set her up for success in life while also encouraging her to remain connected to her Diné roots and family. This served to bring the issue up while minimizing other stories that didn’t turn out quite as well.

These and a few other issues were brought up and addressed in a way that put the Church in the most favorable light possible while still remaining historically accurate (though the discussion was usually not as deep as, say, American Zion).

Again, the delicate dance that historians had to do while working on this institutional history made it incredibly difficult and complex to handle. I have immense respect, appreciation and sympathy for the historians involved in the project. I believe that they did an impressive job at navigating those tensions and providing a useful and inspiring history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As I said with Volume 3, I loved this volume of Saints. If I had my way, every member of the Church would familiarize themselves with this series. They provide important historical information that illuminates why the Church is the way it is today, but (more importantly) they also provide spiritual nourishment. I found that my belief in God and His influence in guiding people through the Holy Spirit was strengthened, as was my love of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, by reading Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days, Volume 4: Sounded in Every Ear, 1955-2020.

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For my reviews for earlier volumes of Saints, follow the links below:

• Saints, Volume 1: A Review
• Saints, Volume 2: A Review
• Saints, Volume 3: A Review