Saints: My Review
Posted on May 31, 2019 by Trevor in Religion
This is my review of Saints: The Standard of Truth, the LDS Church’s recent publication on its early history.
This book represents a giant step forward as far as official LDS historical publications go. I wouldn’t have believed 15 years ago that the Church would publish something this ambitious. I’ve set aside some of my disappointments with the book as I think how unprecedented it is. (Low expectations for the win, maybe?) It attempts to tackle a lot of the troublesome areas of early Mormon history that generally get avoided or swept under the rug in official treatments.
That being said, this book is apologetic in nature. As the afterword notes: “To maintain the readability of the narrative, the volume rarely addresses challenges in or to the historical record in the text itself.”
It’s written for those who will likely only read one LDS history book in their whole lives. In this sense, it’s far superior to any alternatives published by the church.
All in all, disappointments aside, it’s a must-read for any member of the church that’s not likely to read Rough Stone Rolling or any more serious historical treatment of early Mormon history.
Some further notes:
Pros:
- It’s easy to read. Great effort was put into making the prose simple and clear.
- A real attempt was made to include the stories of the women and others who weren’t leaders yet nonetheless sacrificed deeply and moved the cause forward.
- It doesn’t really leave many of the troubling aspects of church history untouched. Readers will at least be exposed to even the ugliest subjects. Average readers will most likely learn important things they’ve never even heard of before.
- The individual stories create a more cohesive narrative and allowed me to piece the complex sequence of people and places together in a way I haven’t managed before.
Cons:
- The committee of authors leads to some apparent seams in the writing, perhaps in cases where there was disagreement on whether to be overly sympathetic to the traditional narrative or to be frank.*
- The persecution of the saints plays a huge role throughout this book. While it does a far better job than previous publications at acknowledging that there were often good reasons for internal dissent and external opposition, it’s still not good enough, considering the prominent role this narrative plays in the story. Oliver Cowdery, Joseph’s right-hand man for so many of those crucial years, is definitely given a paltry explanation for his disaffection. Not enough words are used to justify why Missourians were so fearful of the saints, often for good reasons.
- The book relies very heavily on late reminiscences at times. The afterword confesses as much, but Lucy Mack Smith’s memoir, written 20 to 25 years after many of the events and discussions recorded solely in its pages, serves as a pillar for the early chapters.
- The book is too often disingenuous in covering hard topics. Lots of weasel words are used to describe Joseph’s secret practice of polygamy. Many complex subjects are covered in a broad brush by bringing in an individual person’s narrative and letting that speak for the entire group.
*For instance, during the Missouri Mormon War, the book mentions that the Saints raided the recently evacuated town of Gallatin for supplies, and then “torched the store and other buildings”. This was about 50 buildings, folks. I mean, they absolutely gutted the place. So it seems some on the authorship committee felt strongly the need to include a hint the destruction here. But the scale is minimized, and later on, that mass arson gets subsumed by sympathetic portrayals of how the saints were only trying to protect themselves from future raids. It’s whiplash.
Furthermore, by sugarcoating this one event, casual readers might not grasp the full horror Governor Boggs and other Missourians felt at what was going on.
Later on, when the book sets up scene of the Nauvoo Expositor, it takes pains to explain that Joseph and the city’s leadership were worried that the unfriendly publication would cause more antipathy towards the saints. They thus needed to rid the city of this nuisance, but in a legal and dignified manner, of course. Very reasonable. The book then describes how the night after they voted to destroy the press, the city marshall took out and “arrived at the Expositor office with about a hundred men. They broke into the shop with a sledgehammer, dragged the printing press into the street, and smashed it into pieces. They them dumped out drawers of type and set fire to the rubble. Any copies of the newspaper they could find were added to the blaze.”
Wait, what? What kind of a proportional reaction was that? And after I was being carefully led to believe this action was meant to reduce animosity towards the saints? Whiplash.
The next paragraph prints the words of Thomas Sharp, a prominent and fierce critic of the saints, calling for their extermination. What’s sorely missing is a short note of how the average Illinois citizen was feeling about this.
