Saints, Volume 1: The Standard of Truth, 1815-1846

A big thank you to the Church for putting their new church history book in the LDS Library app for free, and providing free audio to it so I could just listen to it like a regular audiobook. I would have probably never gotten around to reading this if I hadn't had the audio version. But I'm glad I did. This book covers the early period of church history, in a new narrative version of church history. It seems like the Church is being more open about some of the uncomfortable parts of our history, the things that have been stumbling blocks to people before, like plural marriage and seer stones and the negative things that leaders have done. I didn't feel like much of this history was new to me--I'd learned it all in Church History at BYU. But I was surprised by how uncomfortable a lot of it made me, even though I knew it all. I think I was uncomfortable with how unapologetic this account was, with no explanations or reasonings or apologies for anything which we Mormons are used to explaining away. In my head, I agree with this approach and I think the bare-bones, open nature of this book is going about it the right way, but in my heart, I think I'm still not comfortable with all of these things and I want more explanations to make it more palatable. Particularly everything with plural marriage, which we all know is a huge issue for pretty much everyone today. I've never struggled with major aspects of church history, but I can definitely see why people do.

I did love a lot of this book, though. I loved the focus on lots of different people and how regular people sought and received revelation. Throughout the whole story, from the very beginning, each person prayed to Heavenly Father to receive an answer if the church was true or if a specific doctrine was true. The book talked about how these answers came and what the Spirit felt like for each person. I really liked that angle of the book and how it taught those sorts of doctrines. I also loved some of the faith-promoting stories that were new and fresh, like about Wilford Woodruff serving a mission in some far-off islands and about Edward Partridge's family. I learned a lot about the sequences of things in church history as well. This book made it seem like there was a direct connection between the leaders of the church directing the Nauvoo Expositor press to be destroyed and Joseph eventually being murdered. I didn't really realize that those things happened in such quick succession, or that's why Joseph was eventually captured and held prisoner.

I thought a lot about how we choose to write and view history while listening to this book. The very act of rewriting Church history is an acknowledgement of the fact that history can be rewritten and re-framed based on how you choose to write about it and what you choose to include. I think this step in rewriting the Church's history is a really positive, eye-opening step towards acknowledging some of the darker parts of church history, which aren't emphasized as much but still are there. They don't need to be kept a secret, because it makes us stronger when we know about them and talk about them, and learn from them. (I kept thinking about the "Me, Too" movement when the whole John C. Bennett chapter was going on, when the women talked about how he persuaded them to sleep with him by telling them it was sanctioned by Joseph. So horrible that things like that happened back then like they're still happening today--men in positions of power taking advantage of that power to hurt women. From this account, it seemed like the leaders of the church took the women's accusations seriously, and took away Bennett's power. Maybe not as quickly as they should have, but they did.)