Three from the cast of LDS voices in ‘American Zion’: A daring theologian, a women’s reformer and a disheartened Native American

Reviewers have noted that one of the strengths of Benjamin Park’s “American Zion: A New History of Mormonism,” is how it highlights the contributions of significant (though not necessarily the top) church leaders and individual Latter-day Saints.

[Read more about Park’s new book and the story it tells of an evolving church and nation — along with the tensions that persist in both to this day.]

Here are three examples:

B.H. Roberts

B.H. Roberts, whose life spanned from 1857 to 1933, was a man of words, Park declares, with a drive for “truths that meshed with his vision of the gospel.”

Roberts wrote nearly 20 books on “historical, doctrinal and ecclesiastical matters, edited the documentary series [on church history] and produced a string of apologetic works that responded to the age’s loudest critics.”

His scholarship earned him the reputation as a “defender of the faith,” including his massive undertaking “The Way, the Truth, the Life,” which Park calls “the acme of Mormon modernism.”

Roberts tackled tough topics, particularly the historicity of the faith’s signature scripture, the Book of Mormon, and evolution.

The general authority famously debated then-apostle Joseph Fielding Smith on the age of the earth versus traditional scriptural explanations for human creation.

Eventually, then-church President Heber J. Grant announced that he was going “to sidestep the entire question,” Park writes, urging both parties to focus on the church’s doctrinal fundamentals, and leave the burgeoning questions of science alone.

“The decision was a blow to both Roberts,” he writes, “and his ideological mission.”

Amy Brown Lyman

Though Mormonism was dominated by men, its “patriarchal control,” Park writes, “was always stronger in theory than in practice.”

That was clearly obvious in the life and work of Amy Brown Lyman. Born in the 19th century, married to Richard Lyman (who later became an apostle) at the turn of the century, Lyman was captivated by Christian reformer Jane Addams and the Progressive Era and worked strenuously to bring the ideas of social justice to the faith’s all-women Relief Society.

“What Lyman and her supporters accomplished during the 1920s was remarkable,” the historian writes. “Her willingness to work with government agencies, appropriate their resources, and draw on their funding empowered the Relief Society as a regional force.”

The women were ready when the stock market crashed in 1929, building an organization that could handle “thousands of [welfare] cases per year by 1934.”

Brown “paved the way for integrating the faith’s charitable efforts,” Park writes, “within the larger societal vision.”

The reformer influenced a generation of Latter-day Saint women, Park concludes, but 1945 (when she was released from leading the Relief Society) marked “the end of that trajectory.”

She died in 1959.

Lacee Harris

Lacee Harris, a multigenerational Indigenous Latter-day Saint, spent his high school years living with a white family as part of the church’s Indian Student Placement Program.

He entered Brigham Young University in 1962, a time when the “country was approaching cultural cohesion,” Park writes, as a “Christian nation.”

But Harris felt isolated at the church-owned school. His Latter-day Saint bishop condemned “interracial dating,” and denounced “Indian dances and ceremonies,” the historian reports. After graduating, Harris “grew out his hair, researched and embraced his Ute culture.”

“I’m Nuchee, Northern Ute, first, then Mormon,” he later told those who asked.

To Harris, who died in 2020, and other Indigenous students, the “‘Lord’s ways’ too often coalesced with white supremacy,” Park explains. “...One study found that over half of Navajo children who participated in the [placement program] eventually rejected Mormonism altogether.”

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