Jana Riess: What the new LDS hymns say about the church’s theology

Many years ago, I was called to be my ward’s Primary chorister. Soon after, the Primary president took me aside and told me I had just been given the most important job in the entire Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

It was rather stunning. We are not accustomed to thinking of the chorister job as an important position. Basically, your role is to help the children learn the songs for their annual Primary program. It also helps if you can keep them from killing one another when they get bored. (This was particularly important back at that time, when we still had three hours of church, which meant nearly two hours of Primary.)

Her reasoning, the Primary president explained, was that these kids would likely forget almost every talk or sermon they heard growing up in the church — but the songs they learned by heart would stay with them for the rest of their lives.

I realized she was completely correct about this. I didn’t grow up in religion, but the Girl Scout songs, McDonald’s advertisements and pop music of my childhood are likely the only things I will remember verbatim when I’m in a nursing home and I’ve forgotten the names of all my beloved family members.

That wise Primary president recognized something we don’t tend to discuss in the church much: Hymns and children’s songs are the best teachers of theology. They have a liturgical function; we have repeated them so often that they become available to us in our hours of need — anytime, anywhere. Once we learn them, they lodge in our hearts and minds as the scaffolding of our future faith.

The new hymnal

I’ve thought about this over the past few weeks as our little ward choir has been preparing for Sunday’s special Christmas sacrament meeting, where we will sing two of the 13 new hymns that the church added to its collection in May 2024. More are coming soon, and by 2030 we will have up to 500 hymns and children’s songs in a single, global hymnal that all members around the world will be using.

So we’re only in the early stages of the hymnal overhaul, but the baker’s dozen of new musical offerings can tell us a great deal about the theological legacy of Russell M. Nelson’s presidency.

That legacy is that we’re Christians, we’re Christians, we’re Christians.

To demonstrate that connection, several of the new hymns aren’t new at all, but rather beloved Protestant classics that so far have come from Euro-American sources. (Since one of the stated reasons for revising the hymnal is that the old hymnal expresses only “limited cultural representation of the global church,” I expect those sources to diversify as more hymns are released.)

We’ve got “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” which was the No. 1 request when church members were asked to submit ideas and suggestions for the new hymnal. This one isn’t so much new to Latter-day Saints as restored, since it was in the hymnal for several decades before the 1985 edition we currently use. If I had to guess a theological reason why it was removed and then restored, it would be that this is primarily a hymn about God’s grace, a concept that some Latter-day Saint leaders were often deeply uncomfortable with.

In 1984, for example, apostle Bruce R. McConkie decried the “delusion and mania that prevails to this day in the great evangelical body of Protestantism … the doctrine that we are justified by faith alone, without the works of the law. It is the doctrine that we are saved by grace alone, without works. It is the doctrine that we may be born again simply by confessing the Lord Jesus with our lips while we continue to live in our sins.”

The past two decades have seen a theological shift away from McConkie’s extremism and toward a reconciliation with the idea of grace, though our version of it is not as radical a view of grace as some evangelical Christians have espoused.

‘Amazing’ addition

In fact, we’re so comfortable with grace now that another of the newly added hymns is “Amazing Grace,” the standard-bearer for that theological concept. But as the liner notes make clear, even this has a history of being in an earlier Latter-day Saint hymnbook (1841), so there’s precedent.

Precedent is important to us but so is moving forward. It’s vital to look at the theology of the brand-new hymns selected for inclusion out of, apparently, more than 17,000 submissions.

Here, too, we see an emphasis on classical Protestant theology. “Bread of Life, Living Water” focuses on the precious gifts of Christ’s atonement, while “As Bread Is Broken” ties weekly sacrament traditions with Christ’s suffering on the cross. “Gethsemane” brings both of those themes to fruition with a focus on how they can transform us individually: “Jesus loves me/So he gives this gift to me/In Gethsemane.”

Don’t get me wrong; I think these hymns are beautiful. But then again, I’m a convert from Protestantism, so of course I feel right at home with them.

Maybe the point becomes clearer when we think about the kinds of themes present in earlier Latter-day Saint hymns but manifestly not here: There’s no discussion of Zion as the gathering of God’s people, for example, and no focus on key geographic locations like Missouri, which we have classically been taught have vital roles to play in the last days.

When the new hymnal is finalized, I’m predicting we’ll see a real gutting of the content from about No. 33 to somewhere in the mid-50s. The hymns that can be recast with “Zion” as an idealized “pure in heart” theme can stay (e.g., No. 41, No. 47), while the ones that explicitly refer to Zion as a mountain refuge or that are just too weird to play nicely with Protestant rapprochement may quietly disappear. I’d be surprised if “Adam-ondi-Ahman” (No. 49) makes the cut.

If there’s going to be anything that sets our hymns apart from Protestants’ going forward, I predict it will be a focus on obeying church leaders. That’s certainly been a theme of General Conferences in recent years.

In terms of hymnody, I doubt that emphasis on lauding modern prophets and apostles will rise to the idolatrous levels of “Praise to the Man” (No. 27, which actually positions Joseph Smith in the role of a Christlike intercessor on the other side of the veil).

But the main theological point will be clear: Latter-day Saints are Christians, and our view of Christ is as orthodox as those of any other churches. … BUT we also have the only true prophet living on the Earth today.

(The views expressed in this opinion piece do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)