Commentary: The four ‘churches’ within the LDS Church — and who leads them

For a religion sometimes critiqued for its conformity, there are a variety of Churches of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that you might see at General Conference this weekend.

Of course, I don’t mean literal churches. Rather, there are different ways of understanding the faith, different emphases and different visions of what the project of the church might be. Members often divide leaders into categories such as “conservative” or “liberal” or “progressive,” but those labels don’t tell us much. Their meanings are fluid, and though they might carry with them religious connotations — about belief in evolution, say, or how literally to read some stories in scripture — they are also increasingly associated with politics. This only muddles the water even more. The label “conservative” in politics today might indicate support for Donald Trump, for instance, or it might mean opposition to him. All this is to say, these labels are often not terribly useful for understanding what exactly somebody believes — particularly when it comes to religion.

So what follows are other ways of talking about what being a Latter-day Saint means to various church leaders. I should emphasize that I don’t consider these “churches,” as I call them, mutually exclusive, with clean and clear lines separating the people I discuss. Rather, think of them as ideal types and the figures I invoke as representing that type, even as they might fit into others as well. Nor do I insist these are the only types. These are simply some of the various ways to understand and practice religion that I see on the current Latter-day Saint landscape.

The Church of Effort

Representative: Russell M. Nelson.

Past representatives: David O. McKay, Bruce R. McConkie.

Former apostle Bruce R. McConkie and former church President David O. McKay could be gregarious and sociable in private, given to jokes and belly laughs. In public, though, McKay was generous and warm, while McConkie was stern and doctrinaire. They also took differing positions on particular points of doctrine. McConkie despised the theory of evolution; McKay was open to it.

Such differences obscure a common similarity. Both men were deeply optimistic about human capacity to make the right choice if told what the right choice was. For McKay, this faith manifested in deeply humanistic sermons about our divine potential. For McConkie, it manifested in a strict focus on proper belief and right behavior.

For both of them, these impulses grew out of the early 20th-century progressive era, a time when Americans invested deep faith in education to teach people to be good, and many church leaders used that language to understand their faith.

The prime of President Russell M. Nelson’s life — his first marriage, the births of his children, his rise through the church ranks — overlapped with the ministry of these men, and it should be little surprise, then, that he thinks about the church in the same way as did they. It was in the curriculum in his youth programs, the manuals of his adulthood, and the talks he heard in General Conference.

So Nelson’s sermons consistently have emphasized effort, trying harder, doing better, “thinking celestial.” His most controversial, as to whether God’s love can be described as unconditional, makes an argument that McKay and McConkie would have recognized. It links divine blessings to human behavior and argues that the fulness of those blessings derives from doing right. Of course, it also presumes that humans can, theoretically, always choose to do right.

The Church of Natural Law

Representative: Dallin H. Oaks.

Past representative: John A. Widtsoe.

Apostle John A. Widtsoe, among the first trained scientists to enter high church leadership, was one of many Latter-day Saints at the turn of the 20th century to place great faith in the possibility of a rational universe. Indeed, he wrote books titled “Rational Theology” and “Joseph Smith as Scientist.” Many Christians believed in the ultimate compatibility of faith and science in the 19th century, before Protestant fundamentalists kicked up controversy about evolution in the 1920s and created a popular narrative that “religion” and “science” were at odds. Even through that dustup, Widtsoe and others like him continued to insist that science simply revealed how God worked.

The apostle believed God created a universe that functions through knowable principles that could be learned by scientific investigation as well as divine revelation. That investigation would reveal a natural order of things built into the fabric of the world itself. As humans learn that order, Widtsoe said, they can conform to it and be happy.

Dallin H. Oaks, first counselor in the church’s governing First Presidency, has a reputation as perhaps the most consistent defender of “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” among the current general authorities. That document is steeped in the language of natural law. It does not merely state that God prefers human families to function in a certain way; it argues that, in fact, the universe is set up such that families who function in that way will thrive while those who do not will struggle.

For Oaks, a lawyer by training, these sorts of arguments, with their if-then constructions, their neat definition of terms, and their rational procession, are irresistible. He speaks of principles and rules, the comprehensible structure of a universe that functions according to clear law.

“To understand the teachings and examples of our Savior, we must understand the nature of God’s love and the eternal purpose of his laws and commandments,” Oaks teaches. “One does not replace or diminish the other.”

The Church of Grace

Representative: Emily Belle Freeman.

Past representatives: Ezra Taft Benson, Stephen Robinson.

Former church President Ezra Taft Benson famously instructed members to refocus their study on the faith’s foundational text, the Book of Mormon, which emphasizes human incapacity to save ourselves from sin, the need for divine mercy, and Jesus Christ’s capacity to redeem humans not merely from damnation but also from pain, suffering and hopelessness. Benson repeated these themes in his sermons, most notably in a 1987 address in which he quoted the Book of Mormon declaring that Jesus is “full of grace.” That Jesus is “gracious,” Benson said, is one of his fundamental attributes.

At the same time, a set of Latter-day Saint writers — particularly Brigham Young University professors such as Stephen Robinson and Robert Millet — were engaging in interreligious dialogue with Protestants. These writers were particularly attracted to the Protestant notion that divine grace is not something earned but rather a gift that can bridge the gaps of human frailty and heal human weakness. Robinson’s book on the topic, “Believing Christ,” was a hit at church-owned Deseret Book.

President Emily Belle Freeman, head of the global Young Women organization, is the Latter-day Saint leader most fluent in this dialect. Her career before becoming a church officer was built on interfaith dialogue with evangelicals, and her writing and teachings are drenched with evangelical idioms — not merely in content but also in style. She calls for a personal relationship with Christ that provides healing, advances spiritual power and comes in great abundance. She speaks the language of dramatic intensity characteristic of Protestant evangelicals but increasingly appealing to Latter-day Saints who turn to their faith for aid in overcoming challenges.

“In that place where you feel bound, plead for his grace. Trust that it is available in abundance,” Freeman teaches. “Jesus Christ sees you. He can help you overcome.”

The Church of Community

Representative: Gerrit W. Gong.

Past representatives: Brigham Young, Amy Brown Lyman, Thomas S. Monson.

When he learned that a handcart company was trapped on the wintry plains of Wyoming, Latter-day Saint pioneer-prophet Brigham Young famously canceled Sunday services and announced a rescue mission. “That is my religion,” he stated. “That is the dictation of the Holy Ghost that I possess. It is to save the people.”

Young had a number of firm opinions about theology and authority. He also possessed a vision of the church that emphasized first its communal aspects. To be saved, to him, meant to be sealed into the familial networks that polygamy created. To be a member was, in part, to take the sacramental bread and water on Sundays, but most of all to dig irrigation ditches and contribute labor and resources to the well-being of the community.

This frontier version of the faith had its roots in church founder Joseph Smith’s ideas about sealing, polygamy and economic communalism.

It echoes still in the church’s humanitarian work. Thomas S. Monson, church president for nearly 10 years, and Amy Brown Lyman, Relief Society president from 1940 to 1945, were perhaps the greatest 20th-century exponents of this church. Monson was famous for his personal visits to hospitals and comforting of the lonely. Lyman almost single-handedly built the church’s first modern welfare system.

“Service to others is akin to duty, the fulfillment of which brings true joy,” Monson said. “There is no dividing line between our prosperity and our neighbor’s wretchedness.”

Lyman taught that “faith with good works is an asset, a comforter, a blessing; it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth.”

The titles of three of apostle Gerrit W. Gong’s recent conference addresses share a similar focus on the church as a community of mutual care. In April 2021, he spoke on “Room in the Inn,” analogizing the church to the inns of the New Testament. There he asked members to “make [the Lord’s] inn a place of grace and space, where each can gather, with room for all.” In October 2023, he elaborated on the lyrics to the hymn “Love Is Spoken Here,” describing the ideal ward as a place where love is evident through service. That April, in a talk called “Ministering,” he stated “think of your ward or branch as a spiritual ecosystem.” For Gong, the church is a series of bound covenant relationships among humans as much as between humans and God. He emphasizes the social aspects of religious life, seeing salvation coming through bonds with one another.

Again, I don’t think that these various visions of what the church might be are mutually exclusive. I would expect some of the figures I describe here to protest, saying they’d identify with two or three or all of the categories. Nor would I argue that any is the correct or original version of the church. Rather, each is one expression of what the church might be, each the product of cultural circumstance and historical development. In sorting them out, identifying their origins and trajectory, we can see the influence of history upon the church. Perhaps we also can get a glimpse of where it might move in the future.

Matthew Bowman is the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University and the author of 2023′s “The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America” and 2012′s “The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith.”

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