Tad Callister, whose writings and sermons helped shape an entire Latter-day Saint generation’s understanding of Jesus and the doctrine of the Atonement, died Thursday in Bountiful at age 79.
Callister never reached the highest and most visible ranks of church leadership. His most prominent appointment was that of leader of the three-man presidency responsible for overseeing the faith’s Sunday school programs. It didn’t matter. The tax lawyer out of Los Angeles succeeded in becoming a household name among members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints all the same.
Born in 1945, Callister received his law degree from the University of California-Los Angeles before graduating from New York University with a master’s in tax law. He practiced for decades in Glendale, one of L.A.’s affluent suburbs. There, he rose steadily through the ranks of church leadership while raising his six kids with his wife, Kathryn, whom he met while an undergraduate at Brigham Young University.
Then came the 2000 publication by church-owned Deseret Book of Callister’s “The Infinite Atonement.” A blockbuster that remains in print a quarter century later, the volume was, after Stephen Robinson’s “Believing Christ,” one of the most popular Latter-day Saint books on Jesus and the Atonement in a generation. Like Robinson, Callister describes a personal Jesus whose sacrifice extended beyond death and sin to make up for individuals’ weaknesses.
“Those who focus on him and his atoning sacrifice, who let these glorious truths rest in their minds continually,” he wrote, “will find that Christ’s power to lift the human soul transcends even the weightiest burdens the world may thrust upon them.”
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Tad R. Callister speaks during the morning session of the 189th Annual General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City on Sunday April 7, 2019. Callister died Thursday in Bountiful.
In the following years, Callister, who served in the Presidency of the Seventy from 2011 to 2014, would deliver half a dozen General Conference sermons and pen many more articles for the church’s global publications.
In one particularly controversial address, delivered during a 2013 devotional at Brigham Young University-Idaho, he taught that women should dress modestly to help preserve “the moral purity of men.”
“In the end,” he said, “most women get the type of man they dress for.”
Later in life and after departing full-time church employment, Callister publicly took up the cause of conservative politics, including speaking at a 2024 GOP fundraiser alongside Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Top Latter-day Saint leaders maintain — and repeatedly restate — the church’s strict stance of political neutrality on partisan matters. But for Callister, there was no real distinction between promoting the faith’s teachings and the belief in the divine origins and nature of the United States and its Constitution, a major focus of his in his final years.
“God sent the [Founding Fathers] forth at a specified time and place to fulfill their divinely appointed mission,” he wrote in 2023 in Meridian Magazine, a conservative blog for Latter-day Saints. “And what was that mission? It was to form a government that would establish our God-given rights, including freedom of speech and religion, so we would become a nation under God, not a nation without God.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated Tad Callister’s rank in the worldwide Sunday School presidency. The correct title is president.