Commentary: ‘Saturday’s Warrior’ was a big hit with LDS audiences, but its theology was a big miss

Depending on whether one marks from composition, production, first performance or first professional performance, the musical “Saturday’s Warrior” is either 51 or 52 or perhaps only 50 years old in 2025.

It ranks second only to Bruce R. McConkie’s “Mormon Doctrine” as the most influential work of theology in the modern Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This might seem a dramatic claim about a musical even its fans often call tacky, cheesy and subtle as a fire hose. And while fewer and fewer church members have actually seen it, many of its plot points are still repeated as truth over pulpits and in Sunday schools. So it’s worth examining.

“Saturday’s Warrior” was born in the 1970s era of pop-Christian musicals like “Godspell” and “Jesus Christ Superstar.” It was a time when many Protestants and Catholics in the United States had begun a tentative embrace of the unbuttoned Sixties ethos and wanted to prove that Christianity could be as groovy as rock music. There have been a number of such — now mostly forgotten — efforts in the Utah-based church, too: “The Garden,” “My Turn on Earth” and more.


But “Saturday’s Warrior” outlasted them all. It was surprisingly popular in Utah, spawning dozens of productions. A 1989 film version sold thousands of copies and inspired a 2016 remake. The latter has far superior production values but is a harder watch because the musical is deeply, almost defiantly, rooted in the social traumas of the early 1970s. The people behind the remake, thankfully, set the thing in the Nixon presidency, but the plot points are still hard to translate for audiences that were not yet born when it was written.

The musical is focused on the large Flinders family and the trials of some of its children. Its major themes are threefold.

First, the young protagonist, Jimmy, is so ashamed by the fact that his parents have six other children — and another on the way — he flees home and falls in with a group of teenage miscreants who share Jimmy’s odd fixation on how lame large families are. They sing a song advocating birth control called “Zero Population.” These people are presented as maladaptive losers. As far as “Saturday’s Warrior” is concerned, contraception is morally irresponsible.

Second, as per the musical’s title, “Saturday’s Warrior” embraces millennialism, the belief that the world is rapidly coming to an end. Its songs inform us that Jimmy and his fellow young Saints have been specially chosen to be advocates for Jesus Christ in a time when society is descending into the sort of wickedness that only the Second Coming of Jesus can thwart.

The musical is shot through with a martial earnestness. There’s a worried grandiosity to its Latter-day Saint missionary characters and a gnawing anxiety beneath the persistent smiles of Jimmy’s parents, struggling to gather all of their children into the safe boat of the church before it’s too late. There’s a grinning nihilism to the teenage villains. All of the characters believe that the world is almost finished, in one way or another.

Church policy has evolved past the musical

Let me pause here to point out that the contemporary church has disavowed some assumptions in the show. The musical’s tinny, aggressive stance against contraception matched the rhetoric of many church leaders in the 1970s and ’80s. But, by the 1990s, those leaders quietly stopped talking about the issue. In 1998, the church’s official handbook specified that decisions about family planning were up to parents.

Similarly, the vivid title “Saturday’s Warrior,” combined with the millennialism of the musical’s plot, as much as declares that young people today (and, of course, that title has been passed across three generations since the musical, along with their status) are called to be heroes in the desperate moral struggles of the end times.

But that suggestion has been repudiated by the church over and over again. In 2008, leaders put out a statement declaring that rumors circulating that modern youths were “generals in the war in heaven,” soldiers for Christ saved for these latter days, is “a false statement. It is not church doctrine.” The church instructed local lay leaders to “correct anyone who attempts to perpetuate its use.”

Fear of birth control, concern for social decay, they’re reflective of the exhausted early 1970s. The sexual and social revolutions of the 1960s put many church members back on their heels and into a period sociologist Armand Mauss called “retrenchment.” Latter-day Saint leaders became defensive, worried about the outside world, and ready to see apocalyptic struggle in social debates.

But what has really lasted from “Saturday’s Warrior” is the final theme that I want to point out — the one that’s not nearly so timebound as the previous. This is the assumption behind those 1970s specifics — the notion that we all planned our lives before we were born. In the end, of all the theories the musical puts forward, it’s this that I find most distressing.

Matches made in heaven?


The musical is framed with scenes from human premortal and postmortal life. The existence of these states of being is, of course, a basic tenet of Mormon theology. But it’s what the musical does with them that stands out.

Jimmy, his family, the missionaries and converts in the cast — all are shown before their birth discussing their impending lives and challenges. They make agreements to find one another. They swear commitments and accept certain responsibilities. Then the circumstances of the plot work out such that all of these promises and destinies are indeed fulfilled.

In short, the musical proposes the idea that there is a master plan for everybody’s life. You were always supposed to marry this person, take that job, move to this city.


Many Latter-day Saints simply take that concept for granted. Certainly, some version of them has circulated in the church for decades. The premise of “Saturday’s Warrior” is taken from Nephi Anderson’s 1898 novel “Added Upon,” which traces several characters from a premortal existence to life on Earth and through the end of human history. The novel, though, doesn’t depict premortal people planning their future lives to nearly the extent of the musical.

On the other hand, confidence that our lives have a map and an ultimate purpose we must discover proved popular in New Age spaces of the 1960s and in versions of Protestant evangelicalism called the prosperity gospel, which teach that God wants to give the righteous material rewards. In the 1970s, New Age self-help writers, like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra, taught their readers that each individual life was designed by a benevolent universe and that even our trials might be calculated to offer particular opportunities for growth.


In a sense, then, the musical simply translated these ideas into Latter-day Saint vernacular and combined them with the social conservatism of late-20th-century Latter-day Saint theology. Everything happens for a reason — and that reason was worked out in the preexistence.

Authoritative support is lacking

The problem is that Latter-day Saint scripture contains virtually nothing to support the notion that the specific events, challenges or decisions of our lives are designed to deliver us opportunities for growth. Indeed, scripture barely describes premortal life. While some church leaders have articulated something like this belief, a number of others have repudiated it. Former church President Spencer W. Kimball rejected the notion that people are meant to marry a certain person or pick spouses in the preexistence. Apostle James Talmage, one of the faith’s leading theological writers, rejected the notion that God planned human lives before their birth.

Still, the idea continues to circulate. In some ways it seems comforting. It can bring order to the chaos of our existence and help us cope with tragedy.

But it is also rife with difficulties. In the prelude to the musical set in the preexistence, a character played by a woman in the 1989 movie and singer Alex Boye in the 2016 version conducts the birth of spirits. This person makes a number of jokes about punishing mistakes by sending the characters to be born in places like Siberia and Madagascar. Obviously, these are merely jokes, but they illustrate the problem.

Set aside, with apologies to Russians, the musical’s presumption that being born in Russia is so terrible as to be the necessary result of premortal catastrophe. The notions that our experiences on Earth are punishments or rewards for behaviors we cannot remember, or that they are invisible hoops that we do not recall that we agreed we must leap through, can lead to pernicious conclusions.

For many people, the idea that life is one long scramble to hit the marks of the life laid out for us before we were born is so exhausting as to be crisis-inducing. And even more damning, ideas like this are, after all, the basic presumption behind the long-circulated notion — disavowed by the church — that people of African descent were insufficiently righteous before they were born.

In short, the musical seems not to have thought through the implications of its ideas. Its simultaneous assertion of free will and preordained fate is hard to reconcile, and this is no less true in real life than on the stage.

Note to readers • Matthew Bowman is the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University and the author of 2024’s “Joseph Fielding Smith: A Mormon Theologian,” 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.”