How a team created the ‘elaborate and intricate’ narrative arc that spans 4 volumes of ‘Saints’

Historians and writers purposefully chose temples to be tent poles in the narrative arcs that differentiate “Saints” from past histories of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the project’s managing historian said this week at BYU Education Week.
“‘Saints’ actually has quite an elaborate and intricate structure,” Jed Woodworth said. “It’s a superstructure that is buried beneath the storytelling, and part of the engagement that I think people have is that there’s actually an intense logic to ‘Saints’ that is engaging and fulfilling. It’s based on the principles of storytelling. We are creating a structure that is fulfilling to people as they read.”
Woodworth used his Education Week presentation to announce that the fourth and final volume, “Saints: Sounded in Every Ear,” will be released on Oct. 29.
The concept for building the church’s new history around temples originated around the fireplace in BYU’s Gordon B. Hinckley Visitors’ Center in 2008. The founding prophet and president of the Church of Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith, taught that temple ordinances can create eternal families and lead to exaltation, or eternal life in God’s presence.
“The temple and temple covenants bind us together, not only families, but friends and acquaintances,” Woodworth said. “They connect people across cultures, across time, across generations.”
Earlier in 2008, the First Presidency had authorized the Church History Department to form a steering committee to develop suggestions, ideas and an outline for an extension to the second multivolume official history of the church, by B.H. Roberts, who divided his six volumes by the presidential administrations, Woodworth said. The first history was commissioned by Joseph Smith and published in 1842.
When four members of the subcommittee sat on the leather chairs and couches near the Hinckley Center fire, they decided they couldn’t follow the format of one of the Church History classes they were teaching because that, Steven Harper said, would create a false finish. That class ended with Joseph Smith’s death.
“It really doesn’t work,” Woodworth said. “The triumph of our church is not Joseph Smith’s death, it is what he taught. So they didn’t like this idea of ending a volume with 1844.”
As Harper spoke by the fireplace with fellow BYU faculty and “Saints” subcommittee members Scott Esplin, Spencer Fluhman and Reid Neilson, they conceived the idea of building the new church history around temples and temple covenants.
Harper, who preceded Woodworth as managing historian on the project, later described the theme around a Book of Mormon scripture, Mosiah 3:19, about a prophet teaching his people to overcome the nature of the Fall and reorient themselves to walk in the Spirit.
“The idea,” Woodward quoted Harper, “was that Latter-day Saints are ‘fallen’ people, natural men and women who are enemies to God until they make and keep covenants and yield to Christ, become ‘born again’ and become Saints through the Atonement of Christ, culminating in (temple) ordinances, the crowning ordinances of the Restoration.
“So thinking that way, we divided the trajectory of the four volumes into climactic events that would be temple landmarks.”
The first volume of “Saints″ ended with the completion of the Nauvoo Temple in Illinois and the start of temple ordinances there in 1846, just as the Latter-day Saints were about to leave and become pioneers in the West. The second volume ended with them established in the West, with the dedication of the Salt Lake Temple in Utah in 1893. The third volume ended with the building of the Bern Switzerland Temple in 1955.
“Rather than Joseph Smith’s death, the Nauvoo Temple is the culminating product of his work and thought,” Woodworth said. “The Salt Lake Temple is the culmination of gathering converts who want to become saints by the atoning sacrifice of Christ, gathering people from across the world to the Great Basin. The Bern temple is really symbolic of the reverse gathering, where we go back out into the world, and we urge our converts to remain where they are and essentially we say, ‘We will bring the temple to you.’”
Volume 4 will illustrate church history around the central theme of Latter-day Saint prophets directing the building of temples around the world from 1955-2020, when temples began to dot the earth, Woodworth said.
“I hesitate to reveal the ending of this book to you, so you’re just going to have to wait, sorry,” he said.
Woodworth provided several reasons temples worked as the centerpieces to the volumes.
Woodworth credited the Hinckley Center Four and others with making temples the centerpieces of the historical storytelling that makes “Saints” popular among Latter-day Saints.
He said writers James Goldberg and Scott Hales provided “a literary backbone to the concept of temples worked out by the subcommittee.”
“Goldberg really sold (church staff) on writing in an engaging way, creative nonfiction using tried and true principles from screenwriting,” Woodworth said.
Goldberg and Hales worked out the dramatic goal of temple building as a literary choice. The formula matured over a decade until the first volume was released in 2018.
Goldberg also developed a three-act structure for each book. Hales created quarters and milestones within those acts. The second and third quarters of each book take place in the second act.
The first act of Volume 1 set up the story and climaxed with the organization of the church in 1830. The midpoint is the dedication of the Kirtland Temple. The climax of the second act is Joseph Smith escaping prison and founding the city of Nauvoo, Illinois. The third act climaxes with his martyrdom through the resolution of the succession crisis.
Woodworth revealed the quarters for the upcoming Volume 4: