“Written in Heaven,” chapter 16 of Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days, Volume 3, Boldly, Nobly, and Independent, 1893–1955 (2022)
Chapter 16: “Written in Heaven”
Chapter 16
Written in Heaven
When Anna Kullick’s brother Ernst Biebersdorf told her about his Latter-day Saint friends at work, she was intrigued. Their beliefs reminded her of a dream her mother had back in Germany, before Anna and Ernst had moved with their families to Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the early 1920s.
A deeply religious woman, Louise Biebersdorf had seen a beautiful place in her dream. Although she was not permitted to go there, she was told she would get there someday through two of her children. In the same dream, she learned that the true church would come from America.1
Anna and Ernst soon began attending Latter-day Saint meetings in Buenos Aires with Ernst’s friends, whose names were Wilhelm Friedrichs and Emil Hoppe.2 After Parley Pratt’s brief mission to Chile in 1851, the Church had sent few missionaries to South America and had no official presence on the continent. Wilhelm, Emil, and their families, in fact, had joined the Church in Germany and brought its teachings to Buenos Aires when they and thousands of other Germans—including the families of Anna and Ernst—had emigrated to Argentina to escape hard economic times brought on by the recent world war.3
On Sundays, the Saints met in a small room at Wilhelm’s residence. Since neither Wilhelm nor Emil had priesthood authority to bless the sacrament, the meetings were primarily a time for scripture study and prayer. Lacking an organ, the group sang hymns while Wilhelm’s son played the mandolin. The Saints also met at seven o’clock on Thursday evenings to study the Bible at Emil’s house. As the congregation grew, the group began holding a Sunday school, where they studied from a German copy of James E. Talmage’s Articles of Faith. Soon Anna was paying tithing, which Wilhelm sent to Church headquarters in Salt Lake City.
Eager to share the restored gospel, Wilhelm wrote and distributed tracts and advertised Church meetings in local German newspapers. He also wrote articles and delivered lectures on a variety of gospel topics. But he could not speak Spanish, the primary language in Argentina, which limited his efforts. Still, German-speaking people would occasionally turn up at his door, curious about what they had read regarding the Saints.4
By the spring of 1925, Anna was ready to be baptized. At first, her husband, Jacob, had been against her going to Church meetings, but he soon started attending. Their three teenage children were also becoming interested in the gospel. Anna’s brother Ernst and his wife, Marie, were eager to join the Church as well, but there was no one in Argentina who had the authority to administer the ordinance.
As interest in the Church grew, the believers began meeting in three different locations throughout the city. Their faith inspired Wilhelm. “They have a testimony of the authenticity of this work, and desire to be baptized, as soon as opportunity affords,” he wrote Church leaders in Salt Lake City.5
Wilhelm soon received a response from the presiding bishop of the Church, Sylvester Q. Cannon. “We have taken up with the First Presidency the matter of sending missionaries to the Argentina, but so far nothing definite has been decided,” he wrote. “However, we are making inquiry with regard to suitable men who can speak the German and Spanish languages.”6
The news offered hope to Anna, Ernst, and their families. Soon everyone wanted to know when they could expect missionaries in their country.7
Around this time, many white Americans were growing unsettled by changes happening in the United States. Millions of African Americans and immigrants were moving to northern U.S. cities to escape discrimination and find better employment. Their presence alarmed many working-class whites, who were afraid of losing their jobs to the newcomers. As resentment grew, hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan, which used secrecy and violence to brutalize Blacks and other minorities, gained members across the country.8
Heber J. Grant watched the spread of hate groups with dismay. Decades earlier, Klan members had sometimes assaulted missionaries in the American South. Such attacks on Saints had stopped, but recent reports of the Klan’s actions were no less troubling.
“The number of whippings, murders, and the mob violence laid at the door of this organization make a sad page in the history of the South,” the president of the Southern States Mission wrote President Grant in 1924. “There have been no convictions for these crimes. The spirit of lawlessness and violence that has swept over the South is exactly the same as that which inspired the Gadianton robbers.”9
Throughout the 1920s, hate groups fed on widespread racism, which could be found in every region of the United States and in other areas of the world. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that state laws allowing the separation of white and Black Americans in schools, churches, restrooms, railroad cars, and other public facilities were legal. Furthermore, popular novels and films demeaned Black people and other racial, ethnic, and religious groups with harmful stereotypes. Few people, in the United States or elsewhere, believed Black and white people should mingle socially.10
In the Church, wards and branches were officially open to all people, regardless of race. Yet not all congregations agreed. In 1920, Black Latter-day Saints Marie and William Graves were welcome and fully integrated members of their branch in California. When Marie visited a branch in the southern United States, however, she was asked to leave because of the color of her skin. “I never had nothing to hurt me like that in all of my life,” she wrote in a letter to President Grant.11
To prepare the earth for the Lord’s return, Church leaders knew the restored gospel must be taught to every nation, kindred, tongue, and people. For decades, the Saints had actively preached among other people of color—including Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Latin Americans. But centuries-old obstacles, including racism, stood in the way of taking the gospel to all the world.
In the case of Marie Graves, the First Presidency did not ask the congregation to integrate, for fear that challenging racial codes like those in the South put both Black and white Saints at risk. Nor did Church leaders encourage active proselytizing among Black communities, since the Church restricted priesthood ordination and temple blessings from people of African descent.12
Some people in the Church sought exceptions to this practice. During his visit to the Pacific Islands, Elder David O. McKay had written to President Grant, asking if an exception could be made for a Black Latter-day Saint who had married a Polynesian woman and together raised a large family in the Church.
“David, I am as sympathetic as you are,” President Grant had responded, “but until the Lord gives us a revelation regarding that matter, we shall have to maintain the policy of the Church.”13
Beginning in the early 1900s, Church leaders taught that any Saint known to have Black African ancestry, however small, would be restricted. Yet the uncertainty about some Saints’ racial identity created inconsistencies in how the restriction was applied. Nelson Ritchie, the son of a Black woman and a white man, knew little about his parents’ history when he and his wife, Annie, a white woman, joined the Church in Utah. He had light skin, and many of his children were thought to be white. When two of his daughters were ready for marriage, they entered the temple and received the endowment and sealing ordinances.
Later, however, when Nelson and Annie desired to be sealed in the temple, their bishop questioned Nelson about his ancestry. Nelson told him what he understood about his parents, and the bishop took the case to the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, who sent the question back to the bishop to decide. In the end, the bishop affirmed that Nelson and Annie were good Latter-day Saints, but he declined to issue Nelson a temple recommend because of his ancestry.14
While many Saints shared the racial prejudice of the time, most disapproved of organizations that used secrecy, lawlessness, and violence to oppress others. After the Ku Klux Klan spread to Utah in the early 1920s, President Grant and other Church leaders denounced it in general conference and used their influence to stop it. Few Church members ever joined the group. When a Klan leader sought a meeting with Church leaders, President Grant refused the request.15
“It is beyond my comprehension,” the prophet noted in April 1925, “how people holding the priesthood will want to associate themselves with the Ku Klux Klan.”16
In mid-1925, Heber J. Grant and others around the world were captivated by the case of John Scopes, a high school science teacher who had been brought to trial in the southern United States for teaching that humans and monkeys evolved from a common ancestor.17
The Scopes trial exposed a great divide among Christian churches. Some “modernist” Christians believed that the Bible should not be treated as an authority on scientific questions. Science provided a more reliable guide to understanding the natural world, they reasoned, and teachers like Scopes ought to be able to teach evolution in the schools without fear of punishment. “Fundamentalist” Christians, on the other hand, saw the Bible as God’s final and absolute truth. For them it was blasphemy to claim that humankind, God’s highest creation, evolved from less-sophisticated life-forms.18
Heber had great respect for modern science and for scientists like apostles James E. Talmage and John Widtsoe, who had excelled in their fields while retaining faith in the restored gospel. Like them, he was open to the discovery of new truths outside of scripture, and he had faith that science and religion could ultimately be reconciled.19
But he worried about young Latter-day Saints who had abandoned their faith while studying science at colleges and universities. As a young man, he had been ridiculed by a scientist for believing in the Book of Mormon. The man pointed to the passage in 3 Nephi in which God’s voice was widely heard among those who had survived the destruction at the time of Christ’s Crucifixion. The scientist said it was impossible for a voice to carry so far and anyone who believed otherwise was a fool. Years later, after the invention of radio proved that voices could travel great distances, Heber felt vindicated.20
During the Scopes trial, Heber and his counselors decided to publish a condensed version of “The Origin of Man,” the essay issued by the First Presidency in 1909.21 Rather than condemn the teaching of evolutionary theory, as fundamentalists did, the essay affirmed the biblical teaching that God created male and female in His own image. It also declared the unique restored doctrine that all people once lived as spirit children of God before they were born on earth and that these spirit sons and daughters had grown and developed over time.
“Man, as a spirit, was begotten and born of heavenly parents, and reared to maturity in the eternal mansions of the Father,” the First Presidency testified.
The statement ended by emphasizing another kind of change over time—one that looked far into the future. “Even as the infant son of an earthly father and mother is capable in due time of becoming a man,” it declared, “so that undeveloped offspring of celestial parentage is capable, by experience through ages and eons, of evolving into a God.”22
Three days after the First Presidency published its statement, the jury in the Scopes trial issued a verdict. John Scopes was found guilty and ordered to pay a $100 fine.23 After that, when people wrote to Heber asking for the Church’s view on evolution, he sent them a copy of the First Presidency’s statement. He did not have to tell people what to believe. Truth could be judged by its fruits, he said, as Jesus had taught in the Sermon on the Mount.24
When Len Hope was about seventeen years old, he spent two weeks attending a Baptist revival near his home in Alabama, in the southern United States. At night, the young Black man would come home from the revival, lie down in the cotton fields, and look up at the heavens. He would beg God for religion, but in the morning the only thing he had to show for his effort was clothing wet with dew.
One year later, Len decided to be baptized in a local church. Soon after, though, he dreamed that he needed to be baptized again. Confused, he started reading the Bible—so much so that he worried his friends. “If you don’t stop reading so much, you will go crazy,” they said. “Already the asylum is full of preachers.”
Len did not stop reading. One day, he learned that the Holy Ghost could lead him to truth. At the advice of a preacher, he retreated to the woods to pray in an old empty house hidden in a tangle of bushes. There he wept for hours, pleading with God for the Holy Ghost. In the morning, he was ready to go without food or drink until he received the gift. But then the Spirit prompted him not to do so. Only someone with authority from God could confer the Holy Ghost on him.
A short time later, as Len waited for an answer to his many prayers, a Latter-day Saint missionary gave his sister a tract about God’s plan of salvation. Len read it and believed its message. He also learned that Latter-day Saint missionaries had authority to confer the gift of the Holy Ghost on those who accepted baptism.
Seeking out the elders, Len asked if they would baptize him.
“Yes, gladly,” said one of the missionaries, “but if I were you, I would read a little more.”25
Len got copies of the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price, and other Church books—and soon read them all. But before he could be baptized, he was drafted to fight in the world war. The army shipped him overseas, where he served bravely at the front. Then, after returning home to Alabama, he was baptized by a local Church member on June 22, 1919, and finally received the gift of the Holy Ghost.26
A few nights after his baptism, a mob of white men came to the house where he was staying and called out for him. “We just want to talk to you,” they said. In their hands were rifles and shotguns.
Len stepped outside. He was a Black man in the American South, where armed mobs sometimes enforced racial segregation with violence. They could injure or kill him on the spot and may never have to answer for their crime.27
Someone in the mob demanded to know why Len had joined the Latter-day Saints. It was legal for Blacks and whites to worship together in Alabama, but the state also had a strict set of segregation laws and unwritten social codes to keep the races separate in public settings. Since nearly every Latter-day Saint in Alabama was white, the mob saw Len’s baptism as a challenge to the region’s deeply rooted color line.28
“So, you went over to the waters and learned a few things,” the man continued, referring to Len’s army service. “Now you want to join the whites.”
“I was investigating the Church long before I went to war,” Len finally said. “I found it was the only true church on earth. That is why I joined it.”
“We want you to go and have your name scratched off the record,” the mob said. “If not, we will hang you up to a limb and shoot you full of holes.”29
The next morning, Len attended a conference of fellow Saints in the area and told them about the mob’s threat. He knew he was taking a risk by coming to the meeting, but he was willing to die for his newfound faith.
“Brother Hope, we could not scratch your name off if we tried to,” Church members reassured him. “Your name is in Salt Lake City and also written in heaven.” Many of them offered to help Len if the mob ever came after him again.30
But the mob never returned. Len soon married a woman named Mary Pugh in 1920, and they moved to Birmingham, a large city in central Alabama. Mary’s uncle, a Baptist pastor, predicted that she would join the Church before the year was over.
Mary read the Book of Mormon and gained a testimony of its truth. It took a little longer than predicted, but after five years of marriage she decided to join the Church. On September 15, 1925, the Hopes went with two missionaries to a secluded spring near Birmingham. Mary was baptized without incident, finally becoming a Latter-day Saint, like her husband.31
“I couldn’t be anything better,” she told her uncle, “and I can see no better church.”32
Meanwhile, in Buenos Aires, Anna Kullick and her family welcomed apostle Melvin J. Ballard and his companions, Rey L. Pratt and Rulon S. Wells of the Seventy, to their city. The First Presidency had sent the three general authorities to Argentina to dedicate South America for missionary work, establish a branch of the Church, and preach the gospel in German and Spanish to the residents of the city. The Kullicks had waited months for someone to come. The missionaries were the only ones on the South American continent who had the proper authority to baptize them into the Church of Jesus Christ.33
Elder Wells spoke German well, and Elder Pratt spoke fluent Spanish. But Elder Ballard spoke neither language and seemed overwhelmed by his new surroundings. Everything about Buenos Aires—the language, the warm December air, the stars in the southern sky—was unfamiliar to him.34
The missionaries spent their first days in Argentina visiting with the German Saints in the city. They held meetings in the home of Wilhelm Friedrichs and attended a Book of Mormon class in the home of Emil Hoppe. Then, on December 12, 1925, they baptized Anna, Jacob, and the couple’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Herta. Anna’s brother Ernst and his wife, Marie, were also baptized, as was Wilhelm Friedrichs’s adopted daughter, Elisa Plassmann. The next day, the missionaries ordained Wilhelm and Emil as priests and Jacob and Ernst as deacons.35
Two weeks later, on Christmas morning, the three missionaries went to the Parque Tres de Febrero, a well-known city park with wide green lawns, blue lakes, and serene groves of weeping willows. Finding themselves alone, the men sang hymns and then bowed their heads while Elder Ballard dedicated the continent for the Lord’s work.
“I do turn the key, unlock and open the door for the preaching of the gospel in all these South American nations,” he prayed, “and command to be stayed every power that would oppose the preaching of the gospel in these lands.”36
Once the South American Mission was officially open, the missionaries and members worked together to share the gospel with their neighbors. Herta Kullick, who knew Spanish, sometimes shared the gospel with her Spanish-speaking friends at school. Elder Ballard and Elder Pratt, meanwhile, went door to door to distribute tracts and invite people to Church meetings. The work was tiring. The missionaries often had to travel long distances across open fields or on muddy roads in all kinds of weather.37
In January 1926, Elder Wells returned home because of ill health, so Herta became responsible for helping Elder Ballard and Elder Pratt communicate with the German Saints. Elder Ballard would prepare a message for the Saints in English, Elder Pratt would translate it into Spanish, and Herta would translate the Spanish into German. It was a complicated—and sometimes very funny—process, but the missionaries were grateful for her help.38
During their meetings, the missionaries often presented slideshows using a projector they brought from the United States. Thinking her friends might take an interest, Herta invited them to attend the shows. Soon, nearly a hundred young people—most of them Spanish speakers—were appearing at the Saints’ rented meetinghouse, and the elders organized a Sunday school to teach them.39
Parents of the youth, curious about what their children were learning, started meeting with the Saints as well. At one meeting, more than two hundred people crowded the meetinghouse to see slides about the Restoration and hear Elder Pratt teach in their native language.40
Six months after Elder Ballard, Elder Pratt, and Elder Wells came to Buenos Aires, a permanent mission president and two young missionaries arrived to carry on the work in their place. The new president, Reinhold Stoof, and his wife, Ella, had joined the Church in Germany just a few years earlier. One of the missionaries, J. Vernon Sharp, spoke Spanish, ensuring that both German-speaking and Spanish-speaking South Americans would be able to hear the gospel in their own language. Not long after they arrived, the mission had its first Spanish-speaking convert, Eladia Sifuentes.41
On July 4, 1926, just before he was to return to the United States, Elder Ballard bore his testimony to a small congregation of Argentine Saints. “The work will go slowly for a time, just as an oak grows slowly from an acorn,” he declared. “It will not shoot up in a day as does the sunflower that grows quickly and thus dies.”
“Thousands will join here,” he prophesied. “It will be divided into more than one mission and will be one of the strongest in the Church.”42