Chapter 17
No Going Back
On the morning of October 10, 1975, several shiny antique automobiles rumbled to life on the campus of Brigham Young University, signaling the start of the school’s Founders Day parade. Thousands of faculty, students, and alumni, representing the university’s many colleges and associations, marched briskly behind the cars. In the distance, on a mountainside east of campus, a giant whitewashed “Y” gleamed in the sunlight.
BYU celebrated its founding every fall, but this year marked the university’s one hundredth anniversary. To commemorate the occasion, President Spencer W. Kimball and his wife, Camilla, rode in the lead car, a red 1906 Cadillac. In keeping with the nostalgic feel of the parade, President Kimball wore an old-fashioned derby hat and striped suit coat. Sister Kimball, meanwhile, held a black lace parasol above her head.
Although his clothes recalled the past, President Kimball had his eyes fixed on the future. Now that the Church was rapidly becoming a worldwide organization, it did not seem right to provide programs and services for some Saints and not others. Already leaders had done away with Churchwide sports tournaments in Salt Lake City. And in 1974, the First Presidency had announced that the Church would divest itself of the fifteen hospitals it operated in the western United States. Then, the following year, President Kimball had announced that all annual conferences of the general organizations—MIA, Sunday School, Primary, and Relief Society—would be coming to an end because they took place in Salt Lake City and generally benefited only the Saints in and around Utah.
“With the distances growing greater and membership greatly increasing,” he explained, “it seems high time to take another long stride in our decentralization.”
The prominence of the new area general conferences was evidence of the Church’s commitment to its global membership. In 1975 alone, President Kimball had presided at large conferences in Brazil, Argentina, Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. And the Church was calling more missionaries than ever before. During his travels as an apostle, President Kimball had passed out silver dollars to children he met, asking them to begin a missionary fund. Now, as Church president, he asked every young man to serve a mission and encouraged the Saints in every country to supply their own missionary force.
While in Japan, he had announced plans to build a temple in Tokyo, the first in Asia. More recently, at the October general conference, he had called men to serve in a new general priesthood quorum, the First Quorum of the Seventy. According to the Doctrine and Covenants, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles was to “call upon the Seventy, when they need assistance.” The members of the new quorum would support the Twelve, preside at local conferences, and create new stakes across the globe. Although only a few men had been called into the new quorum so far, it could have up to seventy members.
BYU’s anniversary had also caused President Kimball to think about the future of the school. With around twenty-five thousand students, BYU was the largest of the Church’s four institutions of higher education, which also included Ricks College in Idaho, BYU–Hawaii on Oahu, and LDS Business College in Salt Lake City. It was also the largest private university in the United States. The students there, and at all Church schools, abided by an honor code requiring high standards of morality, honesty, and decency.
In 1971, Dallin Oaks, a young Latter-day Saint law professor from the University of Chicago, replaced BYU president Ernest Wilkinson. Under President Oaks’s leadership, the university had provided greater opportunities for female faculty and students, founded the J. Reuben Clark Law School, and expanded other academic programs.
Recently, though, the school had come under scrutiny because some of its honor code policies seemed to violate new federal equal opportunity laws. President Oaks and the board of trustees were concerned about the regulations, noting that they could force BYU to eliminate such things as separate housing for men and women. They were committed to the principle of equal opportunity in education and employment. Yet they objected to any law requiring the university to compromise religious liberty by adopting policies that could undermine the beliefs and practices of the Church.
So far, the issue remained unresolved. Yet President Kimball, as head of the BYU board of trustees, was adamant about upholding Church standards. He believed BYU’s commitment to both secular and spiritual learning was key to its future success, even if that approach set the school apart from other universities.
After the Founders Day parade, President Kimball spoke to a large assembly about his vision for BYU’s second century. “This university shares with other universities the hope and the labor involved in rolling back the frontiers of knowledge even further,” he declared, “but we also know that through the process of revelation there are yet ‘many great and important things’ to be given to mankind which will have an intellectual and spiritual impact far beyond what mere men can imagine.”
He encouraged the faculty and students to be more “bilingual” in their studies. “As LDS scholars you must speak with authority and excellence to your professional colleagues in the language of scholarship,” he said, “and you must also be literate in the language of spiritual things.”
He urged the university to embrace the future with faith, following the Lord’s direction, line upon line. He testified that the university would go forward. “We understand,” he said, “that education is a part of being about our Father’s business and that the scriptures contain the master concepts for mankind.”
“We expect—we do not simply hope—that Brigham Young University will become a leader among the great universities of the world,” he continued. “To that expectation I would add: Become a unique university in all of the world!”
Around this time, representatives from a Protestant church in the United States came to Cape Coast, Ghana, looking for Billy Johnson. They had heard that Billy had performed powerful miracles, and they were hoping to persuade him and his followers to join their church. About four thousand Ghanaians in forty-one congregations called themselves Latter-day Saints. Billy oversaw five of the congregations. The representatives needed someone to take charge of their Ghanaian congregations, and Billy struck them as the right man to lead.
Billy and his followers agreed to worship with the visitors at a community center in the city. The Americans greeted them with gifts of soap and cosmetics. “You kind people must be our brothers,” they said, “and we should be together.” They urged Billy and the others to stop waiting for the missionaries. “They are not coming.”
One of the visitors urged Billy to join them and be a leader in their church. “We’ll pay you,” he said. “We will pay your ministers.” They also offered to help Billy visit the United States and promised to supply his congregation with musical instruments and a new church building.
That night, Billy invited the visitors to stay in his home while he considered their offer. Being as poor as he was, he took the proposal seriously. But he did not want to betray God or his own faith in the restored gospel.
Alone in his bedroom, Billy wept. “Lord, what should I do?” he prayed. “I have waited for so long, and my brothers have not come.”
“Johnson, don’t ever confuse yourself or your members,” a voice told him. “Stay fast to the Church and very soon your brothers will come and assist you.”
Billy ended his prayer and left his bedroom. Soon, one of the guests emerged from another room. “Johnson,” the man said, “you are not asleep?”
“I’m thinking how to sort out things,” Billy admitted.
“Brother Johnson,” the man said, “I wanted to come and knock on your door to tell you your church is organized already. I should not confuse you.” He said the Lord had revealed this truth to him. “I should only be a brother to you,” he said. “Keep up with your church.”
“The Lord has spoken to me too,” Billy said. “It is the Lord’s church. I cannot give the church to anyone.”
Representatives from other American churches came later with similar offers. Billy rejected them all. Soon, leaders from his own congregation learned that he was refusing money and gifts from the Americans. Enraged, the leaders burst into his home. “These people have come to help,” one of the men said. “They’ll pay us.”
“I will not sell the church,” Billy said. “If it takes me twenty years, I will wait for the Lord.”
“You don’t have money,” one man said. “They want to pay us.”
“No,” Billy said, “no.”
The men seemed ready to beat him, but he refused to change his mind. Finally, they backed down, and as they left, Billy embraced them one by one. The last man broke down in tears when Billy took him in his arms.
“I’m sorry I’m hurting you,” the man said. “Please ask God to forgive me my sins.”
Billy cried with him. “Father,” he prayed, “forgive him.”
In August 1976, in another part of West Africa, Anthony Obinna sent a letter to President Kimball. “We here wish you to turn your attention to Nigeria,” he wrote, “and have the land dedicated for the teachings of the true gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Two years had passed since Anthony had last heard from his contact in the missionary department, LaMar Williams. In the meantime, Lorry Rytting, a Latter-day Saint professor from the United States, had spent a year teaching at a university in Nigeria. Anthony and other believers had met with Lorry, and they hoped that his visit would result in more direct contact with Church headquarters—and perhaps the beginnings of a mission. Lorry had returned to Utah and given Church leaders a favorable report of the readiness of Nigeria for the gospel, but nothing had yet come of it.
Anthony was unwilling to give up. “Your church’s teachings embody such good things that cannot be found in others,” he wrote President Kimball. “God calls on us to be saved, and we wish you to hasten the work.”
Anthony soon received a reply from Grant Bangerter, the president of the Church’s International Mission, a special mission supervising areas where Church members lived but where the Church was not officially recognized. President Bangerter told Anthony he sympathized with his situation but informed him there were still no plans to organize the Church in Nigeria.
“We encourage you with all expressions of brotherly love to pursue the practice of your faith as best as you can until such time in the future as it may be possible for the Church to take more direct action,” he wrote.
Around this time, Anthony and his wife, Fidelia, learned that their children were being harassed and humiliated at school because of their religious beliefs. Their eight-year-old daughter told how teachers would call her and her siblings out in front of the student body during school prayers, force them to kneel down with their hands raised, and strike their hands with a stick.
After Anthony and Fidelia found out what was happening, they went to speak with the teachers. “Why are you doing such things?” they asked. “We have freedom of worship in Nigeria.”
The beatings stopped, but the family and their fellow believers continued to face opposition from their community. “Lack of visit of any of the authorities from Salt Lake City has made us a laughingstock from some people here,” Anthony wrote President Bangerter in October 1976. “We are doing everything we can to establish the truth among so many of our Heavenly Father’s children in this part of the world.”
Anthony waited for a reply, but none came. Had his letters not reached Salt Lake City? He did not know, so he wrote again.
“We shall not be tired in writing and asking for the Church to be opened here as you have done all over the world,” he declared. “We in our group are earnestly following the teachings of our Saviour, Jesus Christ. There is no going back.”
When Katherine Warren first learned about the restored gospel, she was working as a nurse’s aide in the home of a woman in the northeastern United States. One day, she answered the door and found a pair of Latter-day Saint missionaries there.
“The lady of the house is in bed,” Katherine told them.
“Tell her that the elders from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints came by,” they replied, offering a pamphlet containing the testimony of the prophet Joseph Smith. Katherine took it, and the missionaries went on their way.
Katherine was impressed by the young men. But when her employer found out about them, she took the pamphlet from Katherine’s hand and threw it in the trash can.
Katherine remained intrigued, so she retrieved the pamphlet. As she read about Joseph Smith’s First Vision and the Book of Mormon later that day, she believed everything.
Katherine told a friend about the pamphlet a short time later. “I believe I have that Book of Mormon,” her friend told her, “and you can have it.”
Katherine trusted that the Lord had been leading her to search for something important. Once she started reading the Book of Mormon, she knew it was what the Lord wanted her to find. When some of what it taught about baptism contradicted what she had learned growing up, she heard a voice urging her not to cast it aside. “Believe all things,” the voice said.
Not long after that, Katherine moved to New Orleans, a city in the southern state of Louisiana, and got married. Eager to worship with the Latter-day Saints, she looked up the Church in the telephone book and attended the local ward. She felt good at church, and she began attending regularly. Yet, as a Black woman, she was treated differently. Some people seemed uncomfortable with her being there and even refused to speak with her. She eventually met an elderly Black woman in the ward, Freda Beaulieu. Although Freda loved the gospel and had been a member of the Church since childhood, she did not attend the ward regularly.
Several years went by, and Katherine wanted to join the Church, but she did not know how. She wrote to President Kimball about her desire, and he forwarded the letter to Church leaders in Louisiana. Two missionaries, serving under mission president LaMar Williams, went to her house right away.
The elders taught Katherine the standard missionary discussions, and soon she was ready for baptism. But at the time, to avoid introducing conflict in marriages, the Church had a policy that a woman could not get baptized without her husband’s permission. And Katherine’s husband refused to give his consent.
“Sister Warren, this is your church. You can continue to come here,” the elders said when she told them the bad news. “It might be fifty years before you get baptized, but you continue to come to church.”
So Katherine continued to go to church. When a new set of missionaries came to the area, they started teaching her again, but she knew all the answers to their questions. “We came to teach you,” they told her, “but you’re teaching us.”
Still hoping to be baptized, Katherine again sought her husband’s permission. This time she gave him a form the missionaries had written up for him to sign. “If this is what you want, I will sign it,” he told her.
But when President Williams traveled to New Orleans to interview Katherine for baptism, her husband would not let her go to meet with him. Discouraged, Katherine almost gave up. She knew the Spirit had led her to the Church, but trying to join had been one problem after another. Was the effort worth it?
She decided to fast, and while she did, she had a vision. A figure in a gray suit appeared in her home. At first she thought it was a missionary, but she quickly recognized that it was an angel. His face shone, and he spoke no words to her. He simply took her by the hand. She felt impressed to invite the missionaries and President Williams to interview her at her home. They did not need to worry about her husband interfering.
President Williams came to New Orleans and interviewed Katherine. She was then baptized on Christmas Day 1976.
At the time Katherine Warren embraced the restored gospel, Saigon Branch president Nguyen Van The was imprisoned in Thành Ông Năm, a squalid Vietnamese fortress serving as a prison camp. He was desperate for news of his wife and children, but the camp had largely cut him off from the outside world. All he knew about his family’s whereabouts came from a telegram from the president of the Hong Kong Mission: “Lien and family fine. With Church.”
The had received the telegram just before entering the camp. In an effort to restore order after capturing Saigon, the North Vietnamese government had required all former members of the South Vietnamese military to submit to a “reeducation” course on the new government’s principles and practices. Since The had served as a junior officer and English-language teacher for South Vietnam, he had reluctantly turned himself in, expecting the reeducation process to last about ten days. Now, more than a year later, he wondered when he would be free again.
Life in Thành Ông Năm was degrading. The and his fellow captives were organized into units and housed in rat-infested barracks. They slept on bare floors until their captors had them build beds out of steel slabs. Meager and spoiled food, along with the unsanitary conditions in camp, left the men vulnerable to sicknesses like dysentery and beriberi.
Reeducation also involved backbreaking labor and political indoctrination. When not cutting trees or tending crops to feed the camp, the men were forced to memorize propaganda and confess their crimes against North Vietnam. Anyone who broke camp rules could expect a brutal beating or solitary confinement in a dumpster-like iron box.
The had survived so far by lying low and clinging to his faith. He tried to obey camp rules and practiced his religion privately. He observed fast Sundays, despite being malnourished, and silently recited scriptures from memory to strengthen his faith. When a fellow Christian in camp gave him a smuggled Bible, he read the entire book twice in three months, cherishing the chance to read the word of God again.
The longed to be free. For a time, he contemplated escaping from the camp. He was sure he could use his military training to evade his captors, but as he prayed for help in the escape, he felt the Lord restrain him. “Be patient,” the Spirit whispered. “All will be well in the due time of the Lord.”
Sometime later, The learned that his sister, Ba, would be allowed to visit him in the camp. If he could slip her a letter to his family, she could send it to President Wheat in Hong Kong, and he could forward it to Lien and the children.
On the day of Ba’s visit, The waited in line as guards conducted full-body searches of the prisoners ahead of him. Knowing the guards would send him straight to solitary confinement if they found his letter to Lien, he had hidden the message behind the cloth band on the inside of his hat. He had then placed a small notebook and pen into the hat and set them on the ground. With any luck, the notebook would distract the guards just enough to keep them from searching the rest of the hat.
When his turn came to be searched, The tried to remain calm. But as the guards inspected him, he began to tremble. He thought of the confinement that awaited if his captors discovered the letter. Several tense moments passed, and the guards shifted their attention to his hat. They examined the pen and notebook, but when they found nothing out of the ordinary, they lost interest in The and let him pass.
Soon, The saw his sister approaching, so he discreetly removed the letter from his hat and pressed it into her hands. He wept as Ba gave him some food and money. She and her husband ran a produce business, and they did not have a lot to spare. The was grateful for all she could offer. When they parted, he trusted that she would get his letter to Lien.
Six months later, Ba returned to the camp with a letter. Inside was a photograph of Lien and the children. The’s eyes brimmed with tears as he stared at their faces. His children had grown so much. He realized that he could wait no longer.
He had to find a way out of the camp and into the arms of his family.