Review of John Gee, Saving Faith: How Families Protect, Sustain, And Encourage Faith (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2020). 313 pages.

Abstract: Saving Faith is a truly excellent book, designed especially for families concerned about their children. It is also a book appropriate for those getting ready to serve as missionaries, or for newly married couples, young couples about to be married, or even for those about to bring children into this world to undergo their mortal probation.

I must admit that I have had a really difficult time fashioning a review of John Gee’s Saving Faith.1 I have tossed out several earlier attempts to address the contents of each of its excellent chapters. When I first began to draft a review, I discovered that I simply could not address all of the excellent content in each of its ten chapters. Even reproducing the book’s table of contents would not help. Hence, in this essay I will not try to address the contents of each of the chapters, but I will only give some close attention to one portion of one chapter.

What Is (and Is Not) in This Book

John Gee is the William (Bill) Gay Research Professor in the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages at Brigham Young University. Hence, this book is the work of a very able research professor. His employment requires him to do research and publish essays and books, which he has done in Egyptology (the field in which he has his PhD) and in other academic areas he finds challenging and important for preserving and advancing the faith of Latter-day Saints. Saving Faith is, [Page 226]I believe, his fourth book, and he has published over a hundred essays and reviews.

In this work, Professor Gee has been able to locate, understand, and master the secular literature on the crucial issues that each of the book’s chapters addresses. If I have counted correctly, Saving Faith has 1,052 footnotes, and at least half of these draw upon contemporary social science scholarship central to the issues addressed in the book. The reader can be assured that Gee has not manufactured evidence to support a revisionist ideology, which some others seem to have done.2

Saving Faith is not a devotional book composed of stories or sermons. Instead, it is, I must stress, an academic book. Don’t confuse it, however, with the stereotype of an academic book — a boring and sometimes pedantic tome that one academic writes for other academics who are often indifferent to what is published. Instead, Saving Faith is fully accessible to ordinary Latter-day Saints on each of the topics addressed in its ten chapters. The book’s subtitle — How Families Protect, Sustain, and Encourage Faith — is a fully accurate indication of what is addressed.

Now for Some of the Actual Contents

There is more information in Saving Faith than one can reasonably address in a short review such as this. Nevertheless, Professor Gee brings up some points that should be brought up here.

Saving Faith begins by addressing rumors (rife in some circles) that Latter-day Saint young people are leaving their faith in “droves.” He demonstrates that while, in America, we do “lose some of our youth, certainly more than we would like,” the fact is that, when compared with Roman Catholics and Protestants, “we hold on to more of our youth than anyone else” (p. 22). “There are,” he demonstrates,