American book-reading habits have been in decline for decades, but you wouldn\u2019t know it from sitting in on a young-adult literature class held last winter at Brigham Young University.<\/p>\n
The professor, Chris Crowe, arrived to the classroom with a box full of books. When he announced they were free for the taking, some two dozen students rushed to the table.<\/p>\n
There were reminders that the class was taking place at \u201cthe Lord\u2019s university,\u201d as B.Y.U. is known in the Mormon world. (The university is owned and run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.) Class began with a student-led prayer, and the syllabus cited the school\u2019s mission statement: \u201cThe full realization of each student\u2019s divine potential is our central focus.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the reading list consisted of mainstream titles any fan of Y.A. fiction would recognize, like \u201cThe Outsiders\u201d by S.E. Hinton and \u201cSpeak\u201d by Laurie Halse Anderson. And the discussion, which that day focused on \u201cMake Lemonade,\u201d Virginia Euwer Wolff\u2019s verse novel about two teenagers living in poverty, came to a familiar head.<\/p>\n
To Laurel Scott, a senior from Sachse, Texas, the book\u2019s main characters \u2014 Jolly, a 17-year-old single mother of two young children, and LaVaughn, a 14-year-old who becomes their babysitter \u2014 seemed rather adult. They were leading difficult lives, and yet, when they got upset, they didn\u2019t let their emotions erupt. \u201cNeither protagonist acted like what I would expect a teenager to act,\u201d Ms. Scott said. \u201cThe story just didn\u2019t read to me like a Y.A. novel.\u201d<\/p>\n
Andrea Amado-Fajardo, a senior from the Bay Area, raised her hand. \u201cBut I think we have to take into account LaVaughn\u2019s circumstances,\u201d she said. \u201cWhen I read this book, I was like, \u2018These were my teenage years.\u2019 This is what it was like to not have generational wealth.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her voice started to shake. \u201cSorry, I don\u2019t want to get emotional, but, like, this is how it is. This isn\u2019t \u2018The Hunger Games.\u2019 This isn\u2019t a dystopian novel. This is just the fact of the matter. People who don\u2019t have generational wealth are forced to grow up faster.\u201d<\/p>\n
Latter-day Saints are some of the most enthusiastic readers of Y.A. and genre fiction in the country. And many become fiction writers themselves, aided by a tight network of writing programs, conferences, workshops and publishers in the Latter-day Saints community.<\/p>\n
B.Y.U. is an incubator, and the young-adult class currently taught by Mr. Crowe, English 420 \u2014 a literature course, as opposed to a creative-writing course \u2014 has been around since 1958, predating by almost a decade the publication of \u201cThe Outsiders,\u201d a turning point in the evolution of contemporary Y.A.<\/p>\n
The literary scene in Utah fosters a workaday approach to fiction writing, akin to that of the songwriting rooms of Nashville, and it has produced some juggernauts. Stephenie Meyer, whose \u201cTwilight\u201d series has sold more than 100 million copies, is a Latter-day Saint and B.Y.U. graduate. So is the sci-fi and fantasy author Brandon Sanderson. His Kickstarter campaign to self-publish four novels he wrote during the pandemic raised more than $41 million last year.<\/p>\n
Mormon authors who have written best sellers include Ally Condie, author of the \u201cMatched\u201d trilogy, and Shannon Hale, author of the \u201cPrincess Academy\u201d series. Orson Scott Card, who wrote \u201cEnder\u2019s Game,\u201d is a B.Y.U. graduate and a great-great-grandson of Brigham Young. The 1971 best seller \u201cGo Ask Alice,\u201d billed as the real diary of a teenage drug addict, was actually written by a Mormon housewife, Beatrice Sparks.<\/p>\n
Mr. Sanderson now teaches a creative-writing class at B.Y.U. and runs Dragonsteel Books, a publishing company he founded in Provo, Utah. He attributes the robust output of Latter-day Saint fiction writers to an especially supportive literary culture, but also to an emphasis on reading in their homes, a view shared by many of the two dozen authors, educators and publishing professionals interviewed for this article. \u201cA lot of L.D.S. folks grow up with their parents having them read the Scriptures,\u201d Mr. Sanderson said.<\/p>\n
He added that the visibility in sci-fi and fantasy is striking in part because the genres are not associated with religious temperaments. \u201cWhen people find out that Stephenie Meyer, who wrote vampire books, is L.D.S., they\u2019re like, \u2018Whaaaaaat? That doesn\u2019t mesh with my view in my head of a conservative religious community.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
If outsiders regard sci-fi and fantasy as incongruous with the faith, many writers who are church members don\u2019t. \u201cFantasy is often a way that you can explore ideas of, you know, trust in something bigger,\u201d said Rosalyn Eves, an author of five Y.A. novels that blend fantasy and romance with historical fiction. \u201cI\u2019ve always felt like religious faith and belief in miracles is not all that different from magic in some ways.\u201d<\/p>\n
This sentiment was echoed by Chris Schoebinger, the publishing director of Shadow Mountain, an imprint of Deseret Book (the publishing arm of the church).<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the core doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is what\u2019s called the plan of salvation,\u201d Mr. Schoebinger said. \u201cWhich takes us from, first, living with our father in heaven, and then coming to Earth, going through this battle for good and evil, this atonement where we\u2019re changed, and then returning to God, or wherever we started, a changed person. That is the hero\u2019s journey.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Schoebinger is known for discovering the New York Times best-selling fantasy author Brandon Mull, who offered another reason writers in the church are drawn to middle-grade and Y.A. fiction. \u201cBig families,\u201d he said by phone from his home in Highland, north of Provo. \u201cWe grow up with that kind of stuff. Disney\u2019s huge in this community. All things family entertainment is pretty big.\u201d<\/p>\n
Every author said that a key reason Latter-day Saints tend to write for teenagers and children is a church-encouraged distaste for explicit material that can be found in adult fiction. They prefer to write books that are \u201cclean\u201d \u2014 the church\u2019s term for content that doesn\u2019t contain graphic sex or violence. It\u2019s one reason Mr. Mull sticks to middle-grade, he said: \u201cI\u2019m like a little kid that way. I like an old-timey classic adventure story.\u201d<\/p>\n
The preference for clean fiction is shared by adult readers in the church community, said Gene Nelson, a longtime director of the Provo City Library. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of people who are tired of the detailed sexuality and violence that occurs in a lot of adult fiction,\u201d he said. \u201cThey don\u2019t want to see the F word bandied about. When the book almost becomes erotica at some point, where do they go? They go to Y.A. fiction.\u201d<\/p>\n
The church doesn\u2019t issue official guidelines for what constitutes clean fiction, but the Provo City Library has a description on the cover of its \u201cSo Fresh! So Clean!\u201d booklet \u2014 a list of its approved books \u2014 warning, in part: \u201cBooks on this list may have some occurrences of the tamest expletives. Sexual references might occur but nothing explicit.\u201d<\/p>\n
The histories of Mormon publishing, church-backed children\u2019s education and Utah statehood are intertwined in the biography of one early settler.<\/p>\n
George Q. Cannon, a writer from England, was among the first Mormons to arrive in the Salt Lake Valley, in 1847. He became the church\u2019s chief storyteller in the West. He edited, and at one point owned, The Deseret News in Salt Lake City. He started a weekly church newspaper in San Francisco.<\/p>\n
He was also the first general superintendent of the church\u2019s Sunday schools. Mr. Cannon editorialized against \u201ctrashy\u201d literature, which he said was one of the greatest threats to the religious education of young people. (Brigham Young said novels were \u201cfalsehoods got up expressly to excite the minds of youth.\u201d) To spread \u201cuplifting\u201d stories, Mr. Cannon created the church\u2019s first magazine for children, Juvenile Instructor, and later founded the bookstore and press that became Deseret Book.<\/p>\n
Mormons started writing fiction in greater numbers in the 1880s in what\u2019s known as the \u201chome-literature movement,\u201d spurred when church leaders, still vexed by the growing popularity of novels, called on Latter-day Saints to write their own. \u201cWe will yet have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own,\u201d the apostle Orson F. Whitney declared.<\/p>\n
Today Deseret Book comprises three imprints, 40 bookstores, a record company and a film distribution company called Excel Entertainment. Its corporate offices are in a complex of glass buildings not far from Temple Square in Salt Lake City.<\/p>\n
Deseret\u2019s main imprint publishes Scripture, church curriculum, inspirational guides for missionaries, self-help, biographies and histories. Shadow Mountain, the general trade imprint, has a different mission: to publish \u201cvalues based\u201d fiction and nonfiction that may appeal to readers who don\u2019t share the same faith.<\/p>\n
The imprint was established in 1985, Mr. Schoebinger said, but a turning point came in the early 2000s, when a survey revealed that customers were reading \u201cHarry Potter\u201d books in droves. Editors combed the slush pile for fantasy manuscripts. Shadow Mountain soon had a best seller with \u201cFablehaven,\u201d Mr. Mull\u2019s first book, about an enchanted refuge for magical creatures.<\/p>\n
When \u201cFifty Shades of Grey\u201d came out (itself inspired in part by \u201cTwilight\u201d), Mr. Schoebinger and his colleagues wondered if they could find a market for G-rated romance, an opportunity other publishers had also tapped with chaste books. \u201cWe wanted a book that mothers and daughters could read together and just feel good about,\u201d he said. The result was Proper Romance, Shadow Mountain\u2019s line of clean romance novels.<\/p>\n
Shadow Mountain has had more than 10 books on one of the New York Times\u2019s best-seller lists. Many are by Mr. Mull. Another is \u201cThe Romney Family Table,\u201d a cookbook by Ann Romney.<\/p>\n
Since the \u201cTwilight\u201d-fueled boom of the 2000s, it has become more common for contemporary Y.A. to contain sex and violence. This shift was on display at the King\u2019s English, a popular independent bookstore in Salt Lake City. There, steamy novels like \u201cA Court of Thorns and Roses\u201d by Sarah J. Maas, about a teenage huntress who falls in love with her faerie captor, sell fast.<\/p>\n
This means less compatibility between Latter-day Saint writers and mainstream Y.A. readers, said Margaret Brennan Neville, the store\u2019s longtime buyer for Y.A. and children\u2019s books.<\/p>\n
She said novels like \u201cFelix Ever After\u201d by Kacen Callender, about a Black trans teenager, and \u201cCamp\u201d by L.C. Rosen, about a summer camp for queer teenagers, were also sought after.<\/p>\n
Latter-day Saints doctrine officially declares same-sex relationships sinful. \u201cThe church distinguishes between same-sex attraction and homosexual behavior,\u201d its policy states. \u201cPeople who experience same-sex attraction or identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual can make and keep covenants with God and fully and worthily participate in the church.\u201d People who act on same-sex attraction, however, cannot. \u201cSexual relations are reserved for a man and woman who are married and promise complete loyalty to each other.\u201d<\/p>\n
There appears to be evidence of a correlation between the church\u2019s treatment of L.G.B.T.Q. members and research showing that younger Latter-day Saints are leaving the church.<\/p>\n
Jana Riess provides an overview of the data in her 2019 book, \u201cThe Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church.\u201d Even the rosiest picture, she wrote in The Salt Lake Tribune, referring to data from Pew Research Center, shows a drop in the church\u2019s retention rate among millennials. The General Social Survey found a sharper decline. According to polling by Ms. Riess, the church\u2019s position on L.G.B.T.Q. issues ranks seventh out of 30 reasons that former Mormons cite for leaving the church. Among millennials who have left, it\u2019s third.<\/p>\n
In fact, six of the authors who were contacted for this article responded that they were no longer active in the church.<\/p>\n
One, Matt Kirby, said his allegiance to the church started to crack when his brother came out as gay in the late \u201990s. \u201cThere was no question that my family and I would continue to love him no matter what,\u201d Mr. Kirby said. \u201cMy concern was: In this context, in this religious context, what will it mean for him?\u201d The breaking point for Mr. Kirby was the church\u2019s push to pass Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California. (It was later struck down.)<\/p>\n
Kiersten White, who has written more than 20 books for young adults and children, including \u201cThe Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein,\u201d also cited the church\u2019s support for Proposition 8.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the things that Mormonism teaches you is that everyone is entitled to personal revelation, that you have a direct line to God,\u201d Ms. White said. \u201cHe\u2019ll either give you a burning in your bosom if things are correct or a stupor of thought if things are incorrect. I still remember being at my polling place, looking down at my ballot, and knowing that our church had not only campaigned for Prop 8 and donated significant amounts of money, but specifically over the pulpit asked us to vote for it. And I felt sick.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Mette Ivie Harrison, the church\u2019s opposition to gay rights was one of many factors. Her faith first began to unravel when she lost a baby in a full-term stillbirth, in 2005. \u201cI kept wanting to find an answer to why God had chosen that thing to happen to me,\u201d Ms. Harrison said.<\/p>\n
Until then an author of fantasy romances for young adults, Ms. Harrison started writing \u201cThe Bishop\u2019s Wife,\u201d an adult mystery published in 2014. The story involved domestic abuse, and its protagonist, Linda, a devout Mormon, experiences doubts about some church beliefs. Deseret Book did not carry it in its stores.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Bishop\u2019s Wife\u201d was received positively outside church channels, including a review by Janet Maslin in The Times. HuffPost asked Ms. Harrison to write a column about Mormonism. She did, and her essays drew the attention of a group called the Strengthening Church Members Committee, she said.<\/p>\n
Ms. Harrison\u2019s local bishop called her in to discuss the articles. The conversation was friendly, she said, and she was not threatened with discipline. But she found it unsettling that her writing had been flagged by a church committee. A spokesman for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints declined to comment for this article.<\/p>\n
In 2015, the church passed its so-called November Policy, which declared members in same-sex marriages apostates and barred their children from being baptized. At that time, Ms. Harrison had close family friends in the church community who had a child who had come out as transgender. To signal that she was in mourning over the church\u2019s treatment of L.G.B.T.Q. members, Ms. Harrison started wearing black clothes and a rainbow ribbon to church.<\/p>\n
Although the November Policy was later reversed, Ms. Harrison stopped attending church in 2019.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s unclear how often fiction writers are pressured by the church to change their work. When it happens, it happens in private. But one fiction writer, Brian Evenson, did have a public confrontation with B.Y.U. in the \u201990s.<\/p>\n
Mr. Evenson was teaching creative writing at the university when his first book, \u201cAltmann\u2019s Tongue,\u201d a collection of horror stories, came out. A student objected to the violence in the stories on moral grounds. \u201cI feel like someone who has eaten something poisonous,\u201d the student wrote in an anonymous letter to church leaders. This prompted a review of Mr. Evenson\u2019s book.<\/p>\n
He was informed that he could not publish another book like \u201cAltmann\u2019s Tongue\u201d and keep his job at B.Y.U. He resigned. \u201cThe pressure was, if I want to keep on writing and not have to constantly be thinking about these people who want me to be writing in a different way, I\u2019ve got to leave,\u201d Mr. Evenson said by phone from his home in Santa Clarita, Calif.<\/p>\n
He soon started writing a novel that was more directly about Mormonism than any of his past work had been. \u201cOne thing that happens when you grow up Mormon is that you have this system of self-censorship that\u2019s built in,\u201d Mr. Evenson said.<\/p>\n
The novel, \u201cFather of Lies,\u201d which came out in 1998, has been described as a \u201cpatriarchal horror.\u201d Mr. Evenson ultimately resigned from the church in 2000.<\/p>\n
Ms. White, the prolific teen horror and paranormal romance author, said she was never pressured by the church, but her writing did change after she left. Previously, she wrote fiction for young adults and children. She has since written two novels for adults.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s this sort of forced innocence,\u201d Ms. White said of being a devout Mormon. \u201cEven though you\u2019re an adult and you have children, you have to engage with and move through the world in a P.G. way, as though you are still a child.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her second novel for adults, \u201cMister Magic,\u201d was published in August. It\u2019s about a religious sect in the desert in Utah.<\/p>\n