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Harold B. Lee: Life and Thought
While Harold B. Lee served as president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for a mere one and half-years—among the shortest tenure of any church leader—his impact on the modern LDS Church remains among the most profound. Lee implemented the Church Welfare Program, which provided relief to suffering church members during the 1930s Great Depression and continues to impact the lives of church members today. As a high-ranking general authority from 1941 to 1973, he championed other innovations, the most important being Correlation. Lee acted in response to the church’s record growth and increased diversity to consolidate and streamline churchwide instruction and administration. As a teacher/mentor, he promoted conservative church doctrine and practice, which influenced a generation of church leaders, including future presidents Spencer W. Kimball, Ezra Taft Benson, Howard W. Hunter, Gordon B. Hinckley, and Thomas S. Monson. Noted historian Newell G. Bringhurst succinctly narrates the major, defining events in Lee’s remarkable life, while highlighting Lee’s important, lasting contributions. This is the first volume in Signature’s new Brief Mormon Lives series.
- GenresReligion
170 pages, Paperback
Published October 25, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 25, 2025
A short, balanced and interesting history of President Lee. I learned things I didn’t know about his childhood, his numerous health problems and his extreme work ethic that probably contributed to his early death and short tenure as church president.
September 13, 2025
BOOK REVIEW - Harold B. Lee, Life and Thought, by Newell G. Bringhurst (09.11.23)
In less than 200 pages Bringhurst makes a persuasive case that Lee, despite a short tenure as Church president (1972–73), was one of the key architects of the modern Church: a systems-builder who paired pastoral urgency with managerial rigor. The book’s great strength is synthesis: Bringhurst threads Lee’s formative welfare work in the 1930s through his mid-century administrative revolution (Correlation), showing how a single governing idea—strengthen the home and put the priesthood at the center—reshaped programs, budgets, curriculum, and leadership pipelines for a worldwide church.
Bringhurst highlights three clusters of change. First, the welfare vision Lee piloted as a young stake president became a Churchwide ethic: bishops’ storehouses, work-relief, and a “providing in the Lord’s way” mindset that wove spiritual and temporal care into one fabric. That institutional DNA, Bringhurst notes, endured precisely because it was yoked to priesthood responsibility rather than left to ad-hoc benevolence. Contemporary Church sources capture the arc: the welfare program born in the Depression matured “by leaps and bounds” once married to priesthood governance.
Second, Correlation. Bringhurst treats Lee’s years as the presiding mind behind Correlation as the hinge of twentieth-century administration: curricula standardized; auxiliary organizations re-anchored to priesthood quorums; budgets centralized; uniform reporting adopted; “home teaching” (now ministering) and Family Home Evening promoted as home-first practices; and, symbolically, magazine consolidation (e.g., creation of the Ensign and New Era in 1970). However you evaluate Correlation’s downstream effects, it delivered exactly what Lee intended: comparably structured worship and instruction for a rapidly global church.
Third, leadership development. Bringhurst underscores how Lee functioned as a mentor and teacher of future leaders and as a relentless clarifier of purpose (“methods change, principles don’t”). Lee reshaped administration, welfare, and mentoring long before he became prophet.
Bringhurst does not sidestep the cost of Lee’s efficiency. The same drive that yielded clear lines of authority could feel, to some contemporaries, like overreach. David O. McKay’s counselors privately worried that Lee’s “Super Priesthood Committee” was siphoning decision-making from the First Presidency; more broadly, some brethren bristled at the velocity of standardization. The book shows both the necessity and the friction: a big, diverse church needed coherence; coherence required structure; structure demanded a firm hand—and sometimes that hand caused recoil.
Quotes:
“We had been wrestling with this question of welfare… there were few government work programs; the finances of the Church were low… And here we were with 4,800 of our 7,300 people who were wholly or partially dependent. We had only one place to go, and that was to apply the Lord’s program as set forth in the revelations.”
“The trouble with us today, there are too many of us who put question marks instead of periods after what the Lord says… If you would teach our people to put periods and not question marks after what the Lord has declared, we would say, ‘It is enough for me to know that is what the Lord said.’”
In less than 200 pages Bringhurst makes a persuasive case that Lee, despite a short tenure as Church president (1972–73), was one of the key architects of the modern Church: a systems-builder who paired pastoral urgency with managerial rigor. The book’s great strength is synthesis: Bringhurst threads Lee’s formative welfare work in the 1930s through his mid-century administrative revolution (Correlation), showing how a single governing idea—strengthen the home and put the priesthood at the center—reshaped programs, budgets, curriculum, and leadership pipelines for a worldwide church.
Bringhurst highlights three clusters of change. First, the welfare vision Lee piloted as a young stake president became a Churchwide ethic: bishops’ storehouses, work-relief, and a “providing in the Lord’s way” mindset that wove spiritual and temporal care into one fabric. That institutional DNA, Bringhurst notes, endured precisely because it was yoked to priesthood responsibility rather than left to ad-hoc benevolence. Contemporary Church sources capture the arc: the welfare program born in the Depression matured “by leaps and bounds” once married to priesthood governance.
Second, Correlation. Bringhurst treats Lee’s years as the presiding mind behind Correlation as the hinge of twentieth-century administration: curricula standardized; auxiliary organizations re-anchored to priesthood quorums; budgets centralized; uniform reporting adopted; “home teaching” (now ministering) and Family Home Evening promoted as home-first practices; and, symbolically, magazine consolidation (e.g., creation of the Ensign and New Era in 1970). However you evaluate Correlation’s downstream effects, it delivered exactly what Lee intended: comparably structured worship and instruction for a rapidly global church.
Third, leadership development. Bringhurst underscores how Lee functioned as a mentor and teacher of future leaders and as a relentless clarifier of purpose (“methods change, principles don’t”). Lee reshaped administration, welfare, and mentoring long before he became prophet.
Bringhurst does not sidestep the cost of Lee’s efficiency. The same drive that yielded clear lines of authority could feel, to some contemporaries, like overreach. David O. McKay’s counselors privately worried that Lee’s “Super Priesthood Committee” was siphoning decision-making from the First Presidency; more broadly, some brethren bristled at the velocity of standardization. The book shows both the necessity and the friction: a big, diverse church needed coherence; coherence required structure; structure demanded a firm hand—and sometimes that hand caused recoil.
Quotes:
“We had been wrestling with this question of welfare… there were few government work programs; the finances of the Church were low… And here we were with 4,800 of our 7,300 people who were wholly or partially dependent. We had only one place to go, and that was to apply the Lord’s program as set forth in the revelations.”
“The trouble with us today, there are too many of us who put question marks instead of periods after what the Lord says… If you would teach our people to put periods and not question marks after what the Lord has declared, we would say, ‘It is enough for me to know that is what the Lord said.’”
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews