"Sharpen My Shovel"

This post is part of a collaborative series between Wayfare and Latter-day Eloquence: Two Centuries of Mormon Oratory, which is available for pre-order here (use S26UIP for a 30% discount!).

In the biographical sketch for “Making Zion,” Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye (1979–2024) is introduced as “a self-described bald Asian American Latter-day Saint woman scholar.”1 With a BA and PhD from Harvard University, Inouye was a senior lecturer in Chinese history at the University of Auckland, with a focus on modern China and global Christianity at the time of this speech. She also contributed to Latter-day Saint intellectual conversations through her position as a historian at the Church History Library and as a leader in the Global Mormon Studies Research Network, with numerous published essays, interviews, and talks, two books for general audiences, and a coedited volume with Kate Holbrook of essays by Latter-day Saint woman scholars, Every Needful Thing.

“Making Zion” was given at Brigham Young University in conjunction with the publication of Inouye’s book Crossings, part of the Living Faith Book Series produced by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. Living Faith books are meant to provide “Latter-day Saint young adults and their mentors nourishing traveling companions on their journeys of faith.”2 In the series, scholars integrate their academic, personal, and spiritual perspectives, showcasing how being an intellectual Latter-day Saint “is a vocation worthy of serious reflection and joyful effort.”3 In this way, the Living Faith Series is part of a larger tradition of Latter-day Saint “personal apologetics” that includes anthologies such as A Thoughtful Faith4 as well as single-author books like Why the Church Is as True as the Gospel5 and The Faith of a Scientist.6 Rather than using rational or theological arguments to justify a faith tradition (i.e., why this should work for everyone), this type of apologetics focuses instead on personal experiences of faith (i.e., why this works for me).

Personal apologetics is one response to the growing number of young Latter-day Saints leaving the faith. Data from 2016, three years prior to Inouye’s address, show that close to 50 percent of millennial (born after 1981) American Latter-day Saints were no longer affiliated with the Church,7 a trend consistent with young Americans’ general disaffection from organized religion. Inouye frames her talk as a response to a young Latter-day Saint woman who is unsure whether