On September 21, 2025, Dallin H. Oaks wrote the introduction to a book about gospel doctrine. He was 93, first counselor in the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and second in seniority behind a church president who was 101. Russell M. Nelson died six days later. On October 14, Oaks was set apart as the church's 18th president.
The book is "Learning the Great Fundamentals: Jesus Christ, Priesthood, and the Plan of Salvation." Deseret Book released the hardcover this winter, and the publisher's description carefully notes that it was "created under the leadership of President Russell M. Nelson" before his death. It is the first book Oaks has published as president of the church. Deseret News religion reporter Tad Walch walked through its contents Friday in his ChurchBeat newsletter.
Deseret Book extended the invitation in the winter of 2024 and 2025, and Oaks picked his three subjects: Jesus Christ, the plan of salvation, and the priesthood and its keys. The 22 chapters are assembled from dozens of talks and writings delivered over his 41 years as an apostle, so readers who have followed him will recognize most of the material.
The introduction is what's new. Oaks writes that he read the Book of Mormon as a teenager for its history rather than its doctrine, and that he never served a mission because his National Guard unit was mobilized during the Korean War. The first gospel book he studied seriously was James E. Talmage's "Jesus the Christ." He read it at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, a BYU accounting graduate sitting through a 17-week basic course for field artillery officers.
By his own account, Oaks did not begin a systematic study of church doctrine until age 31, when he was called to a stake presidency in Chicago. He was teaching law at the University of Chicago at the time, a few years removed from a clerkship with Chief Justice Earl Warren and a few years away from the BYU presidency and the Utah Supreme Court. The doctrine came late, and it came the way the law did, by sustained study.
The essay is the sharper document. Oaks wrote the cover essay for the July/August issue of Deseret Magazine, 964 words titled "The First Freedom." The magazine ran it as part of a curated package of essays on religious liberty for the country's 250th birthday, alongside contributions such as Jon Meacham's on whether America will last another 250 years. It is adapted from a speech Oaks gave at Chapman University's law school in February 2011, back when he was one of the twelve apostles.
The argument has not changed in 15 years. The founders wrote a Constitution that assumes a moral people. For most Americans, morality has been taught in churches and synagogues, so the founders put religious freedom first in the Bill of Rights to protect the foundation on which everything else stood.
Oaks runs through the evidence: abolition in England, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil Rights Movement, the religious roots of American charity, honesty, and voluntary obedience to law. He quotes John Adams, who wrote that "our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." He even enlists Melanie Phillips, the agnostic British journalist, who has conceded that Western values rest on religious ground and erode with it. His own conclusion: religious values and political realities are so interlinked in this country that "we cannot lose the influence of religion in our public life" without putting its freedoms at risk.
The essay's release was timed to a unified fast for religious liberty that Oaks and his counselors called in a March 12 letter, inviting members across the United States to fast on July 5 and pray that religious liberty be strengthened throughout the world. That Sunday, Oaks sat in the Salt Lake Tabernacle for a special America250 broadcast of "Music & the Spoken Word," laughing with Quentin L. Cook and Dieter F. Uchtdorf before the cameras went live. Religious liberty was his signature subject as an apostle, and he argued for it in law reviews and university lecture halls for decades. Now it comes with a call to fast, issued to more than 17 million members, in the first year of his presidency.
Three days after the broadcast, Walch photographed copies of "Learning the Great Fundamentals" stacked on a table at the Deseret Book in Orem, a few miles from the campus Oaks once ran and the Provo neighborhood where he grew up.
