Review
Title: Every Man a Prophet
Author: Stephen LeSueur
Publisher: Kofford
Genre: Novel
Year Published: 2025
Number of Pages: 389
Format: Paper, eBook, Audio Book
ISBN: 978-1-58958-826-4 (paperback)
Price: 26.95
Reviewed by Andrew Hamilton for the Association of Mormon Letters
Stephen C. LeSueur is well known in the Mormon historical studies world for his book, The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri. Published in 1987, this masterpiece is easily the most important book on the Mormon Missouri War. In 2023 his book Life and Death on the Mormon Frontier: The Murders of Frank LeSueur and Gus Gibbons by the Wild Bunch, added a whole new level of knowledge to the story of Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch. Now, in Every Man a Prophet, Stephen C. LeSueur has gifted the world with the best volume of Mormon fiction that I have read.
Every Man a Prophet is the story of two lost missionaries, their families, their enigmatic mission president, and their individual journeys to discover who they are and their prophetic places in God’s kingdom on earth. As the story opens, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson Toressen, president of the Oslo, Norway mission, has a problem; two of his young missionaries, Elders Eddie Pedersen and Orrin Tanner have gone missing from their remote proselytizing area at the northernmost end of the mission. Not only are they gone, they may have been AWOL for as long as three weeks!
President Toressen is a charismatic man, a native Norwegian, and a convert to the Church. He loves his missionaries, the people, and the gospel. He goes out of his way to be in tune with the spirit and to do God’s will. Toressen is so beloved by his missionaries and the local members that they call him “the prophet of Norway.” But even before the two young Elders disappeared on his watch, President Toressen had a problem. His unusual behaviors and unique prophetic spirituality that make him so popular in Norway have made his superiors in Salt Lake City, especially his direct supervisor, Apostle Joseph F. Prichard, very nervous.
Elder Eddie Pederson, the first missing missionary, is a musical genius, a talented missionary, a very, very dedicated Latter-day Saint, AND he is homosexual. Outed at BYU, he is a survivor of the university’s reparative therapy “shock cock” program. He has dedicated himself to being completely dedicated to the work and sacrificing as much as possible so God will “heal” him of his problem. His companion, Elder Orrin Tanner, comes from a storied family. His grandfather Heber had unique spiritual experiences, including a vision of a guardian angel. His father, Anson, is a seminary teacher and the author of two series of immensely popular LDS tracts. Young Orrin has devoted his life to his father’s publishing efforts and to learning the scriptures and church history. He is determined to know and do more than any missionary. What Orrin does not know is that his father has been censured and asked to cease his publishing efforts. The lives of these three men, their various companions, their families, and investigators and their journey’s to be their true selves are all deftly explored in LeSueur’s beautiful and moving depiction of missionary life.
One of the things that made me love Every Man a Prophet so much is that it has some of the most realistic and well-rounded characters I have encountered in Mormon fiction. Toressen, Pedersen, and Tanner are all very well fleshed out and felt very real to me. The characters I grew up with in Mormon fiction felt like caricatures. They were shallow, flat, too perfect and their problems were too easily solved. In Every Man A Prophet, Toressen, Pedersen, and Tanner REALLY struggle. Their questions, concerns and tragedies are those felt by REAL, struggling Latter-day Saints. LeSueur wrote these men’s lives in such a way that I became personally invested in their journeys and ached for what they were experiencing and struggling with and felt joy for them when they succeeded.
Even the more tertiary and minor characters are rounded out and relatable. Those who have served missions will recognize and relate to the various young elders (from the aspiring to the struggling), the investigators, members, and tracting encounters that Elder’s Pedersen and Tanner meet and experience. Even the antagonists, such as the earlier mentioned Joseph F. Prichard are well written and have believable reasons for their decisions and action. Elder Prichard has an antagonistic relationship with President Toressen and is seeking to have him released as mission president. He also has antagonistic relationships with Elder Pedersen (he interviewed him before his mission about his homosexuality) and with Elder Tanner’s father (he knows the family and has pressured the senior Tanner on behalf of Church leadership to stop his publishing efforts). LeSueur could have easily made Prichard a simple, one-dimensional, fanatical, religious extremist who barks out orders. But while Prichard’s relationship with the main characters is on the hostile side, even he fleshed out as a character. It is clear that he is seeking to do what he feels is his prophetic role and that his feelings and decisions are influenced by his inadequacies that relate to doubts he felt about his own testimony when initially given his apostolic calling.
Young Mormon boys are taught from the time that they are very small that one of their major goals in life is to be a missionary. They sing about it, they wear toddler size clothes with fake badges that say, “Future Missionary,” they color pictures of missionaries, and more, their whole young lives are structured with the idea that they will become a missionary and bring many souls into the church. They are taught to hero worship the serving missionaries. They are told that their mission will be the “best two years” of their lives. BUT reality is harsh. Missions are difficult. Missionaries struggle. Rejection, depression, life and family difficulties, failure to meet expectations, the struggle to find or understand one’s place in God’s Kingdom, feeling as if you have been placed in direct responsibility for the eternal welfare of every soul you meet…a LOT of stress is put on young missionaries and their leaders. In Every Man a Prophet Stephen LeSueur has captured the lives, desires, trials, and struggles, of young missionaries and their leaders better than in any other Mormon fiction I have ever read or watched. Every Man a Prophet touch hearts, open minds, and change lives. It is the story of three men struggling to learn what it means to be prophetic, but more importantly learning what it means to be human, to be children of God. And it helped me to learn more about these things myself. I recommend Every Man a Prophet by Stephen LeSueur to everyone. It is a book that has the power to touch and change lives and maybe even wards, missions, and the Church.