The magazines into the 1960s carry official directives of the auxiliaries and Presiding Bishop’s Office on how various programs are to be run, but I can’t remember ever seeing any similar claim for the authoritativeness of doctrinal articles, even Conference talks, the way we see it today with the insistence that “your Ensign is your 5th standard work.” It would be interesting to track down the first occurrence of a claim like that.

I think you’re right in how we view Church publications today, but I suspect that’s a post-correlation view. I don’t know how I’d prove it, but I have a gut feeling that in prior years, members made appeals to the authority of this or that individual GA when they bashed each other about orthodoxy, not to whether or not something had been published in a Church magazine.

I believe you’re right. Do you get the sense that Church publications were seen as less authoritative then they are now? In other words, I think most members nowadays view Church publications as kind of defining the parameters of the gospel. If earlier saints had very much this same view, then it would seem like the parameters of the gospel were construed much larger then they are now.

Welcome to Keepa, Peter — I hope we hear from you more often.

Moniker, I could go all schoolmarmy and say something about this being one of the lessons of history and why we need to study the past yada, yada — but I’d have to stop grinning first. Isn’t it fun to get an unexpected insight?

And Hunter, I can always count on you. An article like this may not be in depth and may not individually have played a lasting role in anybody’s life, but the accumulation of such articles might. JI brought the world to some isolated families without many other resources.

And I loved seeing that illustration from the JI! Speaking of Utah and the Mormon settlements, my sense, as Ardis said, is that early church periodicals were more comprehensive in their subject matter due in large part to the fact that other reading materials weren’t as prevalent.

Still, it makes my heart swell with pride a little everytime I see examples of the various Church publications educating readers in all sorts of “non-Church” areas (nations, cultures, governments, history, art, etc.).

Until well into the 1930s, all the church magazines, especially the Improvement Era, had a heavy dose of more-or-less secular subject matter. I’m guessing that was a habit, a legacy of the Juvenile Instructor which began with the intent to furnish worthwhile reading of all kinds, and with the realization that the JI would likely be the only children’s publication that went into many Mormon homes. There was a similar expectation with the IE as the organ of the Mutual Improvement Associations, which from the beginning promoted improvement in education, occupational choice, and “how-to” skills perhaps even greater than improvement in religious knowledge and behavior. Those other topics, including world religions, gradually dropped away as other reading material became easily available and as there came to be more news about Mormon activities to fill the pages. I’d be surprised to learn that that was a conscious editorial decision rather than an unconscious drift into a niche market.

When do you start to see a shift in Church publications where they wrote less about religions other than our own?

I’d be a bit surprised, for instance, to see something like this in a Church publication today.