It was 1985. I was ten years old, growing up Mormon in southern California. My mother walked onto the cultural hall stage wearing a tapestry robe with a length of silky polyester draped around her head and shoulders. She was exquisitely beautiful, a queen. She stepped into a spotlight and began: “My name is Esther—at least that is what I am called in Persia.”
It was the annual Relief Society birthday celebration, and Marilyn Bayles, the impresario whose roadshows were the stuff of stake legend, had done it again: devised and directed an ambitious theatrical worthy of that venerable sisterhood. Three characters were portrayed: Eliza R. Snow, acted by the regal Lenore Cornwall, every inch the spiritual heir of our dear presidentess; a modern-day Relief Society sister facing the dislocations of late twentieth-century Mormonism; and the scriptural Esther, acted by my own mother, Christie Frandsen, the stake’s acknowledged scriptorian.
Marilyn invited my mother to write her own part, and she took on the project with her usual ambition. A serious student of the Old Testament during her BYU days, she looked up Esther in the Anchor Bible commentary on our bookshelf and infused the script with biblical context. She worked for weeks on memorizing the monologue, stressed about her costume, worried at the dress rehearsal, and then nailed it on performance night. Her ten-year-old daughter took it all in.
This kind of theatrical presentation was ubiquitous in the religious culture of my childhood in the ’70s and ’80s. The great heyday of the MIA, with its encompassing package of activities to develop every aspect of the human person over a lifespan, was already past.1 (If you haven’t yet, check out Claudia Bushman’s self-published autobiography I, Claudia, and the recent volume from the Church Historian’s Press Carry On: The Latter-day Saint Young Women Organization, 1870–2024 for indelible accounts of what this lifeworld was like.) But through the last decades of the century, church activities still frequently featured the performing arts in the wholesome, homespun, unabashedly didactic cultural idiom of North American Latter-day Saints.
Make no mistake, these were ambitious community efforts, and they reached for the stars in the seriousness of their religious themes. In those decades my mother portrayed, in similar productions, Mary the mother of Christ, Mary the sister of Martha (in a two-woman show she wrote and performed with my grandmother, which they then took on the road to both of their stakes), and Emma Smith (long before her cultural rehabilitation in the 2000s, it should be noted). These projects gave her opportunities to exercise skills as a writer, scholar, performer, and administrator in ways that garnered the respect of her community as she edified them in return. And they gave her daughter opportunities to see her mother “expound scriptures” authoritatively and gain status for doing so (Doctrine and Covenants 25:7).
Revisiting her 1985 representation of Esther, my mother is the first to say that it reflects the context of its times. She offered her sisters a tragic reading of Esther’s relevance to modern Saints: “It is our job to stand valiant and true to our principles, to uphold the law, to keep our covenants, no matter what circumstances of opposition we may face,” she said in Esther’s voice. “I failed in this responsibility, and no matter what other good I might have been able to do in my life, I will have to suffer the consequences of my choices. Did I eventually leave the luxurious life in the palace and rejoin the covenant people? Did I abandon my adopted Gentile lifestyle and become an observant, practicing Jew once more? I will leave these questions for you to ponder, and the admonition to look into your own heart and learn from me.”
In my mother’s portrayal, Esther here is a shadow-Eve, a woman who chose sin by choosing not to live out the readily observable behavioral code of the Mosaic law that would have marked her as a Jew. The fact that her religious identity was anonymous to those in the royal court was the problem. She chose sin to serve the greater good, to be sure, but she nevertheless remains accountable for abandoning the covenant. She must repent and return to her people. In 2026, I still find this to be a compelling affirmation of Esther’s moral agency and a bracing impetus to recognize my own power within the larger political and technological forces that shape my life. My mother’s critical lens on Esther calls me to repentance in the way that faithful readings of scripture must.
At the same time, my mother’s interpretation is a period piece that reflects its decade’s anxiety about the Saints’ assimilation to Gentile ways. In the era of mid-twentieth-century retrenchment, Esther could serve as a cautionary tale for Relief Society sisters about the cost of failing to resist the world, maintain our distinctiveness, and be a “living specimen” of a peculiar people. (Janeen Jacobs Brady’s wonderful tune “I’m a Mormon” was a favorite in our home.) The reading is legible as an artifact of its moment and it remains alive to mine, which is what it means to receive a text as scripture.
Rereading my mother’s forty-year-old portrayal of Esther is a way of doing reception history of the Old Testament. Reception history is the study of a text’s afterlives, the changing ways readers across time and place have interpreted, performed, and pressed it into service. Reception history takes the interpreters and their circumstances as seriously as the text itself. Its purview is not what a text originally meant but what its readers have made of it. Reception history understands that the biblical text, when it is received as scripture by a religious community, is always “come to the kingdom for such a time as this” (Esther 4:14). Like Esther summoned to her particular moment, scripture is forever arriving at some new “such a time as this,” forever readdressed to each community that takes it up. The text does not change, but the “kingdom” it comes to constantly changes. Mordecai’s question is perennial for readers of scripture: For what time, and for what purpose, has this scripture arrived among us?
This essay is dedicated to my mother, Christie Hansen Frandsen, who generously allowed me to use her writing in this essay and who developed these ideas in conversation with me. She was my first and remains my paramount teacher of how to read the Bible as living scripture and how to live as a Saint.
Rosalynde F. Welch is associate director and a research fellow at BYU’s Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. A graduate of Brigham Young University and the University of California, San Diego, she is a scholar of Latter-day Saint scripture, theology, and literature and the author of Ether: A Brief Theological Introduction.
Art by John Everett Millais (1829–1896).
The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.
Thank you for reading Wayfare Theology. If you no longer wish to receive these items in your inbox, click manage subscription under your profile and turn off notifications for this section.
Remembering the incredible presentations that were part of my youth and adulthood brought tears to my eyes. I miss them. The work of scripting a story, the practices, the desire to bring to life the scriptures, the histories and the performances were so impactful. I miss them. Even portraying characters in a Gospel Doctrine or Relief Society class carried gospel messages in a different way. Thank you for sharing your memories - through them my memories were opened up and a wealth of wonderful, amazing experiences relived.
Another great article. It brought back my own involvement with many stake performances. It is also a lovely tribute to your mother.