SALT LAKE CITY?Jan Shipps, a scholar who has devoted her life to studying the Mormon church, was in Florida when a news ticker flashed across a news broadcast: “Mormon church opposes war.”
Shipps knew the church would be quick to qualify that statement, and she was right.
The church’s apparent ambivalence toward a pre-emptive strike against Iraq, accused by President Bush of developing weapons of mass destruction, was underscored in remarks last weekend by Apostle Russell M. Nelson.
Nelson denounced aggressive war and yet urged deference to kings and rulers who make war as he addressed thousands of faithful at a conference in Salt Lake City.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints wasted little time putting itself on Bush’s side, most clearly in a Wednesday editorial in the church-owned Deseret News.
Church officials also complained to The Associated Press, which first reported Nelson’s remarks, that it provided a platform for other media to “misinterpret” Nelson’s sermon by seizing on his peace-loving remarks.
On Thursday, the church removed from its Web site a reference to the AP in criticism of the media for stretching Nelson’s remarks. Church officials were especially irked at uninformed chatter on talk radio.
“The LDS church is very sensitive,” especially on matters of U.S. patriotism, said Newell Bringhurst, the past president of the Mormon History Association, an independent group of scholars.
Yet Bringhurst, a professor at the College of Sequoias in Visalia, Calif., said the church has long “straddled the fence” on war and peace.
“These mixed messages are very much a part of the Book of Mormon,” he said.
The Book of Mormon is a chronology of one conflict after another that justifies the fight against evil. Yet it also is full of injunctions against aggressive war, he said.
In the mid-1800s Mormons fled religious persecution for Utah Territory, where leaders were too busy building a kingdom to be champions of U.S. war policy, said Shipps, the non-Mormon scholar of the faith, who was traveling in Utah on Thursday.
But as the church sought acceptance in the 20th century, it “stood foursquare with the nation” through the World Wars, Korean conflict and Vietnam War, she said.
Led by conservatives in solidly Republican Utah, the church has become “hawkish by nature,” said Richard Bushman, author of “Mormons in America” (1998) and “Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism” (1984).
So it came as little surprise to scholars that the church went out of its way to clarify the remarks of Nelson, a member of the church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, which acts under the direction of church President Gordon B. Hinckley and his top two counselors.
A church media advisory says Nelson “made plain that the scriptures ‘strongly condemn wars of aggression, but sustain obligations of citizens to defend their families and their freedoms.'”
One practicing Mormon, Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, found no conflict in Nelson’s counsel. He told The Salt Lake Tribune that Mormons have a duty to promote peace, but also to follow their nation’s leaders.
“The decision to go to war is not yours, it’s the decision of the state in which you live, and if the state decides to go to war, you are not responsible for that decision,” he said.
Bennett said he’s seen enough evidence that justifies a strike against Iraq and Saddam Hussein, even if the rest of the country may not be so certain.
“In a way, I think this has the whole country off guard,” Bushman said. “The president is dragging us into a war we are not ready for.”