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Materializing Faith and Politics: The Unseen Power of the NCCS Pocket Constitution in American Religion

In 2014, Latter-day Saint painter Jon McNaughton painted a triumphal and patriotic, yet reverent, scene of Cliven Bundy on horseback, with one hand lifting an American flag and his hat covering his heart in the…

God and Politics Matthew L. Harris, ed., Thunder from the Right: Ezra Taft Benson in Mormonism and Politics

In the mid-twentieth century, Ezra Taft Benson was an important political figure who despised communism and feared that the United States was on the road to moral decay. He decried the rise of feminism and…

Matthew L. Harris, ed., Thunder from the Right: Ezra Taft Benson in Mormonism and Politics

The Politics of Mormon History

Personal Voices: Dreaming After Trump

Personal Voices: That’s Where the Light Enters

A Citizen in Politics | Richard C. Fuller, George Romney and Michigan

This little book is about George Romney’s introduction into public life and politics in Michigan. The partisanship of the author, an aide in the 1962 gubernatorial campaign, is meticulously restrained, but never out of sight.…

In Opposition to the Two-Party System

Certain segments of the American voting public will be in a real dilemma next year. We don’t yet know which segments, but following are three hypothetical cases to illustrate: a) if the Democrats nominate candidate…

The Mormon Congressman and the Line Between Church and State

We are in an era of significant problems relative to Church-State relations. Federal aid to education, civil rights legislation, prayer in public schools, and a host of other contemporary issues are closely connected with both…

Philosophical, Legal, and Practical Considerations of Collective Bargaining in an Enterprise Society

It seems strange to a student of the economic, political, and legal development of our society and its philosophical underpinnings that, in the middle of the twentieth century, so little is understood generally about the…

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Materializing Faith and Politics: The Unseen Power of the NCCS Pocket Constitution in American Religion

In 2014, Latter-day Saint painter Jon McNaughton painted a triumphal and patriotic, yet reverent, scene of Cliven Bundy on horseback, with one hand lifting an American flag and his hat covering his heart in the…

God and Politics Matthew L. Harris, ed., Thunder from the Right: Ezra Taft Benson in Mormonism and Politics

In the mid-twentieth century, Ezra Taft Benson was an important political figure who despised communism and feared that the United States was on the road to moral decay. He decried the rise of feminism and…

Matthew L. Harris, ed., Thunder from the Right: Ezra Taft Benson in Mormonism and Politics

The Politics of Mormon History

Personal Voices: Dreaming After Trump

Personal Voices: That’s Where the Light Enters

A Citizen in Politics | Richard C. Fuller, George Romney and Michigan

This little book is about George Romney’s introduction into public life and politics in Michigan. The partisanship of the author, an aide in the 1962 gubernatorial campaign, is meticulously restrained, but never out of sight.…

In Opposition to the Two-Party System

Certain segments of the American voting public will be in a real dilemma next year. We don’t yet know which segments, but following are three hypothetical cases to illustrate: a) if the Democrats nominate candidate…

The Mormon Congressman and the Line Between Church and State

We are in an era of significant problems relative to Church-State relations. Federal aid to education, civil rights legislation, prayer in public schools, and a host of other contemporary issues are closely connected with both…

Philosophical, Legal, and Practical Considerations of Collective Bargaining in an Enterprise Society

It seems strange to a student of the economic, political, and legal development of our society and its philosophical underpinnings that, in the middle of the twentieth century, so little is understood generally about the…

The Church and Collective Bargaining in American Society

The attempt to repeal Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act was overshadowed nationally by other issues of the 1965 legislative session, but many Latter-day Saints were intensely interested. The reason was the unusual action of…

RFK at BYU

Thank you very much. Thank you. I appreciate very much being here . . . I understand that this is a campus made up of all political persuasions. I had a very nice conversation with…

The Vietnam War Through the Eyes of a Mormon Subculture

This study was conducted at Brigham Young University in order to assess student views toward the war in a subculture where the norms of Mormonism are overwhelmingly dominant. Brigham Young University is perhaps the only…

The Kingdom of God in Illinois: Politics in Utopia

The purpose of this paper is to re-examine, in a political frame of reference, the persistent question as to why the Mormons were so ferociously constrained from their attempt to establish at Nauvoo a society…

God and Man in History

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sees both God and man in a temporal, that i§^ historical,’ context, but it has developed no authoritative, systematic statement of the philosophical implications of historical relationships. It has no official philosophy of history. What follows, therefore, are simply reflections on some problems which relate to the religious affirmations of the L.D.S. people and a tentative approach to my personal philosophy of history. 

The Reorganization in the Twentieth Century

On April 15, 1972 the Mormon History Association held a notable convention at Independence, Missouri. Some 130 members and friends of the Association visited historic Mormon sites and heard discourses from scholars representing both the…

Revolution and Mormonism in Asia: What the Church Might Offer a Changing Society

Asia is a land of revolution, a land where a complex of revolutions are inter related in such a way that one phase is not understood independent of the others, nor of the traditions from which they stem. These revolutionary trends are creating rapid changes throughout Asian society, one of which is a search for a new stability, and this greatly influences the development of Mormonism in Asia, including the kinds of people it attracts and its relative success or failure in sustaining activity and building a strong organization. 

Three Myths About Mormons in Latin America

For the most part, Mormons have been a socially homogeneous people. True, the initial Anglo-American stock was reinforced from time to time by immigrants from Western Europe, but these converts were quickly absorbed into the Church’s social and cultural mainstream. Although successful missions were established among the Indians and especially among the Polynesians, it was nevertheless the English-speaking white Americans who gave the Church its leadership and set the tone of its culture.

Mormons in the Third Reich: 1933-1945

The experience of the Church in non-American countries has not always been easy. In Germany in the 1930’s, for example, the Hitler regime viewed the Mormon Church as an American institution and therefore open to…

Moderation in All Things: Political and Social Outlooks of Modern Urban Mormons

Perhaps the most difficult kind of analysis that scholars may presume to make is that of presenting attitudes of people toward various ideas. Any poll can be affected by weakness in the sampling technique, by…

The Politics of B.H. Roberts

Among the second generation of latter-day Saints, the Church had few more zealous or versatile advocates than B. H. Roberts. In his day he was the Church’s most prolific writer, its leading historian, one of…

Watergate: A Personal Experience

As a lawyer, I have had a professional interest in the unfolding of Watergate. Lawyers have, of course, played a central role in the saga. A staggering number of the key players were lawyers—those who were involved in the criminal activities and cover-up conspiracies as well as those involved in the unravelling of the conspiracies and the prosecution of the guilty. 

Hanging by a Thread: Mormons and Watergate

We Latter-day Saints not only declare that the Constitution of the United States was divinely inspired but also think of ourselves as standing ready to make a prophesied defense, perhaps even a rescue, of it when it is in particular danger, at some time when it is to “hang by a thread.”

Church and Politics at the IWY Conference

Dialogue 11.1 (Spring 1978): 58–76
During the spring of 1977, Utah’s two major newspapers began their coverage of what was to become one of the hottest political controversies of the year: the Utah Women’s Conference authorized by the National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year and scheduled for June 24-25

Out of the Slot | Marilyn Warenski, Patriarchs and Politics: The Plight of the Mormon Woman

Mormons who believe feminism is deeply subversive will find confirmation in Marilyn Warenski’s Patriarchs and Politics. Her argument can be simply stated: Feminism and patriarchal religion are incompatible. Mormonism is a patriarchal religion. Therefore, there…

The World of Evangelism | Carol Flake, Redemptorama: Culture, Politics, and the New Evangelicalism

As Carol Flake observes, 1976 seemed to be “the year of the evangelical” as the media focused its attention on Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian who taught Sun day School in his small Georgia hometown…

Of Politics and Poplars

The Lombardy poplars are almost gone now. This shouldn’t nag at me, but it does. They used to be everywhere in Utah, lining the edges of farms, marking a town’s boundaries, or marching down long…

Evan Mecham: Humor in Arizona Politics

Through the spring and summer of 1987, Arizona residents had a wonderful time laughing about their newly elected governor, Evan Mecham. Mon day mornings were brighter because people brought to work new jokes they had…

The Holy War Surrounding Evan Mecham

While I am not a political scientist, sociologist, or historian, I am one of many Arizona Latter-day Saints who will never forget Evan Mecham or the “Holy War” of public opinion that surrounded his governorship…

Utah’s Original “Mr. Republican” | Milton R. Merrill, Reed Smoot: Apostle in Politics

I first encountered Reed Smoot more than two decades ago while researching the life and political career of Parley P. Christensen, a Utah political maverick who became the Farmer-Labor party nominee for president in 1920.…

A Valuable Addition to the Literature | Jean Bickmore White, ed., Church, State, and Politics: The Diaries of John Henry Smith

Reviewers expect to apply somewhat different criteria to an edited diary than to a monograph, interpretive book, or col lection of essays. Instead of asking questions about the scope of the research, the felicity of…

A Strange Phenomena: Ernest L. Wilkinson, the LDS Church, and Utah Politics

For Ernest Leroy Wilkinson, successful Washington, D.C., lawyer and seventh president of Brigham Young University, campaign politics was a game he could never master. From his rowdy youth in Ogden, Utah’s notorious Hell’s Half-Acre district, where blind eyes turned to cock-fighting and bootlegging, he had been fascinated by the nature and use of power. By the time he was fifty, he had secured a string of hard-won national victories as a tenacious and intimidating legalist. But the lure of politics remained the one attraction, despite other professional and personal accomplishments, he could not resist.

Ezra Taft Benson and Mormon Political Conflicts

From the 1950s to the 1980s Ezra Taft Benson was at the center of a series of political conflicts within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 1943 he became a member of…

Freedom of Conscience: A Personal Statement

Professional Myths About Latter-day Therapy

“Awaiting Translation”: Timothy Liu, Identity Politics, and the Question of Religious Authenticity

In a 1991 New York Times Book Review article, African-American literary theorist and cultural critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., used the bizarre case of The Education of Little Tree to reexamine the issues of “identity” and “authenticity” in literary studies.

Editing William Clayton and the Politics of Mormon History

Editing William Clayton, James B. Allen
A Response: The Politics of Mormon History, George D. Smith
A Reply, James B. Allen
A Rejoinder, George D. Smith

“But They Didn’t Win”: Politics and Integrity

“Why would you ever want to get involved in politics? Politicians are nothing but self-serving sleazeballs who will do anything to win. Nothing’s ever going to change that!”  That was the sort of wisdom I…

Cosmos, Chaos, and Politics: Biblical Creation Patterns in Secular Contexts

The conceptual link between the state and the cosmos has been explored many times by scholars over the last several decades. Mircea Eliade gave us his reflections in his book The Myth of the Eternal…

From Morality to Politics

A few years ago during the Utah campaign against pari-mutuel betting, an LDS church leader justified his involvement by claiming that it was a moral issue. The implication was that church leaders have jurisdiction over…

Postscript from Iraq: A Flicker of Hope in Conflict’s Moral Twilight

Dialogue 37.1 (Spring 2004): 180–187
It was as I waded through the sewage, stagnant in the streets of one of Africa’s biggest slums—Mukuru, Nairobi, Kenya—while on an assignment with the Community of Christ-sponsore  WorldService Corps in summer 2000, that I was first struck by the enormity of the world’s problems and the horrifying conditions faced by the majority of its inhabiants.

In the Service of Peace, in the Defense of War: War Is Eternal: The Case for Military Preparedness

The history of empires and nation-states is often a chronicle of wars, as this sprinkling of names clearly evokes: Ghengis Khan, Attila the Hun, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, William T. Sherman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Fidel Castro, and Ho Chi Minh. The twentieth century, the bloodiest and most war-crazed in the history of the world, has alone been responsible for combat in which “not less than 62 million civilians have perished, nearly 20 million more than the 43 million military personnel killed.”

In the Service of Peace, in the Defense of War: Of Wars, Maps, and Ideals

I am a child of the sixties. I mean this in a more literal sense than is generally understood: I was a child during the 1960s. One result is that I have a distinctive view…

In the Service of Peace, in the Defense of War: From Flanders Fields

A little over twenty years ago on a beautiful July day in London when the sun glittered in a cloudless sky, warm breezes blew the music of the Royal Green Jackets band across Hyde Park. English families and tourists wandered the park or settled themselves on the grass and benches to listen.

In the Service of Peace, in the Defense of War: Reflections on War of a Liberal Catholic in Mormon Utah

Anxiety and frustration have accompanied my resistance to the second Bush war on Iraq. I feel such discontent partly because the Roman Catholic Church in Utah tends to be ultraconservative in theology and politics. While…

Peace Psychology and Mormonism: A Broader Vision for Peace

Psychologists have long been interested in peace and conflicts, and have made important contributions to society’s understandings of war and peace. A small but growing number of psychologists has become involved in the peace movement…

Rooted in Christian Hope: The Case for Pacifism

As a pacifist for my entire adult life, I find the DIALOGUE call for papers too inviting to ignore. During the Vietnam War thirty-five years ago, I came to grips with what pacifism requires of…

Anabaptism, the Book of Mormon, and the Peace Church Option

Dialogue 37.1 (Spring 2004): 75–94
However, Mennonites and Latter Day Saints may be spiritual cousins. A sympathetic comparison of the origins of both movements may illuminate their past and also assist in contemporary living of the gospel of shalom.

The Ideology of Empire: A View from “America’s Attic”

The most fundamental problem of politics  .. . is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness.—Henry Kissinger[1] LDS attitudes towards war and peace in general have been covered fairly comprehensively in the…

The Possibilities of Mormon Peacebuilding

In 1992, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then Secretary-General of the United Nations, announced his Agenda for Peace. Within it, he encouraged member states to become more actively involved in “peacebuilding,” a vaguely defined term that seeks to…

Reed Smoot and the Twentieth-Century Transformation of Mormonism | Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle

On June 23, 2004, LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor that the United States can bestow, at a White House ceremony presided over by the…

A National Conspiracy? | Robert S. Wicks and Fred R. Foister, Junius & Joseph: presidential Politics and the Assassination of the First Mormon Prophet

Robert S. Wicks and Fred R. Foister selected the title Junius & Joseph to emphasize their thesis that Joseph Smith’s death was a political assassination. The authors point out that the Junius tracts were “issued…

A Must-Read on Gender Politics : Martha Sonntag Bradley, Pedestals, Podiums: Utah Women, Religious Authority, and Equal Rights

Four Reasons for Voting Yes

I don’t live in California, and so the questions of what I thought of Proposition 8 and of my Church’s involvement in it were never presented to me with any more force than that of…

The Political Is Personal

As a California native, I have a stake in my home state’s politics, especially on social issues such as same-sex marriage. I was living in Pasadena, California, in 2000 when Proposition 22, defining marriage as…

An Evangelical Perspective

As an evangelical Christian living in California, I had mixed feelings about the Christian community’s involvement in Proposition 8. I had just started attending a new church during election time. One Sunday, I was handed…

How We Talk about Marriage (and Why It Matters)

A decade from now, same-sex marriage will likely be the law in a majority of states. Given the domino effect of legislatures embracing a cause that has successfully claimed the mantle of equality, coupled with…

The Church’s Use of Secular Arguments

One fascinating development in the Proposition 8 debate in California was the extent to which secular arguments-involving legal, political, and sociological claims-came to take center stage, even in announcements from the Church itself. The Church’s…

Two Modes of Political Engagement

The hard-fought campaign over Proposition 8, which in November 2008 rescinded the legal right to marriage for same-sex couples in California, is evidence of an important political success for religious conservative political groups who support…

Six Voices on Proposition 8: A Roundtable

Dialogue 42.4 (Winter 2009): 106–141
After Prop 22 passed, it was overturned by the courts as a violation of the equal protection clause of the CA constitution. Opponents of same-sex marriage devised a new proposition to amenda the CA constitution to ban same-sex marriage and the LDS church announced its public support and activism for the measure in the summer of 2008 before the november election. It was a deeply contentious issue bringing national attention to the church whose members provided the bulk of the funding for its passage, nearly $40m. The issue was a breaking point for many in the church and the above roundtable attempts to offer a variety of legal and religious arguments for and against the measure. 

A Failure of Moral Imagination: Guantanamo, Torture, the Constitution, and Mormons–An Interview with Brent N. Rushforth

The Richard D. Poll and J. Kenneth Davies Cases: Politics and Religion at BYU during the Wilkinson Years

Undie Running on the Line between Church and State

Mormon History Association Conference: To Forsake Thy Father and Mother: Mary Fielding Smith and the Familial Politics of Conversion

America and the One True Church: What My Church Taught Me about My Country

Review: Liberalism and the American Mormon: Three Takes David E. Campbell, John C. Green, and J. Quin Monson. Seeking the Promised Land: Mormons and American Politics Richard Davis. The Liberal Soul: Applying the Gospel of Jesus Christ in Politics Terryl

Materializing Faith and Politics: The Unseen Power of the NCCS Pocket Constitution in American Religion

In 2014, Latter-day Saint painter Jon McNaughton painted a triumphal and patriotic, yet reverent, scene of Cliven Bundy on horseback, with one hand lifting an American flag and his hat covering his heart in the…

God and Politics Matthew L. Harris, ed., Thunder from the Right: Ezra Taft Benson in Mormonism and Politics

In the mid-twentieth century, Ezra Taft Benson was an important political figure who despised communism and feared that the United States was on the road to moral decay. He decried the rise of feminism and…

Matthew L. Harris, ed., Thunder from the Right: Ezra Taft Benson in Mormonism and Politics

The Politics of Mormon History

Personal Voices: Dreaming After Trump

Personal Voices: That’s Where the Light Enters

A Citizen in Politics | Richard C. Fuller, George Romney and Michigan

This little book is about George Romney’s introduction into public life and politics in Michigan. The partisanship of the author, an aide in the 1962 gubernatorial campaign, is meticulously restrained, but never out of sight.…

In Opposition to the Two-Party System

Certain segments of the American voting public will be in a real dilemma next year. We don’t yet know which segments, but following are three hypothetical cases to illustrate: a) if the Democrats nominate candidate…

The Mormon Congressman and the Line Between Church and State

We are in an era of significant problems relative to Church-State relations. Federal aid to education, civil rights legislation, prayer in public schools, and a host of other contemporary issues are closely connected with both…

Philosophical, Legal, and Practical Considerations of Collective Bargaining in an Enterprise Society

It seems strange to a student of the economic, political, and legal development of our society and its philosophical underpinnings that, in the middle of the twentieth century, so little is understood generally about the…

The Church and Collective Bargaining in American Society

The attempt to repeal Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act was overshadowed nationally by other issues of the 1965 legislative session, but many Latter-day Saints were intensely interested. The reason was the unusual action of…

RFK at BYU

Thank you very much. Thank you. I appreciate very much being here . . . I understand that this is a campus made up of all political persuasions. I had a very nice conversation with…

The Vietnam War Through the Eyes of a Mormon Subculture

This study was conducted at Brigham Young University in order to assess student views toward the war in a subculture where the norms of Mormonism are overwhelmingly dominant. Brigham Young University is perhaps the only…

The Kingdom of God in Illinois: Politics in Utopia

The purpose of this paper is to re-examine, in a political frame of reference, the persistent question as to why the Mormons were so ferociously constrained from their attempt to establish at Nauvoo a society…

God and Man in History

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sees both God and man in a temporal, that i§^ historical,’ context, but it has developed no authoritative, systematic statement of the philosophical implications of historical relationships. It has no official philosophy of history. What follows, therefore, are simply reflections on some problems which relate to the religious affirmations of the L.D.S. people and a tentative approach to my personal philosophy of history. 

The Reorganization in the Twentieth Century

On April 15, 1972 the Mormon History Association held a notable convention at Independence, Missouri. Some 130 members and friends of the Association visited historic Mormon sites and heard discourses from scholars representing both the…

Revolution and Mormonism in Asia: What the Church Might Offer a Changing Society

Asia is a land of revolution, a land where a complex of revolutions are inter related in such a way that one phase is not understood independent of the others, nor of the traditions from which they stem. These revolutionary trends are creating rapid changes throughout Asian society, one of which is a search for a new stability, and this greatly influences the development of Mormonism in Asia, including the kinds of people it attracts and its relative success or failure in sustaining activity and building a strong organization. 

Three Myths About Mormons in Latin America

For the most part, Mormons have been a socially homogeneous people. True, the initial Anglo-American stock was reinforced from time to time by immigrants from Western Europe, but these converts were quickly absorbed into the Church’s social and cultural mainstream. Although successful missions were established among the Indians and especially among the Polynesians, it was nevertheless the English-speaking white Americans who gave the Church its leadership and set the tone of its culture.

Mormons in the Third Reich: 1933-1945

The experience of the Church in non-American countries has not always been easy. In Germany in the 1930’s, for example, the Hitler regime viewed the Mormon Church as an American institution and therefore open to…

Moderation in All Things: Political and Social Outlooks of Modern Urban Mormons

Perhaps the most difficult kind of analysis that scholars may presume to make is that of presenting attitudes of people toward various ideas. Any poll can be affected by weakness in the sampling technique, by…

The Politics of B.H. Roberts

Among the second generation of latter-day Saints, the Church had few more zealous or versatile advocates than B. H. Roberts. In his day he was the Church’s most prolific writer, its leading historian, one of…

Watergate: A Personal Experience

As a lawyer, I have had a professional interest in the unfolding of Watergate. Lawyers have, of course, played a central role in the saga. A staggering number of the key players were lawyers—those who were involved in the criminal activities and cover-up conspiracies as well as those involved in the unravelling of the conspiracies and the prosecution of the guilty. 

Hanging by a Thread: Mormons and Watergate

We Latter-day Saints not only declare that the Constitution of the United States was divinely inspired but also think of ourselves as standing ready to make a prophesied defense, perhaps even a rescue, of it when it is in particular danger, at some time when it is to “hang by a thread.”

Church and Politics at the IWY Conference

Dialogue 11.1 (Spring 1978): 58–76
During the spring of 1977, Utah’s two major newspapers began their coverage of what was to become one of the hottest political controversies of the year: the Utah Women’s Conference authorized by the National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year and scheduled for June 24-25

Out of the Slot | Marilyn Warenski, Patriarchs and Politics: The Plight of the Mormon Woman

Mormons who believe feminism is deeply subversive will find confirmation in Marilyn Warenski’s Patriarchs and Politics. Her argument can be simply stated: Feminism and patriarchal religion are incompatible. Mormonism is a patriarchal religion. Therefore, there…

The World of Evangelism | Carol Flake, Redemptorama: Culture, Politics, and the New Evangelicalism

As Carol Flake observes, 1976 seemed to be “the year of the evangelical” as the media focused its attention on Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian who taught Sun day School in his small Georgia hometown…

Of Politics and Poplars

The Lombardy poplars are almost gone now. This shouldn’t nag at me, but it does. They used to be everywhere in Utah, lining the edges of farms, marking a town’s boundaries, or marching down long…

Evan Mecham: Humor in Arizona Politics

Through the spring and summer of 1987, Arizona residents had a wonderful time laughing about their newly elected governor, Evan Mecham. Mon day mornings were brighter because people brought to work new jokes they had…

The Holy War Surrounding Evan Mecham

While I am not a political scientist, sociologist, or historian, I am one of many Arizona Latter-day Saints who will never forget Evan Mecham or the “Holy War” of public opinion that surrounded his governorship…

Utah’s Original “Mr. Republican” | Milton R. Merrill, Reed Smoot: Apostle in Politics

I first encountered Reed Smoot more than two decades ago while researching the life and political career of Parley P. Christensen, a Utah political maverick who became the Farmer-Labor party nominee for president in 1920.…

A Valuable Addition to the Literature | Jean Bickmore White, ed., Church, State, and Politics: The Diaries of John Henry Smith

Reviewers expect to apply somewhat different criteria to an edited diary than to a monograph, interpretive book, or col lection of essays. Instead of asking questions about the scope of the research, the felicity of…

A Strange Phenomena: Ernest L. Wilkinson, the LDS Church, and Utah Politics

For Ernest Leroy Wilkinson, successful Washington, D.C., lawyer and seventh president of Brigham Young University, campaign politics was a game he could never master. From his rowdy youth in Ogden, Utah’s notorious Hell’s Half-Acre district, where blind eyes turned to cock-fighting and bootlegging, he had been fascinated by the nature and use of power. By the time he was fifty, he had secured a string of hard-won national victories as a tenacious and intimidating legalist. But the lure of politics remained the one attraction, despite other professional and personal accomplishments, he could not resist.

Ezra Taft Benson and Mormon Political Conflicts

From the 1950s to the 1980s Ezra Taft Benson was at the center of a series of political conflicts within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 1943 he became a member of…

Freedom of Conscience: A Personal Statement

Professional Myths About Latter-day Therapy

“Awaiting Translation”: Timothy Liu, Identity Politics, and the Question of Religious Authenticity

In a 1991 New York Times Book Review article, African-American literary theorist and cultural critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., used the bizarre case of The Education of Little Tree to reexamine the issues of “identity” and “authenticity” in literary studies.

Editing William Clayton and the Politics of Mormon History

Editing William Clayton, James B. Allen
A Response: The Politics of Mormon History, George D. Smith
A Reply, James B. Allen
A Rejoinder, George D. Smith

“But They Didn’t Win”: Politics and Integrity

“Why would you ever want to get involved in politics? Politicians are nothing but self-serving sleazeballs who will do anything to win. Nothing’s ever going to change that!”  That was the sort of wisdom I…

Cosmos, Chaos, and Politics: Biblical Creation Patterns in Secular Contexts

The conceptual link between the state and the cosmos has been explored many times by scholars over the last several decades. Mircea Eliade gave us his reflections in his book The Myth of the Eternal…

From Morality to Politics

A few years ago during the Utah campaign against pari-mutuel betting, an LDS church leader justified his involvement by claiming that it was a moral issue. The implication was that church leaders have jurisdiction over…

Postscript from Iraq: A Flicker of Hope in Conflict’s Moral Twilight

Dialogue 37.1 (Spring 2004): 180–187
It was as I waded through the sewage, stagnant in the streets of one of Africa’s biggest slums—Mukuru, Nairobi, Kenya—while on an assignment with the Community of Christ-sponsore  WorldService Corps in summer 2000, that I was first struck by the enormity of the world’s problems and the horrifying conditions faced by the majority of its inhabiants.

In the Service of Peace, in the Defense of War: War Is Eternal: The Case for Military Preparedness

The history of empires and nation-states is often a chronicle of wars, as this sprinkling of names clearly evokes: Ghengis Khan, Attila the Hun, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, William T. Sherman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Fidel Castro, and Ho Chi Minh. The twentieth century, the bloodiest and most war-crazed in the history of the world, has alone been responsible for combat in which “not less than 62 million civilians have perished, nearly 20 million more than the 43 million military personnel killed.”

In the Service of Peace, in the Defense of War: Of Wars, Maps, and Ideals

I am a child of the sixties. I mean this in a more literal sense than is generally understood: I was a child during the 1960s. One result is that I have a distinctive view…

In the Service of Peace, in the Defense of War: From Flanders Fields

A little over twenty years ago on a beautiful July day in London when the sun glittered in a cloudless sky, warm breezes blew the music of the Royal Green Jackets band across Hyde Park. English families and tourists wandered the park or settled themselves on the grass and benches to listen.

In the Service of Peace, in the Defense of War: Reflections on War of a Liberal Catholic in Mormon Utah

Anxiety and frustration have accompanied my resistance to the second Bush war on Iraq. I feel such discontent partly because the Roman Catholic Church in Utah tends to be ultraconservative in theology and politics. While…

Peace Psychology and Mormonism: A Broader Vision for Peace

Psychologists have long been interested in peace and conflicts, and have made important contributions to society’s understandings of war and peace. A small but growing number of psychologists has become involved in the peace movement…

Rooted in Christian Hope: The Case for Pacifism

As a pacifist for my entire adult life, I find the DIALOGUE call for papers too inviting to ignore. During the Vietnam War thirty-five years ago, I came to grips with what pacifism requires of…

Anabaptism, the Book of Mormon, and the Peace Church Option

Dialogue 37.1 (Spring 2004): 75–94
However, Mennonites and Latter Day Saints may be spiritual cousins. A sympathetic comparison of the origins of both movements may illuminate their past and also assist in contemporary living of the gospel of shalom.

The Ideology of Empire: A View from “America’s Attic”

The most fundamental problem of politics  .. . is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness.—Henry Kissinger[1] LDS attitudes towards war and peace in general have been covered fairly comprehensively in the…

The Possibilities of Mormon Peacebuilding

In 1992, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then Secretary-General of the United Nations, announced his Agenda for Peace. Within it, he encouraged member states to become more actively involved in “peacebuilding,” a vaguely defined term that seeks to…

Reed Smoot and the Twentieth-Century Transformation of Mormonism | Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle

On June 23, 2004, LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor that the United States can bestow, at a White House ceremony presided over by the…

A National Conspiracy? | Robert S. Wicks and Fred R. Foister, Junius & Joseph: presidential Politics and the Assassination of the First Mormon Prophet

Robert S. Wicks and Fred R. Foister selected the title Junius & Joseph to emphasize their thesis that Joseph Smith’s death was a political assassination. The authors point out that the Junius tracts were “issued…

A Must-Read on Gender Politics : Martha Sonntag Bradley, Pedestals, Podiums: Utah Women, Religious Authority, and Equal Rights

Four Reasons for Voting Yes

I don’t live in California, and so the questions of what I thought of Proposition 8 and of my Church’s involvement in it were never presented to me with any more force than that of…

The Political Is Personal

As a California native, I have a stake in my home state’s politics, especially on social issues such as same-sex marriage. I was living in Pasadena, California, in 2000 when Proposition 22, defining marriage as…

An Evangelical Perspective

As an evangelical Christian living in California, I had mixed feelings about the Christian community’s involvement in Proposition 8. I had just started attending a new church during election time. One Sunday, I was handed…

How We Talk about Marriage (and Why It Matters)

A decade from now, same-sex marriage will likely be the law in a majority of states. Given the domino effect of legislatures embracing a cause that has successfully claimed the mantle of equality, coupled with…

The Church’s Use of Secular Arguments

One fascinating development in the Proposition 8 debate in California was the extent to which secular arguments-involving legal, political, and sociological claims-came to take center stage, even in announcements from the Church itself. The Church’s…

Two Modes of Political Engagement

The hard-fought campaign over Proposition 8, which in November 2008 rescinded the legal right to marriage for same-sex couples in California, is evidence of an important political success for religious conservative political groups who support…

Six Voices on Proposition 8: A Roundtable

Dialogue 42.4 (Winter 2009): 106–141
After Prop 22 passed, it was overturned by the courts as a violation of the equal protection clause of the CA constitution. Opponents of same-sex marriage devised a new proposition to amenda the CA constitution to ban same-sex marriage and the LDS church announced its public support and activism for the measure in the summer of 2008 before the november election. It was a deeply contentious issue bringing national attention to the church whose members provided the bulk of the funding for its passage, nearly $40m. The issue was a breaking point for many in the church and the above roundtable attempts to offer a variety of legal and religious arguments for and against the measure. 

A Failure of Moral Imagination: Guantanamo, Torture, the Constitution, and Mormons–An Interview with Brent N. Rushforth

The Richard D. Poll and J. Kenneth Davies Cases: Politics and Religion at BYU during the Wilkinson Years

Undie Running on the Line between Church and State

Mormon History Association Conference: To Forsake Thy Father and Mother: Mary Fielding Smith and the Familial Politics of Conversion

America and the One True Church: What My Church Taught Me about My Country

Review: Liberalism and the American Mormon: Three Takes David E. Campbell, John C. Green, and J. Quin Monson. Seeking the Promised Land: Mormons and American Politics Richard Davis. The Liberal Soul: Applying the Gospel of Jesus Christ in Politics Terryl