International Legal Experience and the Mormon Theology of the State, 1945-2012

• Author: Nathan B. Oman
• Position: Cabell Research Professor, William & Mary Law School
• Pages: 715-750

715

International Legal Experience and the

Mormon Theology of the State,

1945–2012

Nathan B. Oman

I. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................. 715

II. THE INTERNATIONAL EXPANSION OF MORMONISM SINCE 1945 .. 719

A. PRE-1945 MORMON EXPANSION .............................................. 719

B. THE POST-WAR PERIOD ........................................................... 720

III. LEGAL CHALLENGES AND INTERNATIONAL EXPANSION ................ 723

A. LEGAL CHALLENGES FACED BY THE CHURCH ............................ 724

B. CAUSES OF THE CHURCH’S LEGAL CHALLENGES ........................ 730

IV. LAW AND THE MORMON THEOLOGY OF THE STATE ...................... 740

A. EARLIER MORMON THEOLOGIES OF THE STATE ........................ 742

B. A QUIETIST MORMON THEOLOGY OF THE STATE ...................... 744

V. CONCLUSION ................................................................................ 749

I. INTRODUCTION

By spring 1945, the Third Reich had reached its Götterdämmerung. The

previous summer, Allied Armies, under Dwight D. Eisenhower, landed in

Normandy and began driving toward the Fatherland. The Red Army had been

pushing west toward Berlin since its victory over the final German offensive at

the Battle of Kursk in August 1943. On April 30, Hitler committed suicide in

his bunker, and Germany surrendered seven days later. War continued on the

other side of the globe. The American strategy of island-hopping had

culminated in the 1944 recapture of the Philippines and the final destruction

 Professor of Law and Robert and Elizabeth Scott Research Professor, Willia m & Mary

Law School. I would like to thank Abigail Bennett, Jeffrey Bennett, Bob Bennett, Wilfried Decoo,

Cole Durham, and Michael Homer for their assistance and comments. I also presented an earlier

version of this paper at the 2014 International Religious Legal Theory Conference sponsored by

the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory Law School and benefited from

participants’ comments. As always, I thank Heather.

716 IOWA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 100:715

of the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. On April 1, 1945,

American forces landed on Okinawa, a Japanese island 340 miles south of the

home archipelago. After 82 days and over 142,000 deaths, the Americans

declared victory. Six weeks later, the United States dropped atomic bombs on

Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On September 2, 1945, the Japanese formally

surrendered on the deck of an American battleship in Tokyo Bay. The war

was over.

That same month, the First Presidency1 of the Church of Jesus Christ of

Latter-day Saints2 began discretely calling men to serve as mission presidents.3

Beginning in 1939, the Church shut down its overseas missions and recalled

American Mormons serving as missionaries back to the United States. As war

spread across the globe, the American government exercised extensive

control over the U.S. economy, imposing rationing- and labor-controls. Not

surprisingly, religious proselytizing was far down on the wartime

government’s list of priorities, and the Church ceased virtually all formal

missionary work.4 The mission presidents sent forth by the First Presidency in

September 1945 would help to create a very different kind of Mormonism

than that which had existed before World War II. In 1945, there were roughly

980,000 Mormons, living mainly in the Intermountain West. Taking

advantage of the Pax Americana wrought by the United States’ victory and the

tense stability of the Cold War, the Church would seek to establish itself as a

global institution. By 2013, the Church would claim more than 15 million

baptized members, the majority living outside of the United States.

While little-remembered today, President George Albert Smith pointed

toward the Church’s post-war emphasis on international growth in December

1947. In a front-page Church News editorial, he stated:

I assure every man and woman of the Church that you have a great

obligation to spread the word of the Lord abroad and to carry the

1. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a highly centralized institution. At the

local level, Mormon congregations, called wards, and collections of congregations, called stakes,

are staffed by a volunteer lay clergy. Above these local structures are so-called general authorities,

who are full-time religious leaders “called” into church service from other careers. At the top of

this structure is the President of the Church, whom Mormons sustain as “a prophet, seer, and

revelator.” He is assisted in the First Presidency by two counselors. The next highest governing

body of the Church is the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, consisting of apostles who are in the line

of succession to be President of the Church based on seniority.

2. Hereinafter, unless otherwise specified, all references to the “Church” are to the Church

of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

3. CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS, DESERET NEWS CHURCH ALMANAC 315

(2013). Mission presidents are ecclesiastical leaders that direct missionary work in a defined

geographic area called “a mission.” Like all Mormon leaders, they are drawn from the Church’s

lay priesthood. In places with organized “stakes,” they have no ecclesiastical authority over local

congregations. In places without stakes, mission presidents also have final authority over local

congregations.

4. JAMES B. ALLEN & GLEN M. LEONARD, THE STORY OF THE LATTER-DAY SAINTS 536–38 (2d

ed. 1992).

2015] THE MORMON THEOLOGY OF THE STATE 717

truth to every land and clime so that the power of the Priesthood will

be made manifest among our Father’s children in many places

where it has never yet even been heard of.5

In the succeeding decades, Mormons would carry out this injunction by

expanding the scope of missionary work, establishing the Church in dozens

of countries where it had never previously functioned. This expansion,

however, transformed the Church both institutionally and ideologically.

Twenty years after Smith’s 1947 editorial, Elder Franklin D. Richards

remarked, “We are now 20 years into this new era of growth and development,

and growth and development mean change. We must not resist change, as we

believe that God ‘will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining

to the Kingdom of God.’”6

In discussing the interaction between law and religion, scholars and

others often speak as if religion is a given, a phenomenon exogenous to law.

We then ask how the law reacts to religion, either regulating it,

accommodating it, or perhaps being controlled by it. Implicit in this view is

the sense that law is the agent reacting to religion. The Mormon experience,

however, provides an example of what this approach misses. The law not only

reacts to religion, but it also shapes it. Religious traditions are not static. They

evolve and reinterpret themselves over time in reaction to the world in which

religious believers find themselves. Law is one of the factors that can force

religious change. The Church’s abandonment of polygamy in the face of legal

pressure from the United States’ government is a dramatic example of this

kind of change. Less well-understood is the way that law has driven shifts in

Mormon theological discourse in the 20th century. Thus, beyond any

particular interest it may offer, the story of law and the international

expansion of Mormonism since 1945 provides an example of the more

general phenomenon of how law precipitates religious change.

This Essay has three goals. The first is to provide a basic narrative of post-

war Mormon expansion, identifying the basic periods and major

developments. The second is to summarize the main legal issues provoked by

this expansion. The scholarship on Mormon legal history has overwhelmingly

focused on the 19th-century experience of the Latter-day Saints, resulting in

general agreement about the basic structure of the narrative.7 We can divide

5. FRANKLIN D. RICHARDS, OFFICIAL REPORT OF THE ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-SEVENTH SEMI-

ANNUAL GENERAL CONFERENCE OF THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS 146

(1967) (quoting George Albert Smith, Looking Ahead into a New Century of Growth and Development,

CHURCH NEWS, Dec. 20, 1947) (internal quotation marks omitted).

6. Id.

7. The two most important books on 19th-century Mormon legal history setting forth this

narrative structure are EDWIN BROWN FIRMAGE & RICHARD COLLIN MANGRUM, ZION IN THE

COURTS: A LEGAL HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS, 1830–1900

(1988); SARAH BARRINGER GORDON, THE MORMON QUESTIO N: POLYGAMY AND CONSTITUTIONAL

CONFLICT IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA (2002). For a conceptual summary of the