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

I. INTRODUCTIONBy spring 1945, the Third Reich had reached its Gotterdammerung. 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 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 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.5In 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.'"6In 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. …