In this podcast, Mormon Matters host Dan Wotherspoon and panelists Charles Randall Paul, Liz Shropshire, and James Faulconer reflect upon today’s world a decade past September 2001, as well as the nature of peace itself and what it means to be “at peace.” The discussion then turns to the history of Mormon prophetic discourse as it calls, with varying vigor, church members to be peacemakers, as well as to some of the key scriptural passages, stories, and theological notions that inspire the panelists’ own peacebuilding work.

We trust that you will find this a thoughtful and important discussion at this solemn and reflective moment in time, and we encourage you to join in the conversation in the comments section below.

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Please check out (and donate if so moved!) these two peace building foundations run by two of this episodes’ panelists:

The Shropshire Music Foundation–Teaching Children Peace Through Music

The Foundation for Religious Diplomacy

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Other Mormon-led peacebuilding and humanitarian foundations, and LDS peacemakers, to learn about and support:

Joan Betros. Joan heads up F.U.T.U.R.E. (Families United Toward Universal Respect), which uses the model of Relief Society to get women to connect, support, and help each other in Iraq.

Chad Ford. Chad runs the Intercultural Peacebuilding Certificate program at BYU-Hawaii, and he is also involved with the Arbinger Institute and Peace Players International, which uses basketball and other sports to bring together children and adults from both sides of divided communities together. Chad is helping podcast panelist Charles Randall Paul put on a goodwill match next year in Salt Lake City between the Iranian women’s soccer team and an American equivalent.

Peggy Rogers. Peggy founded and runs the Zambia Scholarship Fund, which provides stipends for teachers and scholarships for Zambian students to attend high school and college and learn to become teachers themselves.

Cecile Pelous. Cecile went to India to help Mother Teresa and ended up starting an orphanage that she still runs in Nepal. Cecile gave up her life as a fashion designer in Paris to go to India, and she is who inspired panelist Liz Shropshire to start looking for a way she could help children affected by war.

Warner Woodworth works tirelessly to bring money and expertise from church members who have it to aid new entrepreneurs in establishing sustainable businesses in South and Central America.

Daniel Peterson runs the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative (METI), which opens important dialogues with Muslims by producing bi-lingual classical Islamic texts that have not previously been translated.

Bill Jackson directs the Intermountain Research and Medical Foundation (formerly the Deseret Foundation), which has operations in Africa, the Philippines, and South and Central America that bring doctors and supplies to train local doctors in procedures that cure and heal thousands.  

The Brent and Bonnie Jean Beesley Foundation works to establish elementary schools in rural India.

We invite Mormon Matters listeners to write about other LDS-led peacemaking and humanitarian organizations that we can add to this list.

Memorial Day is a United States federal holiday which “commemorates U.S. men and women who have died in military service to their country.”   At the risk of coming under the condemnation of Mormon bloggers everywhere, I wish to register my objection to the deplorable sentiments underlying this holiday.

We can all agree on the magnitude of the sacrifice offered by American soldiers. They answered the call of the leaders of their country to go to war. They did this with the knowledge that their own lives might be taken. I am not one who looks upon military volunteers as being either bloodthirsty warmongers or poverty-stricken and brainwashed victims. Their brand of courage is not ordinary, and will never be ordinary.

I must, however, denounce the commemoration of lives destroyed by militarism. Instead of celebrating lives given up for war, I would mourn the lives snuffed out and stolen by our country’s participation in martial combat. It seems to me that Memorial Day might more aptly commemorate the lives of America’s great Peacemakers — people such as Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King, Peace Pilgrim, Jeannette Rankin, A.J. Muste, Jane Addams, and a myriad of others.

“The job of the peacemaker is to stop war, to purify the world, to get it saved from poverty and riches, to heal the sick, to comfort the sad, to wake up those who have not yet found God.” (Muriel Lester, Social Activist, Gandhian Pacifist, 1883-1968)

Throughout history, nations have consigned their young men (and now women) to kill one another for reasons honorable or absurd. Often war was declared as a response to evil or oppression; other times violence came as political or economic conflicts that should have been resolved without violence. When the causes are just and when they are not, lives lost to war are sacred and full of promise and potential. Those who ponder these things can only regret that wars are still waged and lives are still lost. I wish that on the day which has been set apart as a “Memorial”, we would not only remember the courageous souls who were sent by their governments to die on battlefields, but rather we would regret and repudiate the conditions that lead some people to believe that offering their lives in military service is the best or only hope for peace, protection or patriotism.

“Indeed, conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. Let me illustrate. Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others. The inhabitants of the other spots reason in like manner, of course, with the result that, from early infancy, the mind of the child is poisoned with blood-curdling stories about the Germans, the French, the Italians, Russians, etc. When the child has reached manhood, he is thoroughly saturated with the belief that he is chosen by the Lord himself to defend HIS country against the attack or invasion of any foreigner. It is for that purpose that we are clamoring for a greater army and navy, more battleships and ammunition.” (Emma Goldman: Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty From the 1917 edition of Emma Goldman’s Anarchism and Other Essays)

Military indoctrination, by its nature, teaches the young that the enemy is unworthy of life.

Christian pacifists are often asked about Romans 13. ["Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience."] The Mormon counterpart seems to be our Article of Faith #12: ["We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law."] But I find my answer in Romans 12, which says to do good to your enemy and to overcome evil with good. In World War II, after all, there were many Catholics and Lutherans in Germany who used Romans 13 to justify fighting for the Nazis.

“Many people know the simple spiritual law that evil can only be overcome by good. Pacifists not only know it, they also attempt to live it.” (Peace Pilgrim, Philosopher, Activist, Ethical Vegetarian, Vegan 1908-1981)

A Memorial Day song in a new tradition, Hymn for Anzac Day, was sung for the first time at Mornington Methodist Church in New Zealand on April 29, 2007. Anzac Day is New Zealand and Australia’s version of Memorial Day. Notice the third stanza, where the brave who do not answer the call of war are also honored:

Honour the dead, our country’s fighting brave,
honour our children left in foreign grave,
where poppies blow and sorrow seeds her flowers,
honour the crosses marked forever ours .

Weep for the places ravaged by our blood,
weep for the young bones buried in the mud,
weep for the powers of violence and greed,
weep for the deals done in the name of need.

Honour the brave whose conscience was their call,
answered no bugle, went against the wall,
suffered in prisons of contempt and shame,
branded as cowards in our country’s name.

Weep for the waste of all that might have been,
Weep for the cost that war has made obscene,
Weep for the homes that ache with human pain,
Weep that we ever sanction war again.

Honour the dream for which our nation bled,
Held now in trust to justify the dead,
Honour their vision on this solemn day,
Peace known in freedom, peace the only way.

(words by Shirley Murray, music by Colin Gibson)

I challenge supporters of the American military machine to demonstrate how war brings about peace. How does more killing honor the lives of those who have died? The world has been at war throughout recorded history, and never has war brought definitive peace to any generation. Violent resistance to violence always fails to bring about peace. Rather, it establishes a realignment of forces under principles of violence. War is rarely motivated by the high ideals that its supporters use to justify it.

“Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction…. The chain reaction of evil — hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars — must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.” (Martin Luther King Jr.)

In this day and age, with our weapons of mass destruction and our new and improved ways of torturing each other, war is insanity. It is destructiveness; it is immorality; it is total waste. Our goal today must be the end of war. Negotiation should be our commitment. Perhaps the best way to memorialize the sacrifice of those who have lost their lives in war is to strive for a mastery of peace — a better way of resolving conflict — a commitment to the transformational power of love.

This is why I love President Monson! He has the common touch and appears to love people.

If you watch the video linked above, you will see the news piece on Salt Lake TV. At the very end, President Monson ends the informal report by flashing a peace sign, saying “Peace!” and chuckling. I was completely enamored of him once again.

So watch him in the Pioneer Day parade and enjoy!

If you want to comment, feel free:

Would President Hinckley have flashed a peace sign?

Is this a subtle pro-Obama signal from our revered ecclesiastical leader?

Are Mormons just stuck in the 1960s?