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Episode: 095 “Peace on Earth”—How Can We Help? An Interview with Patrick Mason

Author: Scripture Central
Duration: 01:02:52

Episode Shownotes

Throughout this series on Peace and Violence in Latter-day Saint History, we’ve looked at how Church members have been the victims of violence, how they’ve engaged in defensive violence, and how they’ve even been the aggressors and perpetrators of inexcusable violence. In this episode of Church History Matters we sit

down with our friend Patrick Mason, a Latter-day Saint historian, scholar on peace studies, and author of several books on violence and peace in Latter-day Saint history. We take a step back and think deeply about how each of us can more intentionally participate in bringing peace on earth and good will to all. For show notes and transcript for this and other episodes go to https://doctrineandcovenantscentral.org/church-history-matters-podcast/

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_02
Hi everyone, this is Scott from Church History Matters. Before we jump into today's episode, we're excited to announce that for the entirety of 2025, Church History Matters is doing a deep dive into the Doctrine and Covenants.

00:00:13 Speaker_02
That's right, each week Casey and I will be digging into those sections of the Doctrine and Covenants that align with the church's Come Follow Me curriculum. We're doing this for a couple reasons.

00:00:22 Speaker_02
I mean, for one, we're big fans of the revelations of the Doctrine and Covenants. They play a major foundational role in our church's history, after all. And second, well, the whole church is now shifting their focus to studying this book.

00:00:35 Speaker_02
So we feel like we want to jump on this moment when our interests are so perfectly aligned. And, of course, Casey and I being who we are, we can't just walk through the revelations themselves and call it a day.

00:00:47 Speaker_02
We're going to also explore the important historical context for every section and what impact that revelation had on the church's trajectory.

00:00:54 Speaker_02
And, of course, it wouldn't be Church History Matters if we didn't probe into the controversies connected to most of these revelations, right? So, of course, we'll do a lot of that too.

00:01:04 Speaker_02
Now, our first episode for 2025 actually dropped today, Christmas Eve 2024, and we'll typically drop them early like this in case any teachers out there want to draw from any of the material we cover for their lessons or whatnot.

00:01:17 Speaker_02
You can continue to listen to the audio version here on this podcast channel, or if you'd prefer, we're now also offering a video version that you can watch on Scripture Central's YouTube channel.

00:01:27 Speaker_02
So, however you want to join us, we look forward to studying the Doctrine and Covenants with you. All right, now on to the episode.

00:01:39 Speaker_02
Throughout this series on peace and violence in Latter-day Saint history, we've looked at how church members have been the victims of violence, how they've engaged in defensive violence, and how they've even been the aggressors and perpetrators of inexcusable violence.

00:01:53 Speaker_02
In today's episode of Church History Matters, we sit down with our friend Patrick Mason, a Latter-day Saint historian, scholar on peace studies, and author of several books on violence and peace in Latter-day Saint history.

00:02:05 Speaker_02
And together we're going to take a step back and try to think deeply about how each of us can more intentionally participate in bringing peace on earth and goodwill to all. I'm Scott Woodward, and my co-host is Casey Griffiths.

00:02:19 Speaker_02
And today, Casey and I dive into our ninth and last episode in this series on peace and violence in Latter-day Saint history. Now let's get into it.

00:02:29 Speaker_01
Hello, Scott. Hi, Casey. We're back, and it's almost Christmas. Yeah. Merry Christmas Eve. Yeah.

00:02:39 Speaker_02
Yeah. We did it. We built up. What has this been? Is this episode 9 or 10? Anyway, we are wrapping up.

00:02:46 Speaker_02
Today is the final episode on our Peace and Violence series we've been working on, and what better day than Christmas Eve, Casey, to land the plane on this one.

00:02:56 Speaker_01
I did not anticipate that I would spend my holidays talking about the Mountain Meadows Massacre and other things that are decidedly not in the spirit of Christmas. But what better day to talk about peace on Earth and goodwill toward men. True, true.

00:03:12 Speaker_01
And I think our guest today is going to help us stick the landing.

00:03:15 Speaker_02
Yes.

00:03:16 Speaker_01
Because like we said, it's not the sort of thing that you associate with Christmas, but again, I want to emphasize the title of the series is peace and violence, and we want to emphasize peace.

00:03:26 Speaker_01
That's been the whole purpose of this is to explain that Latter-day Saints don't have a spotless record when it comes to peace and violence.

00:03:33 Speaker_01
But we do have a great theology that we hope leads people towards peace and helps them understand the importance of being peacemakers in our homes, in our communities, and in the wider world.

00:03:44 Speaker_02
Yes, and so we have invited on the show today, let's call him an early Christmas gift for all of our listeners here. We have with us Brother Patrick Mason. Patrick, say hi.

00:03:55 Speaker_00
Hey, everybody. Merry Christmas. Yes.

00:03:58 Speaker_01
Merry Christmas to you too, Patrick. Thanks for joining us. And let me give you a little bit of background on Patrick. So Patrick is the Leonard Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University.

00:04:10 Speaker_01
We also want to point out that Patrick is the co-host of a great podcast that we really enjoy. He co-hosts the Proclaim Peace podcast with Jennifer Thomas. She's the co-executive director at Mormon Women for Ethical Government.

00:04:23 Speaker_01
Tell us a little bit about your podcast, Patrick, and what the aim is.

00:04:28 Speaker_00
Well, it's great to be with you guys. Thanks for the invitation. And yeah, Proclaim Peace, it really, I can't take much credit for it in terms of the genesis of it.

00:04:37 Speaker_00
Jen and everybody else at Mormon Women for Ethical Government have been doing amazing work for the past few years, trying to build peace in the civil sphere, especially around democracy promotion and things like that.

00:04:49 Speaker_00
And so they do tons of work, like in Washington and state capitals and all that.

00:04:52 Speaker_00
But coming into this year, when we were studying the Book of Mormon as a people in Come Follow Me, they said, we really need, and knowing that it would be a contentious election season and everything, they said, we really want to do something to highlight

00:05:04 Speaker_00
the distinctive contributions and messages of the Book of Mormon to what it tells us and teaches us about how to be peacemakers.

00:05:12 Speaker_00
So, Jen approached me, I said yes immediately, and so we have sort of semi-systematically and a little haphazardly been going through the Book of Mormon, pulling out principles and tools and lessons about what that inspired text, what that Book of Scripture teaches us about how to be better peacemakers.

00:05:31 Speaker_01
Yeah, and the podcast is a collaboration between Mormon Women for Ethical Government and Faith Matters, correct?

00:05:36 Speaker_00
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, both organizations that I think are doing great work out there.

00:05:40 Speaker_01
And we talked about this before we hit record, but it's called Mormon Women for Ethical Government, Patrick. But tell us why you were selected to be there. This is kind of a cool story.

00:05:52 Speaker_00
I don't think I want to actually share that because some people might think I'm complicated.

00:06:00 Speaker_01
I'll share so you don't come across as tooting your own horn, which there's plenty there and plenty of justification to do so. The Mormon Women for Ethical Government approached you and said you were a non-problematic male, which, wow, I mean,

00:06:19 Speaker_00
Yeah, I mean, obviously they did not talk to my wife or to any number of people who have ever actually spent time with me. But, but I accepted the compliment. Mostly I was just happy because it is Mormon women for ethical government.

00:06:33 Speaker_00
I was happy just to be brought in to offer what my wife chromosome could.

00:06:38 Speaker_01
I remember when you told that story and I was there thinking, wait a minute, am I problematic? They didn't ask me, but then I realized, yeah, I probably am.

00:06:46 Speaker_02
So just go ask Liz and she'll let you know.

00:06:49 Speaker_01
Yeah, my wife could give you a whole dissertation on why I should not host a peacemaking podcast. But that is a major compliment to you, and I knew that you wouldn't tell that story yourself. I did want to throw it in here.

00:07:04 Speaker_00
Well, thank you. Thank you. It's a great compliment of my life. I'm just not sure that I actually live up to it.

00:07:10 Speaker_01
Hey, well, I mean, if you were there for 30 seconds, that's better than most of us. So that's pretty good. You've arrived. I also want to add to that. You have a book coming out with a couple of our dear friends from the podcast, Andrew Bolton.

00:07:24 Speaker_01
And Todd and Lynn Ford are your co-authors, co-editors on a book called The Radical Spirit, The History and Potential of Latter-day Saints, which is coming out next year. Tell us a little bit about that too.

00:07:35 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's an amazing group of authors. I'm just grateful for the collaboration. It's a lot of both Latter-day Saint and Community of Christ scholars, and I think at least one scholar who's neither.

00:07:46 Speaker_00
We're really looking at what are some really maybe surprising ways that the Latter-day Saint tradition kind of shows up in ways that are kind of countercultural. and that speak prophetically to major issues, whether it be around economic justice.

00:08:01 Speaker_00
I have an essay on nonviolence, whether it be around gender and the role of women. We have great essays on the Relief Society and just what a remarkable organization it has been throughout its history on climate change.

00:08:14 Speaker_00
And so it's mostly historical take, but we're also looking at what resources are there within our own tradition.

00:08:20 Speaker_00
within the Latter-day Saint tradition to address both the way that it has addressed and to continue to address some of the most important issues of our time.

00:08:28 Speaker_01
I'm looking forward to that, and not just because Andrew Bolton is my dear friend and so is Tonal and Ford.

00:08:34 Speaker_01
I just love the idea that, you know, we're rediscovering all the time these radical ideas in the early restoration that still are resonant in the 21st century. We're coming up on two centuries.

00:08:45 Speaker_00
Yeah if i can put a plug i mean i think that's part of the ongoing restoration is actually rediscovering our own history right rediscovering our own resources that we have all of this amazing scripture.

00:08:57 Speaker_00
We have this amazing history we have lots of things where we sort of tried things. for a while, and for various reasons, it didn't work out at the time.

00:09:04 Speaker_00
But I think we can go back to those things and always be plumbing the depths of our own tradition to see, are there things that we used to do or tried to do that maybe with a little bit of juice, a little bit of reimagining, we can bring into the 21st century?

00:09:18 Speaker_00
I think it's a pretty good project, and at least I think it's a good model for us to be thinking broadly about how do we apply this 200-year-old tradition to the most current issues in front of us. I love it. I love how bold and exploratory it is.

00:09:33 Speaker_02
Look forward to the book. This is exciting.

00:09:35 Speaker_00
Yeah, I will say there's a line in there that we have a great essay in there about socialism. Actually, some of the earliest church leaders in Europe were socialists. Karl Marx thought that we were too religious. We were too pious.

00:09:47 Speaker_00
So, he wasn't... Guilty as charged. Exactly. So, maybe Karl Marx's critique becomes one of the great letters of recommendation for the Latter-day Saint tradition.

00:09:58 Speaker_01
Cause I can't decide if you're a socialist, but Karl Marx hates you. Does that make you problematic or?

00:10:03 Speaker_00
Yeah. Right. Maybe you can make everybody mad.

00:10:08 Speaker_01
Yeah. Yeah. Well, okay. That definitely sounds intriguing. So you're here with us on our Christmas Eve episode, because we want to talk about peace on earth.

00:10:18 Speaker_01
The field that you're leading light in is, is called peace studies, but I don't know if a lot of people understand what that means. And what it's meant to do.

00:10:25 Speaker_01
So could we just start maybe by doing a broad overview of what is meant by peace studies and what you do and what the aims are there?

00:10:32 Speaker_00
Yeah, I'm not sure I'm a leading light in peace studies, but maybe in terms of trying to apply some of those, some of that knowledge to the Latter-day Saint tradition, to the restoration tradition and see where, where we fit into it.

00:10:43 Speaker_00
Yeah, I didn't know there was a thing called peace studies either until I encountered it in graduate school. But I'd been prepared before that in a couple of different ways. So when I was an undergraduate at BYU, got my bachelor's in history there.

00:10:56 Speaker_00
At least at the time, everybody had to take kind of a world history or they called it history of civilization class. And I just happened to sort of stumble into one.

00:11:06 Speaker_00
It was an honor section that was being taught by a pair of professors, Alan Keel and Wilfred Griggs. And some of the listeners may know one or both of those names and the whole theme of it.

00:11:16 Speaker_00
And you know, they went, we literally started with the preexistence and the garden of Eden and came all the way up to the present over the space of two semesters. But their whole theme was around war and peace.

00:11:26 Speaker_00
They actually called it the pen and the sword.

00:11:29 Speaker_00
And they said, basically the question is, how is it that all human beings in every culture have always said they want peace, they love peace, but they always end up fighting each other and end up in war and destruction and horrible things.

00:11:44 Speaker_00
And so we looked at that throughout all of history and it was really inspiring. And I read a lot of things that I'd never thought about and thought about a lot of things that were new to me as a 18-year-old freshman at BYU.

00:11:56 Speaker_00
But then, kind of fast forward a few years, I went to the University of Notre Dame for graduate school, and again, I went to do history. But the very last class I ever took as a doctoral student, it was kind of a comparative religion class.

00:12:09 Speaker_00
It was on comparative religious fundamentalisms. And I went into the class, and almost everybody in the class, almost all the students, were in this program in international peace studies.

00:12:20 Speaker_00
And again, I didn't know there was such a thing as peace studies, but it turns out that Notre Dame has one of the oldest and most prestigious institutes for peace studies in all of North America. And these students were incredible.

00:12:33 Speaker_00
They were from all over the world, from all different religions, and these were people who had dedicated their lives to peace. There was an imam, a Muslim imam from South Africa, who had marched with Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela.

00:12:48 Speaker_00
He was basically like the Muslim Mandela or Tutu.

00:12:53 Speaker_00
There was a husband and wife team who were part of an organization called Christian Peacemaker Teams, that they would literally go into sites of active violence, of active conflict, and put their bodies in between warring parties.

00:13:05 Speaker_00
literally risking their lives to stand in between and protect innocent victims and just on and on and on people like this. And I said, like, that's those are my people like that's I want to be like that when I grow up.

00:13:18 Speaker_00
And so I learned more about this peace studies thing and realized that actually you could get a master's degree in it.

00:13:22 Speaker_00
So I actually took a leave of absence from my doctoral program, applied to the university again, got into this peace studies program and spent time getting a master's degree in peace studies. It was one of the most transformative years of my life.

00:13:33 Speaker_00
learning all about this, learning about peace in a really rigorous way, you know, at a graduate school level. So I've spent the rest of my life, the past 20, 25 years trying to apply all those things.

00:13:46 Speaker_00
And the kind of insight that I had while I was doing all of that work is that we have all these principles in the restoration.

00:13:54 Speaker_00
I learned all these basic principles, maybe not all the technical terms, maybe not all the applications and all those kinds of things, but the basic principles I knew because I had read the scriptures.

00:14:05 Speaker_00
I knew this stuff because I'd read the Book of Mormon. I'd read the New Testament. And so peace studies kind of crystallized it. It gave me language, it gave me applications, but the basic principles I had because I'm a Christian. Wow. Wow.

00:14:18 Speaker_02
That's incredible, man. That's how you got into and interested in peace studies. You almost stumbled into it and turned out to be a life changer.

00:14:25 Speaker_00
Yeah, it was, whether you want to call it an accident or serendipity or providence, I'll take any of those. And I've done other things too.

00:14:33 Speaker_00
You know, so actually while I was in that program, I wrote an article kind of exploring, it was called The Possibilities of Mormon Peacebuilding, and it was one of the first articles. A few people had done some earlier work.

00:14:43 Speaker_00
Hugh Nibley had written about this a little bit. Eugene England had written about this some. He actually has a beautiful book called Making Peace.

00:14:49 Speaker_00
But in terms of trying again, graduate school gave me the kind of rigor that I needed to think, you know, not just in kind of naive idealistic terms, but actually what does this look like in the 21st century?

00:15:00 Speaker_00
So I wrote an article again as a grad student and it got published and it kind of made the rounds and helped inspire some conversations. And so.

00:15:09 Speaker_00
For the past 20 years, I've really been thinking and collaborating with other people and writing and teaching. What is the Restoration's contribution to this broader conversation about peace? Every religion is doing this, right?

00:15:22 Speaker_00
There are Muslim peace builders and Jewish peace builders and Hindu peace builders and Catholic peace builders, and of course, you know, secular peace builders. But what is it the Latter-day Saints have to offer?

00:15:31 Speaker_00
How can we join the conversation and what do we have to add to the conversation?

00:15:47 Speaker_01
One of the things that compelled us to do this series was the charges made by John Krakauer and a few others that the faith of the Latter-day Saints is just inherently violent.

00:15:57 Speaker_01
It sounds like you would argue, no, that it's not, but what are the principles within our Latter-day Saints faith that you think kind of lead us towards peace that help us to construct this theology?

00:16:09 Speaker_00
So when I came here to Utah State University, I came here a little over five years ago, and I created a course called Religion, Violence, and Peace. It's kind of my version of a world religions class. We march through all of the big world religions.

00:16:23 Speaker_00
So we do Hinduism and Buddhism and Judaism and Christianity, Islam. Then I add the Latter-day Saint tradition, and we do indigenous traditions. We do these seven traditions throughout the course of the semester.

00:16:35 Speaker_00
And we do it, you know, I introduce students to the basic principles and concepts and language of each of these traditions. But then we really focus on this question of violence and peace.

00:16:45 Speaker_00
And for me, it's not about that question, are these religions inherently violent or inherently peaceful? Because the answer to both of those questions is yes and no at the same time. What do you mean?

00:16:59 Speaker_00
Well, what I mean is that every single religion, I really don't know of one that would be an exception.

00:17:05 Speaker_00
Every religion has resources that can lead a person or a group to practice and exercise violence, and they also have tremendous resources that can lead people and inspire them to be peacemakers.

00:17:17 Speaker_00
We go through each of these traditions and we look at sacred texts, we look at history, we look at teachings of leaders, we look at other kinds of things. And in every single one of these cases, and this would include secular traditions as well,

00:17:30 Speaker_00
there have been horrific examples of violence in the name of that religion. So not just conducted by members of that religion, right? We can always say, oh, there's like a few bad apples in every, you know, bushel.

00:17:42 Speaker_00
But conducted in the name of, you know, justified by the scriptures of, justified by the teachings of a prophet, a guru, you know, whatever the leader of that religion is.

00:17:53 Speaker_00
But there's also, it's precisely that religion, it's scriptures, it's history, it's tradition, it's leadership that has inspired some of the greatest acts of peacemaking in world history. And so for me, it's always a both and.

00:18:07 Speaker_00
The lesson I want students to learn is that you get to choose, right? And the practitioners of every religion, they do have both things laid out in front of them. It's true for Latter-day Saints, it's true for every other religion. If you want to find

00:18:22 Speaker_00
justifications for violence in your scriptures and in your history, you can find it. But it's your choice.

00:18:28 Speaker_00
If you want to find the resources to become a powerful force for peace, for justice, for solidarity, for reconciliation in the world, you can find that too. In some ways, that's a harder answer, right? Because it's an answer about complexity.

00:18:43 Speaker_00
It's an answer that requires people to lean in. When people ask the question, is Islam inherently violent? Is Mormonism inherently violent?

00:18:51 Speaker_00
That's kind of a lazy question because it's ignoring the complexity that's at the heart of every single religious and philosophical tradition.

00:18:59 Speaker_01
Yeah, I've had great discussions with some of my students here at the university who are Muslim to basically say, you know what, you've been characterized as being violent, so have we. How do you find peace within your own faith?

00:19:12 Speaker_01
And like you said, it's more complicated than just saying, hey, all people from this faith are violent, but there is, like you said, the tools and the resources there to construct some beautiful things, some ways to resolve conflict that have existed for a really long time.

00:19:27 Speaker_00
Yeah, speaking of Islam, it's funny, one of the class sessions I do, or one of the exercises we do, I have a bunch of quotes from the Bible and from the Qur'an.

00:19:37 Speaker_00
And I pull them straight out, just put them on a PowerPoint slide without the reference, and we go through a series, either out of like 10 or 12 of these, and the students have to guess, is that from the Bible or from the Qur'an, right?

00:19:47 Speaker_00
And these are like very violent verses. They're like calling for genocide or for killing unbelievers or, you know, other kinds of things. And the students can't tell the difference. between the two.

00:19:57 Speaker_00
So sometimes there is, it's easier to point the finger at a different tradition, right? And I think those of us, especially who lived through 9-11, we remember all of that discourse about violent Islam and so forth.

00:20:08 Speaker_00
But it's much easier to point the finger at somebody else than to look deep into your own tradition and say, are there verses, are there passages, are there problematic things that we have to wrestle with in my tradition before I start pointing the finger at somebody else's?

00:20:22 Speaker_00
Yeah, and I guess I have questions about all of that.

00:20:25 Speaker_02
I teach a world religion course here as well, and I don't do that angle, but I'm thinking of the Bhagavad Gita. The whole context is a war between these two groups.

00:20:40 Speaker_02
Arjuna is thinking about whether or not this would be ethical to kill his cousins, and Krishna is there trying to walk them through the thinking through it. And yeah, the Bible, I'm thinking of verses that can easily be used to justify that.

00:20:53 Speaker_02
I'm thinking Old Testament with the book of Joshua is horrific when it comes to this. Is that truly divinely

00:21:00 Speaker_02
commanded genocide, or is there some human in there, is there problems with the text, is that literally what he said, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

00:21:06 Speaker_02
So I guess I'm just asking, why do you think each sacred tradition actually has in their text justifications for violence? Is this God meeting us where we're at? Is this human putting that in there? Is there other options?

00:21:20 Speaker_02
I'm sure you've thought about this way more than me. What are your thoughts about why that's in the sacred text?

00:21:25 Speaker_00
Yeah, we could easily spend an hour just on that question. My short answer is that it's all of the above, everything you mentioned. I personally believe, yeah, that scripture of all types, it's human authors working under divine inspiration.

00:21:39 Speaker_00
It's people working in their own cultural context with their own understanding of things.

00:21:44 Speaker_00
I also think that one of the reasons why these scriptures, again, whether it's ours or other religious traditions, that they've stuck around for so long and are read by so many people is because they actually speak in real ways to the human condition.

00:21:59 Speaker_00
If these were totally scrubbed, sanitized texts that seemed like they just operated on a different plane of reality where everybody's perfect and there's never any arguments or blemishes, let alone war or anything like that, we would say that text has nothing to do with me and the world I live in.

00:22:17 Speaker_04
Yeah.

00:22:17 Speaker_00
So, I think it's precisely because, I mean, for us as Christians, of course, we believe that Jesus enters history in order to redeem history. And so, we're not afraid of history.

00:22:27 Speaker_00
We're not afraid of a fallen world and in showing, I always say, like, don't hand the Old Testament to, like, anybody under 18. Like, I mean, it should have, like, some kind of rating system on there. It is, it is a, it's a tough book.

00:22:40 Speaker_00
But that is what's been handed down.

00:22:43 Speaker_02
And you don't need to go very far in the Book of Mormon to across the justified murder, right, with Laban. What are we, chapter four in the book?

00:22:50 Speaker_00
And... Yeah, and we tell that story and we, because it's so early and we've read it to our kids since the time that they were, you know, three years old or whatever, there's a way in which you can tell stories so many times that you don't even notice the story anymore, right?

00:23:04 Speaker_00
That should, every time we read that story or tell that story, like, it should bring us up short. Like, I mean, here is the spirit inspiring Nephi to cut a guy's head off. right? And offering justifications and rationales.

00:23:17 Speaker_00
But we just breeze through it because it's so familiar to us at this point. Yeah, I think, why is it in there? For me, the bottom line is it's God revealing us to us. It's God revealing ourselves to us and then inviting us into something better.

00:23:33 Speaker_00
For me, it's Moroni in Mormon chapter 9 saying, I've shown you all of our imperfections so that you can be better. I think that's kind of the way that I read scripture, especially along these lines.

00:23:45 Speaker_02
And tell me about the mechanism of salvation itself. You mentioned that Jesus entered into history in order to redeem it, and at the beating heart of that redemption story is a violent murder of Jesus Christ. That's right.

00:23:58 Speaker_02
Is that the revelation of mankind to itself?

00:24:01 Speaker_00
You put your finger on it. I think that's exactly right. I think lots of things are going on with the Atonement and in Gethsemane and Golgotha, but I think one of the crucial things that is going on is that Jesus, the ultimate innocent victim,

00:24:16 Speaker_00
allows himself to be lifted up on the cross, and he invites us, in fact, for those of us who believe in him, he compels us to gaze on his bloodied, broken, tortured body on the cross.

00:24:29 Speaker_00
And that should force us to say, is this the world that I want to live in? Do I want to live in a world where we crucify, either literally or metaphorically, innocent victims?

00:24:41 Speaker_00
And so Jesus on the cross, we can talk about him atoning for our sins in a kind of abstract way, but actually that is a very literal culmination of all of the hate and violence and exclusion and all of the barbarity that we've developed since Cain and have multiplied a billion times over, that all of that gets absorbed by Jesus hanging on the cross.

00:25:05 Speaker_01
See, and as you guys were talking, I'm sitting here, I guess I'm kind of a sunny optimist. I'm thinking, you know, the central story of Christianity and the faith of Latter-day Saints is the death of this innocent person.

00:25:19 Speaker_01
Compare the power of that story to something like the Iliad.

00:25:23 Speaker_01
Yeah, or the song of roland where achilles kills hundreds of people and that makes him awesome christ comes and gives up his life and that makes him more than just awesome it makes him transcendent makes an infinite i do believe you know again maybe i'm a sunny optimist that.

00:25:40 Speaker_01
we've made progress at least that the stories that hold our societies together are based around considering the power of a single death as opposed to those stories told where, you know, being a great person meant that you were a great warrior, which meant you could take life and take it in graphic means on a grand scale.

00:26:00 Speaker_01
And that's what made you great. I mean, there's a nice inversion there that I really appreciate in Christianity.

00:26:05 Speaker_00
Totally. It's a complete inversion. And that's what makes it, I mean, I'd say this is why Jesus is God, right? Is that if this were a kind of Homeric tale, right? That at the moment in the garden, when the temple guards come, right? And he's confronted.

00:26:23 Speaker_00
That's the moment where he goes all Marvel superhero, right? And he even says, like, I could command all these legions to come down, right? So we know how that story goes.

00:26:33 Speaker_00
We've read that story, we've seen that movie a hundred times, a thousand times, right? And Jesus does something totally different. He confounds all of our expectations.

00:26:42 Speaker_00
And what makes Jesus God is that he chooses to suffer and die rather than to kill and to inflict pain. And that didn't make him God, he was God, right? I mean, he didn't become God in that moment. So, you know.

00:26:55 Speaker_02
He's revealing his divinity, his clear transcendence above the common human tropes of violence and retaliation.

00:27:02 Speaker_02
And he does the counterintuitive thing, which was even more superheroic or superhuman than to retaliate and beat the whole band barehanded or whatever. Exactly right. Exactly.

00:27:24 Speaker_02
How would you respond to people who say that peaceful means are not a realistic way of existing in the world? And on a religious basis, it's not a realistic way to defend your beliefs. I mean, you got to stand up for what you believe, right?

00:27:39 Speaker_02
So how would you push back against that kind of thinking? That's not realistic. That's kind of idealistic gas. But in real life, you kind of have to fight for what you want.

00:27:47 Speaker_00
I'll answer this in a couple different ways. So this semester, I've been teaching a course on African American history, and we recently covered the civil rights movement.

00:27:55 Speaker_00
I think one of the great insights that Martin Luther King made, especially after the Montgomery boycott, he wrote about the power of nonviolence. And he says, nonviolence resistance is not the same as passive nonresistance to evil.

00:28:13 Speaker_00
The nonviolence resistance is resistance to evil. It's active resistance to evil. It just refuses to enter into the logic and the cycle of violence. chooses a different way.

00:28:25 Speaker_00
But do not confuse it for just passively rolling over and accepting injustice and accepting evil in the world. I think that's one of the key insights. There's excellent scholarly research that actually shows the supremacy

00:28:40 Speaker_00
of nonviolence and peaceful ways. So there was a book published a few years ago that did a really rigorous, detailed study of every social movement around the world from 1900 to 2006. This is a book called Why Civil Resistance Works.

00:28:54 Speaker_00
And they showed statistically that groups that remained peaceful and nonviolence were twice as likely to succeed in their goals than movements that resorted to violence.

00:29:05 Speaker_00
So it's not just that it's some kind of moral idealism, or it's not just some kind of pie in the sky. It actually is more effective. And we say sometimes, oh, you know, people get beat up and people get killed and so forth.

00:29:17 Speaker_00
Well, that happens in war too. We have whole cemeteries for veterans and those who did make that ultimate sacrifice, you know, while fighting for their country. And in nonviolent movements, they do ask for sacrifice.

00:29:29 Speaker_00
And people do get beat up and sometimes in some movements they get killed, but actually casualty rates are much lower. I think about even about the Book of Mormon, right?

00:29:39 Speaker_00
With the anti-Nephi-Lehi's who are like the ultimate example of the way that nonviolence works. So a thousand of them die, right? It's tragic. But compare that to the body counts in all of Captain Moroni's battles or Tiankham's battles or others.

00:29:52 Speaker_00
So even though there's a body count, it's much lower. And the fact of the matter is it works. They defended their families. These nonviolent social movements actually work. The entire country of India was liberated nonviolently.

00:30:03 Speaker_00
The civil rights movement was done nonviolently. So these things actually work. I think there is a kind of hard practical answer to that question, right?

00:30:12 Speaker_00
But I also think as Christians, I think we want to avoid living only in a world of kind of moral realism or utilitarianism where we measure the value of an idea simply on its utility, its immediate utility. Again, we worship a God who chose to die.

00:30:31 Speaker_00
Now, he rose three days later, but at the time, nobody knew that that was gonna happen, right? he had prophesied of, but Martin Luther King says, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

00:30:43 Speaker_00
As Christians, we believe in hope, right? And we look forward, but we know that sometimes these things take a very long time to work themselves out. But I think as Christians, we have to ask ourselves, do we actually believe Jesus?

00:30:55 Speaker_00
When he calls himself the Prince of Peace, when he tells Peter to put away the sword and those who live by the sword will die by the sword, when he says, blessed are the peacemakers, you know, all those things, do we actually believe him?

00:31:07 Speaker_00
Or do we think that he was a naive idealist or not actually talking about politics? Like, oh, well, I'll be Christian and church on Sundays, but that doesn't apply to the world of politics. That doesn't apply to other things.

00:31:17 Speaker_00
Like, do we think actually that Jesus is Lord over all the areas of our life or only some of the areas of our life? So I think that's what we have to ask ourselves and then work out what that looks like.

00:31:30 Speaker_00
I mean, we've spent billions, trillions of dollars learning the art of war. have we exercised the same, have we dedicated the same amount of research, of time and energy and creativity to learning the art of peace?

00:31:45 Speaker_01
And when you were bringing that up, I mean, the example that came to my mind was Edward Partridge in Jackson County, where he was tarred and feathered and publicly humiliated, but he said, I bore my sufferings with such resignation and meekness, and then told them that they were doing what had been done to Christ, that

00:32:01 Speaker_01
The mob just kind of wandered away versus 1838 when the Danites say, it's going to be an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. And there's no doubt. It just escalates it, doesn't it? It just escalates it, that it just got worse and worse.

00:32:15 Speaker_01
In fact, Patrick, I want to give you a story problem from church history. Scott and I went over Zion's camp.

00:32:22 Speaker_01
I know you've presented on that before and so you know a little bit about it, but we kept going back and forth between, is this violent or is this supposed to be a peace movement? And what was the message and what was the purpose of Zion's Camp?

00:32:34 Speaker_01
I know you've done some deep thinking about that, but could you use that as kind of a story problem to explain Latter-day Saint approaches to resolving conflict?

00:32:43 Speaker_00
Yeah, it is such an interesting case study, isn't it? Because it, that there aren't shots fired, right? I mean, there's the terrible, you know, there's all the storms and they find out that the governor actually isn't going to support their cause.

00:32:54 Speaker_00
So, so they end up turning back. I do think all indications are that they were willing to fight, or at least a significant number of men in Zion's camp were willing to fight. And the rhetoric of the Revelation seems to condone that, right?

00:33:10 Speaker_00
Yeah, I'm actually not so sure. Ah, okay, good.

00:33:13 Speaker_02
This is good. We want to hear you push back.

00:33:15 Speaker_00
I think that's the way we've read the revelations.

00:33:19 Speaker_00
I think that might have even been the way that at the time they read and understood the revelations, but if you read them very carefully, and this is like section 98, section 101, section 103 if I'm getting my numbers right, that the Lord does command them to go and redeem the land of Zion and he does authorize them to put together this group to do so.

00:33:40 Speaker_02
Like I'm thinking of like verse 25 of section 103 where it says, even in avenging me of mine enemies unto the third and fourth generation, and let no man be afraid to lay down his life for my sake," et cetera, right?

00:33:58 Speaker_02
And Casey and I, Casey and I already sparred on this a little bit, so I want to hear your thoughts, yeah.

00:34:01 Speaker_00
Casey Mayfield Okay, that last phrase is really key. What does it say? Let no man be afraid to lay down his life. Pete Slauson Yes, it sounds like you might fight and then die in this cause, right? Casey Mayfield Exactly.

00:34:11 Speaker_00
It does not say, let no man be afraid of killing somebody else. right? That's what Jesus says. This is invoking John, right? Greater love is no man than he lays down his life for his friend. This is the ethic of nonviolence.

00:34:25 Speaker_00
This is the anti-Nephi-Lehi's, right? Are they willing to fight for their friends? Yes. Are they willing to resist evil? Yes. But they'll fight with the weapons of love. They'll fight with the weapons of nonviolent resistance to evil.

00:34:39 Speaker_00
And so I think if you read those sections carefully, I don't see any verse where the Lord authorizes his servants to inflict violence on others. What do you think he means by avenge me of mine enemies? I think there's an alternative world, right?

00:34:58 Speaker_00
Not the world we live in, but there's an alternate universe where they could have gone in nonviolently through moral suasion and through a kind of Gandhian set of techniques.

00:35:08 Speaker_00
They could have redeemed and reclaimed the land of Zion and therefore avenged in that sense. I don't think, you know, we normally associate vengeance or avenging with violence.

00:35:18 Speaker_00
But there's a way in which they could have avenged or gotten back what they had lost, sort of gotten justice against those who had persecuted the saints in a way that you could say that Gandhi avenged all those Indians who had suffered at the hands of British colonialism, but he did so nonviolently.

00:35:36 Speaker_00
And so there's a way that Zion's camp might have nonviolently avenged and therefore redeemed the land of Zion.

00:35:44 Speaker_01
See, there's this great quote from Amasa Lyman that was shared in the wake of Mountain Meadows, where he was rebuking them. And he said this, the best way to avenge the blood of the prophets was to take a course to diminish the power of the devil.

00:36:00 Speaker_01
And I think that even language that uses words like avenge or vengeance doesn't necessarily have to condone violence. The Lord's interested in, like Amasa Lyman said, lessening the power of the adversary. And violence increases his power.

00:36:14 Speaker_02
That seems to be the Christ way, right? Christ was actively defeating the powers of darkness by the techniques that he employed of submitting and dying. That actually breaks the powers of darkness

00:36:27 Speaker_02
as Jacob would say in the Book of Mormon, overcomes the powers of death, hell, and the devil. And that's so non-intuitive, but what a great way to take vengeance on evil to diminish its power. I'm trying to catch up with you guys.

00:36:41 Speaker_02
I'm getting into this headspace of the way that you avenge evil is by bringing more light and more peace. Is that what you're saying?

00:36:50 Speaker_00
Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, Martin Luther King has this great quote, darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.

00:37:00 Speaker_00
So what Jesus does is he breaks this cycle of violence, right, that began with Cain. He says this is the way that it's typically been done, and he does this in the temptations in the wilderness, right?

00:37:13 Speaker_00
he refuses the logic of the devil, he refuses it when the crowd offers him the kingship because that's not the way the kingdom will actually be won through force. You know, he says the kingdom of God will not be gained by force, right?

00:37:25 Speaker_00
He tells James and John that their leadership will adopt a different kind of way, it'll be servant leadership. And so at every point, He actually rejects essentially the logic of Caesar. He rejects the logic of Cain, that goes all the way back.

00:37:39 Speaker_00
And he's not rejecting the world, he's redeeming the world, right? That the world is something that God loves, the people of the world, even those who have done evil, which is all of us.

00:37:48 Speaker_00
he wants to come in and redeem us, and so he shows us a different way. I love 3 Nephi 27 when he comes and he interprets the cross to the Nephites in a way we don't even have in the New Testament.

00:37:59 Speaker_00
And he says, the Father lifted me up on a cross so then all men could be drawn to me and be lifted up, right? That wasn't an exact quote. Yeah. Exactly. And so there's an attractive quality, the cross kind of works like a magnet.

00:38:17 Speaker_00
We should both be repelled by the violence of it, but attracted by the infinite love that Jesus displays in that moment.

00:38:27 Speaker_00
And when he says, this should be the great and last sacrifice, I think he's talking not just about ritual sacrifice, like we're gonna stop sacrificing each other on the altar of violence, right? This is where we get, this is the world you get.

00:38:37 Speaker_00
And so like, stop it, just stop it. I'm showing you a different way and instead follow the Prince of Peace.

00:38:43 Speaker_01
Yeah, he just refuses to play the game that people play.

00:38:48 Speaker_00
He does that with Caiaphas. He does that with Pilate. He refuses to play their game.

00:38:53 Speaker_02
And you see that in the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, right? He's saying that this is going to be the kingdom of God, but we're doing things a very different way here. This is inverting.

00:39:01 Speaker_02
The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, and mustard seeds do eventually take over everything. They grow like a nasty weed that chokes everything out. But we're not doing this with hand grenades. We're not doing this with police brutality.

00:39:13 Speaker_02
This is not how the kingdom of God will be conducted. It's by people turning the other cheek. by people who are loving their neighbors, people who are being peacemakers, even being persecuted, right?

00:39:23 Speaker_00
Can I read a quote from President Kimball?

00:39:25 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:39:25 Speaker_00
And this is one that Latter-day Saint peacebuilders love, but it's amazing. It's from 1976 in the Ensign. He says, We are all warlike people, easily distracted from our assignment of preparing for the coming of the Lord.

00:39:38 Speaker_00
When enemies rise up, we commit vast resources to the fabrication of gods of stone and steel, ships, planes, missiles, fortifications, and depend on them for protection and deliverance.

00:39:50 Speaker_00
When threatened, we become anti-enemy instead of pro-kingdom of God.

00:39:55 Speaker_00
We train a man in the art of war and call him a patriot, thus, in the manner of Satan's counterfeit of true patriotism, perverting the Savior's teaching to love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to hate them, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you.

00:40:12 Speaker_00
So, I mean, that is just so prophetic, right? That we become anti-enemy instead of pro-kingdom of God.

00:40:19 Speaker_00
and that we forget that that prayer of love your enemies is not to reinforce the fact that they're your enemies, but is actually to change your heart so that you no longer see them as enemies, because they're not, they're sisters and brothers.

00:40:33 Speaker_00
Praying for them may not do very much to change their hearts, it might, but as much as anything, it'll change your heart and change the dynamics of the conflict.

00:40:41 Speaker_01
Yeah, going back to Zion's camp, Scott and I went three or four rounds on this violent language, and then there was a passage in section 105, which is the last revelation given to them, that I think just struck us both like lightning, where the last thing he says to them, this is verse 38 of section 105,

00:41:02 Speaker_01
Again, I say unto you, sue for peace, not only to the people that have smitten you, but also to all people, and lift up an ensign of peace, and make a proclamation of peace unto the ends of the earth, and make proposals for peace unto those who have smitten you according to the voice of the Spirit which is in you, and all things shall work together for your good.

00:41:22 Speaker_01
It's clear that what he was aiming for there wasn't violent retribution.

00:41:26 Speaker_01
It was a peaceful resolution that everybody could feel good about that like the anti-Nephi-Lehi's may have resulted in some people losing their lives, but far more if both sides were trying to kill each other.

00:41:38 Speaker_00
Yeah, and I look at verse 14 of section 105, for behold, and again, this is the Lord's, as you said, it's the Lord's final word to these folks. And he says, for behold, I do not require at their hands to fight the battles of Zion.

00:41:51 Speaker_00
For as I said in a former commandment, even so will I fulfill. I will fight your battles. I think he's going back to section 98, renounce war and proclaim peace and so forth. And again, he's not asking for passive non-resistance to evil.

00:42:05 Speaker_00
Renounce war and proclaim peace. Proclaim peace is a proactive, active, anxiously engaged type things. And of all of the beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount, most of them talk about the condition of your heart, the condition of your soul.

00:42:18 Speaker_00
The one that directly calls on us to do action in the world is blessed are the peacemakers. So that's the active thing we do in the world. Yeah, so I'm still chewing on verse 14.

00:42:29 Speaker_02
At the very end, he says, I will fight your battles. We talk about, just for a second, Jesus as a punisher of the wicked.

00:42:36 Speaker_02
I don't want to get too far off into the weeds here, but it seems like he takes that upon himself to decide whether or not violence should be done. I mean, section 133, it's hard to get around when he says,

00:42:50 Speaker_02
my garments will be red when I come because of the blood of my enemies that will be destroyed." Or think about 3 Nephi, when the voice in the darkness, chapter 8 and 9 of 3 Nephi, where he says, I did that.

00:43:01 Speaker_02
I am the one who sunk that city into the sea, and I'm the one who brought the whirlwind, and I'm the one who brought the fire. because of the blood of the prophets that was spilled.

00:43:09 Speaker_02
And it seems like there is some times in which Jesus literally does fight and actually does, like, there is some killing.

00:43:16 Speaker_02
And again, maybe I'm reading this at a certain superficial level here, and you could take me deeper and say, actually, that's not true. Or maybe you'll agree. I don't know. I'm curious your thoughts on Jesus as an active fighter of the wicked here.

00:43:29 Speaker_00
I think that's such a good question, Scott. I think it's such an important question. In the book that I wrote with David Pulsifer called Proclaimed Peace, we have a whole chapter that wrestles with that question of basically, is God violent?

00:43:39 Speaker_00
And I think you just pointed out probably the most difficult passage.

00:43:43 Speaker_00
There's a lot of passages in the Bible that point to this, but I think they can be, especially in the Old Testament, there's ways that you can kind of get around them because of authorship, because of various kinds of things.

00:43:56 Speaker_00
I think 13, 5, 8, and 9 just absolutely put a point on this that make it really hard for us to wriggle out of in any kind of fancy, you know, academic ways that we might want to. Because you're exactly right.

00:44:09 Speaker_00
It's the voice of Jesus that we'll hear like two chapters later, you know, when he comes down to visit the people. It's the voice of Jesus saying, I did that, I did that, I did that, I did that.

00:44:19 Speaker_00
The best explanation that I can, now some people, and I appreciate the sentiment, they just wanna completely rule out of hand any possibility that God could ever be violent, because how can a loving God be violent?

00:44:30 Speaker_00
And I appreciate the sentiment behind that, but it's simply not what the scriptural record points to.

00:44:35 Speaker_00
And maybe I'm not smart enough to find some other way out of this, but the way that David Pulsifer and I thought about this, especially with 3 Nephi 8 and 9, is that God's different than you and me.

00:44:49 Speaker_00
And even if he's not ontologically different, he's perfected in a way that you and I are not. He has perspective that you and I don't. He also has power that you and I don't.

00:44:58 Speaker_00
One of the reasons why thou shalt not kill is so important because you and I don't have any power to take that back. I have no ability to take back if I do violence to other people, especially lethal violence. God does.

00:45:11 Speaker_00
He can make that wrong right, and he offers that universally through the resurrection.

00:45:17 Speaker_00
The other thing is that when Jesus comes, as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as a Christian, I am bound and covenanted to follow Jesus. When he comes to the people, he says, do the works that you've seen me do.

00:45:30 Speaker_00
So maybe, I don't know if this is gonna be satisfactory to everybody, but I'm not commanded to do all the things that Jesus does in heaven. I don't have the power to do all the things that Jesus does in heaven as a glorified, perfected God.

00:45:44 Speaker_00
But he says, do the works which you've seen me do. I think it's the kinds of works that he did here on earth as a mortal in the same state that you and I are in right now, sinless, but in the same state that you and I are in.

00:45:56 Speaker_00
So those are the works that I'm commanded to do, right? Whatever happens with exaltation and all those kinds of things, I just think that's like so far removed from my experience right now. That's not my pattern right now.

00:46:08 Speaker_00
My pattern is the mortal Jesus who came and lived in a sinful, violent world and encountered it as the Prince of Peace. That's what I'm commanded to follow. So, is God violent? Sometimes, maybe, yes.

00:46:22 Speaker_00
Maybe the scriptures seem to point that way, but does God want me to be violent? I don't think so. I think he wants me to follow the mortal Jesus who was perfectly non-violent.

00:46:32 Speaker_02
Yeah, I think that's a fair reconciling of the differences we see in the text, right? As mortals, he's modeling how mortals ought to do the mortal condition. Yeah. Now, given, you know, Patrick Mason 2.0, resurrected, exalted Patrick Mason.

00:46:48 Speaker_02
2 billion point 0, right? Well, that's a different playbook, right? There's a different playbook for those in that echelon.

00:46:57 Speaker_02
But I think that's a really profound thought that you just shared that we are commanded to follow the mortal Jesus in which he interacted with evil and violence. I'm going to be thinking about that for a few days.

00:47:19 Speaker_01
Patrick, let me bring up something else. It seems like there's been a lot of emphasis from leaders of the church in recent years, asking us to be peacemakers.

00:47:29 Speaker_01
Sometimes in specific ways, President Nelson asked us to root out racism among ourselves, but even more recently, it It feels like every time there's a general conference and I ask my students, what was the theme?

00:47:41 Speaker_01
It comes back to making peace and reducing contention. Why do you think that is? What's going on right now that's causing the leaders of the church to be led by the Spirit in that direction?

00:47:53 Speaker_00
Yeah, I think it's because they're prophets.

00:47:57 Speaker_00
I think it's because the role of the prophet, one of the roles of the prophet, there are many, but one of the roles of the prophet is to see the present condition that we find ourselves in as humanity, that the holes that we've dug ourselves in, and to point us to a better way, to give us a rope ladder to help us come out of those holes.

00:48:17 Speaker_00
And my sense is that as they look around, not just the United States, but around the world, we live in an incredibly contentious and fractious time.

00:48:27 Speaker_00
You can say there have always been wars, and that's absolutely true, but I don't live in some past age, I live now.

00:48:34 Speaker_00
And right now, I live in an era of fracture, of contention, where family members can't even talk to each other because of politics, where there are wars and rumors of wars in every corner of the world.

00:48:48 Speaker_00
I see it as nothing less than prophetic for apostles of the Prince of Peace to point us to a better way and to say that if we're going to be followers of the Prince of Peace, then that's what it should look like.

00:49:01 Speaker_00
I can point to statements from church leaders throughout church history where they've talked about peace. Incredible, powerful statements. I would agree with you and with your students that there does seem to be a kind of concentration

00:49:12 Speaker_00
of messages that we've heard in these recent years.

00:49:15 Speaker_00
I think President Nelson, when we look back on his presidency 100 years from now, 200 years from now, one of the things we're going to, we'll remember him for temples, but I think we're also going to remember him as a prophet of peacemaking.

00:49:27 Speaker_00
That I think one of the signal messages that he's given us, both as an apostle, this predates, he gave some very powerful talks about this before he became president of the church.

00:49:36 Speaker_00
I think he sees the world that we live in, all of the contention inside the church, outside the church, in families, in politics, between nations, and he says, no, followers of Jesus should follow a different way.

00:49:49 Speaker_02
I'm curious, you're a student of history, you're a professor, I'm wondering what grade you would give Latter-day Saints right now as a whole, as you step back, like how are we doing at peacemaking?

00:49:59 Speaker_02
In church history, there's some spots you might flunk us, like Mountain Meadows, that's an F. The Missouri War, 1838, we're hitting back to, I don't know what grade we are there. How are we doing now?

00:50:12 Speaker_02
The arc of history, the arc of church history in this present moment, what do you see that encourages you? What do you see that could maybe some room for improvement?

00:50:21 Speaker_00
Yeah, I don't know. Maybe we're like a solid like B-. Like a student who like really cares and is trying but maybe doesn't quite yet have the tools of how to do it, right?

00:50:37 Speaker_00
So that's where I would assess where we're at as a people right now collectively. I genuinely see among Latter-day Saints in lots of places in every corner that I talk to a genuine desire to be peacemakers.

00:50:50 Speaker_00
I think, though, most people don't know how, and that's maybe what's lacking.

00:50:54 Speaker_00
So again, a lot of desire, sincere desire, but we haven't yet developed the tools, the systems, the programs to implement what that looks like as a church and as a people and as individuals.

00:51:07 Speaker_00
I don't know, maybe B-minus is a little too harsh, but we're not at A-level yet. We have other sisters and brothers in other Christian churches and in other religions who are ahead of us, actually have some things to teach us.

00:51:18 Speaker_00
They've been at this longer than us, so I think we can learn some things from them. But again, we have so many resources in our own scriptures and in our own tradition, and I think we just haven't spent the time and energy really plumbing those.

00:51:31 Speaker_00
I'm confident we can get there and we will get there, but we need a few extra study sessions and lab sessions to get there.

00:51:39 Speaker_02
So for Latter-day Saints who want to go to lab, how would you encourage them to get involved in learning the tools, getting involved in peace movements? Where would you point them? They're that hungry student who just wants to learn.

00:51:51 Speaker_02
They just don't have the tools. Where do they go?

00:51:53 Speaker_00
I think a few different places. So, first of all, I would say study the scriptures with an eye towards peace. Read them this way. What do the scriptures, whatever you're reading, Book of Mormon, New Testament, Doctrine and Covenants, whatever,

00:52:05 Speaker_00
What does this sacred scripture have to teach me about how to be a better peacemaker?

00:52:10 Speaker_00
I promise you, because I've done it this year with the Book of Mormon, if you read the scriptures with that question in mind, they will come alive in ways that you've just never expected or ever seen.

00:52:21 Speaker_00
So I think they are our main handbook and playbook.

00:52:24 Speaker_01
I had the same experience with the Doctrine and Covenants.

00:52:26 Speaker_01
I had to read through it intensely and write a commentary during the pandemic, and I was so impressed at how many times the Lord said, Zion can't be built on a foundation of violence, that you should purchase these lands, not redeem them by blood.

00:52:41 Speaker_01
raise up the banner of peace. I think that the themes in the Book of Mormon continue on in the Doctrine and Covenants and are maybe even more powerful. So this year as we go in to study the Doctrine and Covenants, use that lens.

00:52:53 Speaker_01
What is the Lord telling us about peacemaking in the revelations that are found in the Doctrine and Covenants?

00:52:58 Speaker_00
I agree 100%. There's so much powerful stuff in there. So I think that's the main thing. And then I think there are some great organizations that the Latter-day Saints are running. We mentioned earlier Mormon Women for Ethical Government.

00:53:09 Speaker_00
I think that's a really powerful organization. And if you look on their website, they actually have six principles of peacemaking.

00:53:16 Speaker_00
I think if you want like a basic primer on peacemaking, that is a fantastic place to go just to learn some of those basic principles. And they're all scripturally grounded.

00:53:26 Speaker_02
And that organization is pretty well split Democrat-Republican. Yes. This is not Mormon women for one party or the other.

00:53:33 Speaker_02
This is a pretty cool model of people from both political parties coming together based on these scriptural principles and actually making it work. Yeah.

00:53:41 Speaker_00
Yeah, their color scheme is purple, right? So it's not red or blue. It's both. And they really try hard to be nonpartisan, which means that people on either side sometimes get mad at them, right? Because they're not sufficiently partisan.

00:53:53 Speaker_00
Only women can join, but men can go to the website and learn a lot from the resources that they have there. I also think there's just so much going on. Peacemaking is really big and capacious.

00:54:04 Speaker_00
It's not just going in and like solving the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It's not creating peace in Ukraine. It can start in your family. It can start in your community, like join the PTA, right? Get involved in local politics and be a peacemaker there.

00:54:19 Speaker_00
Work with local refugees, right? Oftentimes the people who are victims of violence.

00:54:24 Speaker_00
So welcoming them into our communities, into our homes, healing trauma that they have, work with a local homeless population, work with victims of trauma and violence in your community, whether from domestic abuse, sexual abuse, whatever that might be.

00:54:38 Speaker_00
So sometimes we think of peacemaking just as like, that's what people do who sign peace treaties. No, the vast majority of peacemaking is going to happen in your immediate context.

00:54:48 Speaker_00
I think, frankly, the Latter-day Saint ward becomes one of the great laboratories for being peacemakers, because we're thrown in with a bunch of people that we disagree with, that we might not choose to associate with. Otherwise, there are arguments.

00:55:02 Speaker_00
I do think Latter-day Saints are oftentimes like A-plus conflict avoiders. Yeah, which is not the same thing as peacemaking, right? That's not the It's not the same thing, right? So learning how to engage a conflict more constructively.

00:55:13 Speaker_00
But the ward is a great site, not only to learn those skills, but then to apply those skills into the community. Can you imagine what it would be like to mobilize a ward wherever you live around bringing greater peace to your community?

00:55:27 Speaker_00
Whatever that looks like. Again, working with refugees, working with victims of violence. I think the ward is just an absolutely inspired laboratory where we can actually get to work.

00:55:37 Speaker_01
So maybe Patrick, one more question. You've tried to serve as a peacemaker and I've heard you share some powerful experiences where you've seen peacemaking happen or participated in it.

00:55:47 Speaker_01
Could you maybe share one or two experiences where you saw this kind of peace and reconciliation happen?

00:55:54 Speaker_00
Yeah, well, maybe I'll share one recently that I witnessed. It was less that I was a participant and more that I was a witness, and it just affected me so deeply.

00:56:02 Speaker_00
So this past summer, I had the opportunity to travel to Rwanda, which is a country in Central Africa, kind of Central East Africa. 30 years ago, there was a horrific genocide there by one group called the Hutus against another group called the Tutsis.

00:56:17 Speaker_00
A million people were killed in the space of 100 days. Oh, my word. It's unimaginable, right, in terms of the pace of killing, the scope of killing in this really small little African country.

00:56:29 Speaker_00
So I went with a group of students and faculty and we went to go and learn about this and we visited a lot of the sites of the genocide. It was some of the hardest things I've ever seen.

00:56:38 Speaker_00
I'm just openly weeping, visiting with a lot of survivors of the genocide, visiting actually with perpetrators as well. And one of the most powerful places we went was a community.

00:56:50 Speaker_00
So afterwards, the government recognized like, hey, we're a small little country, we can't separate all the perpetrators on one side and the victims and survivors on the other side, right? Like we have to learn to live together.

00:57:02 Speaker_00
And so the government and other groups have sponsored tons of forgiveness and reconciliation efforts over the past 30 years.

00:57:08 Speaker_00
And one of the things they did was create these communities, these villages, because a lot of the survivors, their homes had been burned or destroyed.

00:57:16 Speaker_00
A lot of the perpetrators who were thrown in prison or other things, they came out and now they needed a place to live. So the government, with some international funding, they've created these new villages. They call them reconciliation villages.

00:57:28 Speaker_00
where survivors and former perpetrators live side by side. They get housing and other things with the promise that basically they'll try to learn to get along and live next to each other.

00:57:41 Speaker_00
And so when we went and visited one of these villages, we heard a presentation from this man who was a former perpetrator.

00:57:47 Speaker_00
He didn't tell us exactly what he did, but based on his prison sentence and some other kind of clues that we heard, he killed a lot of people, a lot of people.

00:57:56 Speaker_00
And then we had a woman who was there whose entire family, husband and children, had been killed in the genocide, lost her house, lost everything. They lived in this community.

00:58:05 Speaker_00
They were both placed in this reconciliation village, and you could tell they are genuine friends. And they had learned over the space of many, many years The art of forgiveness, the art of reconciliation. And she said, like, it wasn't immediate.

00:58:18 Speaker_00
Like when the government offered to put her here, she wasn't sure if she could live alongside former perpetrators. He wasn't sure when he came out of prison that he could ever be forgiven.

00:58:27 Speaker_00
But to see these two people and this entire community that is literally based on the principle of reconciliation, it's actually working. It's real. It's not easy. It's not that there's not ongoing trauma, but like forgiveness is real.

00:58:42 Speaker_00
Reconciliation is real. It's possible. I came away from that. Of course, now I hope to never witness anything like what the Rwandans experienced in 1994, but we have our own serious contentions here at home in the United States.

00:58:58 Speaker_00
Sometimes it can seem like the forces of division are so overwhelming that they can't be countered, that we can't do anything about it.

00:59:06 Speaker_00
I'll just never forget what I saw in Rwanda in the face of unspeakable genocide and horror and trauma, the reconciliation is happening. I think that has to be our hope as Christians. You talked about the mustard seed.

00:59:19 Speaker_00
Jesus talks about the leaven in the loaf, right? Salt and light, these are all tiny little things that are transformative in their effect. And I think our hope as Christians has to be that God will multiply our peacemaking efforts.

00:59:33 Speaker_00
That whatever small things we do for peace and reconciliation in our families, in our communities, in our wards, in our country, that God will magnify those things, like the loaves and the fishes, and he'll make more of our efforts than we can make of them ourselves.

00:59:47 Speaker_01
Boy, and it feels like if they can get past genocide, our problems seem small in comparison.

00:59:53 Speaker_01
We can overcome the issues that we have, and we can heal the divides that we've experienced, and there is a way for us to come together, especially with the grace of Christ.

01:00:03 Speaker_02
Yeah. Amen. Wow. Well, thank you so much, Patrick. It's been wonderful to have you on the show today, and what a fitting conclusion to this series on peace and violence. Emphasis on the peace, please.

01:00:17 Speaker_00
Yeah, remember, peace on earth, right? That's what the angel said. Yes.

01:00:22 Speaker_01
That's right. And I couldn't think of a better way for us to give you a Christmas present than to have this discussion.

01:00:27 Speaker_01
And hopefully over the holidays, you think a little bit about that it's a new year and what things you can do differently to bring peace. So thanks, Patrick.

01:00:36 Speaker_01
You set a great tone for us and I think you helped us stick the landing on a difficult topic to cover.

01:00:41 Speaker_00
Thanks guys. Really appreciate it. Yeah, a hundred percent.

01:00:48 Speaker_02
Thank you for listening to this episode of Church History Matters.

01:00:51 Speaker_02
We'd like to again thank Dr. Patrick Mason for joining us today and for his remarkable scholarship on peace and violence, and maybe more importantly, for his active personal engagement in helping there be just a little more peace on earth and goodwill toward all.

01:01:06 Speaker_02
We again invite you to roll up your sleeves and continue with us as we now mentally shift gears toward dissecting the contexts, content, controversies, and consequences of each section of the Doctrine and Covenants throughout 2025.

01:01:21 Speaker_02
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01:01:32 Speaker_02
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01:01:41 Speaker_02
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01:01:54 Speaker_02
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01:02:25 Speaker_02
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01:02:40 Speaker_02
Thank you so much for being a part of this with us, and Merry Christmas.