In March, after Israel violated its internationally brokered ceasefire with the Palestinian armed group Hamas and resumed its war on Gaza, Nathan McLaughlin, a young Mormon in Salt Lake City, gathered with dozens of like-minded Latter-day Saints to denounce the genocide. They organized a sit-in at the Utah state capitol and a flyering campaign to lobby their co-religionists, calling for a Mormonism that foregrounds “the inherent nature of every human being as children of Heavenly Parents,” McLaughlin told Inkstick.
When, as a teenager, he had set off to perform missionary service in Atlanta, fellow Mormons had told him to prepare to be persecuted for his faith. (In reality, the experience in Georgia was “nice and chill,” he said.) But he recently recalled those warnings when he described the “beautiful and very disturbing” reactions he received when he approached people to distribute flyers as they left the church-owned Deseret bookstore and strolled around Salt Lake City’s Temple Square.
“Our God tells us to ‘renounce war and proclaim peace’! The United States is funding this genocide,” McLaughlin told the passers-by. “Children are being slaughtered, and men and women. This is something we should be standing against.”
Over and over, he heard: “I don’t care,” or: “I’m not interested.”
Others, he said, were “ecstatic” to see Mormons taking a stand, including a Palestinian Latter-day Saint who expressed her gratitude on social media.
At the same time, another anti-war Mormon collective centered around the college town of Provo, home to Brigham Young University, was planning a first-of-its-kind divestment campaign targeting the church’s secretive investment manager, Ensign Peak Advisors. With clipboards in hand, the Latter-day Saints Committee of the Olive Tree Solidarity Coalition approached people in and around the BYU campus and nearby Utah Valley University. By July, they got 250 of them to send “letters of lamentation” to Ensign Peak. The postcards call on the fund to divest from weapons manufacturers Lockheed Martin and Boeing and other companies that supply the Israeli military.
Demonstrators rally against Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza in Utah (Courtesy of Mormons with Hope for a Better World)
The campaigns target the hearts, minds, and flush investment fund of the 17 million-strong Utah-based religion — a high-impact target since the church is believed to have the largest investment portfolio of any religious organization in the country. Just its publicly reported stockholdings available on SEC filings are worth more than $52 billion. It’s also a church that, in contrast to other Christian denominations, has not publicly stated its “sin screen” regarding investments in weapons manufacturers, as an Inkstick Media cover story on the Salt Lake City Weekly detailed last year. That exposé dove into the fund’s outlier status among peer churches as a stockholder in the world’s largest nuclear weapons manufacturer, Northrop Grumman.
“As a person who has paid thousands of dollars to tithing over the course of the last two decades, I am struggling with frustration around how that $$$ is being used,” one postcard reads. “After months of prayer, I have decided to give my 10% to the PCRF [Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund] until the church divests from divisive companies like Boeing and Lockheed.”
Church leadership has said little about the US-backed atrocities committed by the Israeli military in Gaza over the past 22 months. In 2023, the church governing body, the First Presidency, called the “eruption of violence” in the Middle East “abhorrent to us and… not in harmony with the gospel of Jesus Christ.” But the anti-war campaigners fear that the church’s desire to maintain a satellite BYU campus in occupied East Jerusalem necessitates collaboration with a government widely accused of apartheid and genocide. The church has also never publicly addressed its investments in weapons manufacturers that supply the Israeli military and did not respond to questions from Inkstick Media about the Mormon-led campaigns targeting Ensign Peak and denouncing the genocide.
Activists have organized a "letters of lamentation" campaign sending hundreds of postcards to Ensign Peak (Courtesy of Olive Tree Solidarity)
For McLaughlin and the growing number of people joining the Mormons with Hope for a Better World collective, the experience of protesting at the capitol and flyering was part of their call for bottom-up moral revival among their co-faithful. Taking inspiration from the likes of Jewish Voice for Peace and Catholic liberation theology, they identify as a leftist and socialist movement that uplifts immigrants, the Indigenous, and queer people, while calling for nuclear disarmament and investments in education and housing rather than endless war, colonialism, and imperialism.
After launching in January, the group quickly gained dozens of members. “I would not be surprised if we’re one of the fastest growing left-wing organizations in the state of Utah,” McLaughlin said.
Utah has hosted missile manufacturing plants since the early days of the Cold War, when a scout for the Thiokol Chemical Corporation set out to find “cheap, unproductive land” where it could conduct “explosive” operations to produce missiles for the Air Force. Utah’s West Desert fit the bill. The six-mile-long plant, nowadays owned by Thiokol successor Northrop Grumman, will churn out more than 600 new intercontinental ballistic missiles for nuclear warfare in the coming years.
Deep economic entrenchment aside, a remarkable upheaval in Utah’s long history with the defense industry occurred in 1981. A colorful coalition of Utah civil society members, from homebuilders to cattlemen to hippies — and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — came together to oppose an Air Force proposal to base a mobile nuclear weapon, known as the MX missile, in Utah and Nevada. The church wired a statement of dissent directly to the Reagan administration, calling the project a “denial of the very essence of that gospel” that brought Mormons into the area.
Back in those days, disarmament activists had a foot in the door with Latter-day Saints leadership, including progressive Mormon attorney Ed Firmage. Firmage had a unique LDS pedigree. A descendent of Brigham Young, his grandfather had been in the church’s governing First Presidency; current church president, Russell Nelson, was the heart surgeon who operated on attorney Firmage’s father. Firmage spent years in meetings with the First Presidency and their advisors, convincing them that the MX missile went against church values and that the Soviets would see the basing area, and the 2.1 million Mormons living in it, as a prime target for a nuclear strike.
Observers watch a test firing at Northrop Grumman’s Promontory plant in Utah’s West Desert (Kim Raff/Inkstick)
“Even though I’m sure that they could be as bureaucratic as any organization, there was a willingness to act personally and to trust the person, and that provided Dad with this really unprecedented opportunity to educate them, to bring them along, and ultimately, to get them to make a series of increasingly important statements,” Ed Firmage Jr. told Inkstick.
One key ingredient in his father’s rhetoric was pointing to anti-war precedent in the church and, in particular, bone-chilling remarks that J. Reuben Clark, an American ambassador and a member of the First Presidency, delivered to the church’s general conference a year after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Clark excoriated everyday Americans for their “general approval of this fiendish butchery.”
The church door remained open for peace and disarmament activists in the years after the MX battle. Steve Erickson, a longtime progressive activist in Utah, told Inkstick that he met with the church’s then-lobbyist, Bill Evans, and other members of Mormon leadership, such as Dallin Oaks, who is in line to become the church’s next president, to discuss issues such as high cancer rates among “downwinders.” The term refers to people exposed to radiation from nuclear weapons testing, including Utahns downwind from the Nevada Test Site.
But the modern-day Gaza campaigners have not yet had that access, according to a student organizer with the LDS committee of Olive Tree Solidarity, who asked Inkstick to not use his name. Despite numerous attempts to speak with Ensign Peak, including sending Facebook messages to employees and following up on leads from friends of friends, the student said the only conversation the campaigners have had with the church-owned fund was a “brief phone interaction” with the investment manager’s secretary.
“We really tried for probably six months to meet with somebody and just have a conversation,” the student said. When that effort went nowhere, they began the letter-writing campaign, copies of which they post on their website. “Obviously, we want them to divest,” the student added. “But if this could even just start the conversation, if this could just bring them to the table, that would be a win.”
Mormons with Hope is a countercultural movement in a faith community that, at least when it comes to its American members, has been deeply Republican for more than half a century. At the same time, they’re only so maverick in a church whose leaders in the last century warned of the “creation of a great war machine” as the military-industrial complex took root in the early Cold War. And the collective has peers in modern-day Mormonism, too. In the post-9/11 era, a group called Mormons for Equality and Social Justice protested the Iraq war. While many disillusioned Millennials became disaffiliated with the church, McLaughlin said, Gen Z Mormons often “are staying at an increasingly nuanced kind of place.”
Camille Perkins, a member of the collective from the Salt Lake City suburb of Magna, said she’s seen a similar dynamic with queer Mormons. “There’s just been a lot more of a feeling of, wait, why should we be pushed out? This is ours too. We’re going to keep it and we’re going to make it our own,” she said.
While officially based in Utah, the Mormon church is quickly becoming a global and diverse faith. The majority of its members nowadays live in fast-growing convert communities abroad in places like Mexico, Brazil, the Philippines, and Nigeria. That diversification may not be reflected in the church’s leadership any time soon, Perkins explained. But she said it can move the church’s cultural center of gravity away from an America-first one, since “ultimately, it’s the members who actually make up the church.”
Jeff Young, another activist with Mormons with Hope, recalled a story from 2015, when the church’s then-spokesman, Michael Otterson, addressed that global shift and political affiliations that come along with it. Latter-day Saints had asked him, “Can a member be a Democrat and a good Mormon?” He answered: “That one makes me smile, because if the members who ask it could travel to some countries of the world and meet faithful members of the Church who belong to their national communist parties, I fear their blood pressure might be permanently damaged.”
Church leadership also follows the changing tides of popular culture, organizers with Mormons with Hope told Inkstick. After facing blowback for the church advocating for its California-based members to vote in favor of Prop 8 to ban same-sex marriage in 2008, the church switched positions and by 2022 publicly supported the LGBTQ-affirming Respect for Marriage Act. Mormons with Hope also see micro-shifts in everyday Mormon culture, such as tolerance for female missionaries having multiple piercings, despite church rules to the contrary.
Regarding Palestinian human rights, McLaughlin said the collective is not asking the church to take a particular partisan or ideological stance. “I just want the church to look at the material facts on the ground and have a preferential option for the poor, to speak out for the oppressed.”
The student campaigner in Provo told Inkstick that the scores of people they have approached on the street have varying opinions about geopolitics, but only one ever defended the church’s investments in the likes of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
“Everyone else, even if they believe in this whole defense thing, they’re still like: ‘Why is the church invested in that?’” the student said, adding that people hold religious organizations to high ethical bars.
“Mormons with Hope” isn’t McLaughlin’s first foray into leftist organizing, but he says the antagonism they have faced at public events about Gaza is a new level for him and suggests their movement is hitting a nerve.
“Something worries them about Mormons speaking out because of Mormonism and actually potentially shaking up the status in the state of Utah,” he said.
Top photo:Demonstrators in Utah rally in solidarity with Palestinians amid Israel’s ongoing war on the Gaza Strip (Courtesy of Mormons with Hope for a Better World)
Author bio
Taylor Barnes
Field Reporter
Taylor Barnes in Inkstick Media's field reporter for military affairs and the defense industry. She is a grantee with the Ploughshares Fund and is based in Atlanta. Follow her work at @tkbarnes. Tips? tbarnes@inkstickmedia.com
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