The only real and lasting antidote to the sin of war, he believed, was the promulgation of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ “as far as we have power to send it forth through the elders of the Church.”[10]

A Fulfillment of Prophecy

Though the war was not the work of God, the Mormon leader was nonetheless quick to see in it a fulfillment of divine prophecy, both ancient and modern. “The newspapers are full of the wars and the rumors of wars,” he wrote in a private family letter of November 1914, “which seem to be literally poured out upon all nations as foretold by the Prophet [Joseph Smith] in 1832. The reports of the carnage and destruction going on in Europe are sickening and deplorable, and from the latest reports the field of carnage is greatly enlarging instead of diminishing.”[11]

A few weeks later, in his annual Christmas greeting to the Church for December 1914, he returned to this same theme. “The sudden ‘outpouring’ of the spirit of war upon the European nations which startled the whole world and was unexpected at the time of its occurrence, had long been expected by the Latter-day Saints, as it was foretold by the Prophet Joseph Smith on Christmas Day, December 25th, 1832.”[12]

Yet no one took pleasure in seeing such foreboding prophecy fulfilled. Nor could predictions be made tantamount to divine imposition on the affairs of men. At stake were the agency—and the evil—of man. As the cold calamity of war spread across the battlefields of Europe, President Smith continually stressed this point. “God, doubtless, could avert war,” he said in December of 1914, “prevent crime, destroy poverty, chase away darkness, overcome error, and make all things bright, beautiful and joyful. But this would involve the destruction of a vital and fundamental attribute of His sons and daughters that they become acquainted with evil as well as good, with darkness as well as light, with error as well as truth and with the results of the infraction of eternal laws.”[13] Thus, the war, among so many other things, was a schoolmaster, a judgment of man’s own doing, a terrible lesson of what inevitably transpires when hate and greed rule the day.

Despite these broken laws and with them the inevitable fulfillment of calamitous prophecy, there can be found, like a stream of clear water running throughout his teachings, the doctrine of ultimate redemption and resolution:

Vowing initially not to take sides in the struggle, President Smith found it increasingly challenging, however, to remain neutral. The sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915 struck an ominous chord in America, intent as the country was in staying clear of the conflict. His colleague, James E. Talmage, then a member of the Church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, described the sinking as “one of the most barbarous developments of the European war,” charging Germany for staining its hands “with innocent blood never to be washed away.”[15]

Hoping Not to Take Sides

Despite such wartime atrocities, President Smith clung to the hope that America could somehow remain detached from the war. “I am glad that we have kept out of war so far, and I hope and pray that we may not be under the necessity of sending our sons to war, or experience as a nation the distress, the anguish and sorrow that comes from a condition such as exists upon the old continent.”[16]

Nevertheless, as America lurched reluctantly toward war, President Smith saw America’s involvement as a necessity. News of the Zeppelin bombing raids over England and his consequent fear for the safety of his own mission-president son and missionaries then serving in England particularly bothered him and led him to question ever further Germany’s wartime tactics. “It seems to me that the only object of such raids is the wanton and wicked destruction of property and the taking of defenseless lives,” he wrote.

It appears that the spirit of murder, the shedding of blood, not only of combatants but of anyone connected with the enemy’s country seems to have taken possession of the people, or at least the ruling powers in Germany. What they gain by it, I do not know. It is hardly possible that they expect to intimidate the people by such actions, and it surely does not diminish the forces of the opposition. By such unnecessary and useless raids in the name of warfare, they are losing the respect of all the nations of the earth.[17]

A staunch patriot, he was soon to admit the obvious: “I have a feeling in my heart that the United States has a glorious destiny to fulfill, and that part of that glorious destiny is to extend liberty to the oppressed, as far as it is possible to all nations, to all people.” Gradually, he forged a cautious, nonpacifist view in behalf of the entire Church: “I do not want war; but the Lord has said it shall be poured out upon all nations, and if we escape, it will be ‘by the skin of our teeth.’ I would rather the oppressors should be killed, or destroyed, than to allow the oppressors to kill the innocent.”[18]

If Latter-day Saints must fight—and thousands of them soon enlisted in the cause—their attitude must ever be that of “peace and good will toward all mankind, . . . that they will not forget that they are also soldiers of the Cross, that they are ministers of life and not of death; and when they go forth, they may go forth in the spirit of defending the liberties of mankind rather than for the purpose of destroying the enemy. . . . Let the soldiers that go out from Utah be and remain men of honor.”[19] Eager to demonstrate Mormon loyalty to an America still suspicious of the Church and of some of its teachings and to support President Wilson’s entry into the war, President Smith led active campaigns to enlist Latter-day Saints in the ranks of the military and to involve the Church and its membership in the various Liberty Bond drives of the time, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process.[20]

Significantly, his writings bear an absence of malice or a spirit of vengeance toward the aggressor. Less critical than other younger leaders, such as James E. Talmage who, although not given to retribution, felt Germany had a debt to pay, President Smith was ever slow to condemn. Said he: “Let the Lord exercise vengeance where vengeance is needed. And let me not judge my fellow men, nor condemn them lest I condemn them wrongly.”[21]

Meanwhile, until the war ended, Latter-day Saints joined with others in praying for peace and in taking up arms in the cause of victory over the enemy. America’s involvement eventually turned the tide of war, ultimately bringing a defeated Germany and the other Axis powers to Versailles. And though half a world away, news of the pending peace was as jubilantly received in Utah as it was most everywhere else in the free world.[22]

The Armistice

The Latter-day Saints were, of course, not alone in proclaiming a vision of the war and of peace. A sampling of what others saw as the war wore away may be instructive. Randall Thomas Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury, was trying earnestly to see meaning out of a senseless war, to see divine purpose in man’s malignancy, and to bring vision to a groping world. “There, then, with all that the war has brought us of darkened homes and of shattered hopes for those we loved,” he said in his war-closing sermon of gratitude preached at Westminster Abbey in London on 10 November 1918,

He closed a later sermon with his particular vision of a new Christian way:

Views of Clerics

Pope Benedict XV, in his first encyclical immediately following the end of the war, rejoiced that “the clash of arms has ceased,” allowing “humanity [to] breathe again after so many trials and sorrows.” Next only to gratitude, his sentiment was one of profound regret, bordering on apology, that a leading cause of the war had been the “deplorable fact that the ministers of the Word” had not more courageously taught true religion rather than the politics of accommodation from the pulpit. The conscience of Christianity had been scarred by its own advocates. “The blame certainly must be laid on those ministers of the Gospel,” he lamented. He went on to chastise the pulpit and called for a new vision, a new order of valiant, righteous Christian spokesmen who would declare peace and the cross fearlessly. “It must be Our earnest endeavor everywhere to bring back the preaching of the Word of God to the norm and ideal to which it must be directed according to the command of Christ Our Lord, and the laws of the Church.”[25]

The official American Catholic response may best be seen in the pastoral letters of its bishops. At its base, the war showed a deep “moral evil” in man where “spiritual suffering” and “sin abounded.” Despite all of mankind’s progress—“the advance of civilization, the diffusion of knowledge, the unlimited freedom of thought, the growing relaxation of moral restraint— . . . we are facing grave peril.” Scientific and materialistic progress notwithstanding, a world without moral discipline and faith will lead only to destruction. The only true vision of hope is “the truth and the life of Jesus Christ,” and the Catholic Church must uphold the dignity of man, defend the rights of the people, relieve distress, consecrate sacrifice, and bind all classes together in the love of the Savior.[26]

James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore, the leading American Catholic spokesman, in calling upon Americans to “thank God for the victory of the allies and to ask him for grace to ‘walk in the ways of wisdom, obedience and humility,’” ordered his priests to substitute the prayer of thanksgiving in the Mass in place of the oration.[27] He instructed them further that a solemn service be held in all the churches of the archdiocese on 28 November 1918 at which the Church’s official prayer of thanksgiving, the Te Deum, should be sung.[28] Written as early as A.D. 450, the words to one of Catholicism’s most famous hymns speak of man’s immortality, of Christ’s divinity, and of His redemption of the dead:

We praise Thee, O God: we
acknowledge Thee to be the Lord
Thee, the Eternal Father, all
the earth doth worship . . .

Thou, O Christ, art the King of glory.
Thou art the Everlasting Son of the Father.
Thou didst not abhor the Virgin’s
womb, when Thou tookest upon
Thee human nature to deliver man.

When Thou hadst overcome the
sting of death, Thou didst open
to believers the kingdom of heaven.

Thou sittest at the right hand of
God, in the glory of the Father.
Thou, we believe, art the Judge to come.[29]

The American Protestant view of the war, and more especially of its postwar opportunities, is varied and diverse and defies simple categorization and analysis. There were almost as many “visions” as there were hundreds of denominations. While most, like Bishop Charles P. Anderson of the Protestant Episcopal Church, spoke in terms of gratitude, many others soon were speaking jingoistically, calling for immediate punishment and retribution.[30] “The Christian Century, which was representative of a great portion of Christendom, believed in the thorough chastisement of Germany.”[31] Likewise, the Congregationalist editorialized that “Germany is a criminal at the bar of justice.”[32] Reverend Dr. S. Howard Young of Brooklyn called “retribution upon the war lords” as “divine,” “the first world lesson to be derived from the German downfall.”[33]

Meanwhile, Billy Sunday, “God’s Grenadier” and by far the most popular patriot/evangelist of his day, saw the war as good against evil, God against Satan, “America and Christ, indissolubly linked, forging ahead in a glorious struggle.”[34] Though some others shared his view, Billy characteristically always went a step or two further. “Hey, Jesus, you’ve gotta send a country like that to damnation,” he once said. “I’ll raise enough of an army myself to help beat the dust off the Devil’s hordes.”[35] He also saw the end of the war as a window, a God-given opportunity to revitalize the evangelical cause of Christian revivalism and of individual spiritual rebirth, a time to confront the anti-Christ of such foreign-inspired teachings as evolution, social Darwinism, higher criticism, and every other philosophical evil of the age.

Other, more moderate, clergymen like the positive-minded Presbyterian, Robert E. Speer, saw a moral victory stemming out of the war, a new vision rising out of the ashes of Europe. “The war also has unmistakably set in the supreme place those moral and spiritual principles which constitute the message of the Church,” he declared. “The war has shown that these values are supreme over personal loss and material interest. . . . We succeeded in the war whenever and wherever this was our spirit. . . . The war says that what Christ said is forever true.”[36]

Rabbi Silverman, speaking in Chicago’s Temple Beth-El synagogue, mirrored Speer’s sentiments. “The world was nearer its millennium today than ever before,” he is reported to have said. “War had brought mankind nearer to brotherhood than had centuries of religious teachings. . . . War had brought religion back to its original task of combating bigotry, fighting sin, and uplifting mankind.”[37]

Both Reverend Speer and Henry Emerson Fosdick, professor of the Union Theological Seminary in New York, along with other leading religious leaders, welcomed the end of war as an opportunity to launch “the Church Peace Union,” a new united religious order funded, in part, by Andrew Carnegie and his Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to unite multiple Protestant faiths marching under one grand united banner—“the new political heaven [to] regenerate earth,” as Bishop Samuel Fallows of the Reformed Episcopal Church liked to describe it. Though destined to failure because of oppressive debts, internal disagreements, and opposition from Protestant fundamentalism, for a brief moment, this Interchurch World Movement of Protestants, Catholics, and Jewish leaders in America became “the principal voice of institutional religion on behalf of peace-keeping and peace-making” and appeared to hold enormous promise for church unity, social reform, and economic improvement.[38]

Fosdick, one of the most eloquent American Protestant statesmen of his time, had grudgingly supported America’s entry into the war but came out of it a confirmed pacifist. Reflecting the utter disillusionment the war wrought on many religionists, Fosdick listed several elements in his vision of warning for the future: “There is nothing glamorous about war any more,” “war is not a school for virtue any more,” “there is no limit to the methods of killing in war any more,” “there are no limits to the cost of war any more,” “there is no possibility of sheltering any portion of the population from the direct effect of war any more,” and “we cannot reconcile Christianity and war any more.”[39] Every effort must be made to avoid such a future calamity. He, like many others, was bitterly disappointed by America’s refusal to ratify the Versailles Peace Treaty and enter the League of Nations. As one commentary said, “God won the war and the devil won the peace.”[40]

Joseph F. Smith’s Visions of the Dead

Worn out by a long life of devoted Church service and worn down in sorrow with the recent deaths of several members of his immediate family, Joseph F. Smith, though a loving soul, knew all about grief. “I lost my father when I was but a child,” he once said. “I lost my mother, the sweetest soul that ever lived, when I was only a boy. I have buried one of the loveliest wives that ever blessed the lot of man, and I have buried thirteen of my more than forty children. . . . And it has seemed to me that the most promising, the most helpful, and, if possible, the sweetest and purest and the best have been the earliest called to rest.”[41] Speaking of the loss of one of his former polygamist wives, Sarah E., and, shortly thereafter, of his daughter Zina, he said: “I cannot yet dwell on the scenes of the recent past. Our hearts have been tried to the core. Not that the end of mortal life has come to two of the dearest souls on earth to me, so much as at the sufferings of our loved ones, which we were utterly powerless to relieve. Oh! How helpless is mortal man in the face of sickness unto death!”[42]

His daughter’s death triggered four of the most revealing discourses ever given by a Latter-day Saint leader on the doctrines of death, the spirit world, and the resurrection. As one noted scholar put it: “It is doubtful if in any given period of like duration in the entire history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints so much detail as to the nature of the life after death has been given to any other prophet of this dispensation.”[43] All were well received by the membership and extended hope and comfort to those who had lost loved ones or who might be asked to sacrifice family members in times of peace or of conflict. The war, raging loud and cruel, served as a vivid backdrop to these emerging doctrines.

On 6 April 1916, with the battles of Verdun and the Somme very much dominating the daily news, he gave a talk entitled “In the Presence of the Divine.” In it he spoke of the very thin veil separating the living and the dead. Speaking of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, Wilford Woodruff, and his other predecessors, he preached the doctrine that the dead, those who have gone on before, “are as deeply interested in our welfare today, if not with greater capacity, with far more interest, behind the veil, than they were in the flesh. I believe they know more. . . . Although some may feel and think that it is a little extreme to take this view, yet I believe that it is true.” He went on to say, “We cannot forget them; we do not cease to love them; we always hold them in our hearts, in memory, and thus we are associated and united to them by ties that we cannot break.”[44]

President Smith taught that death was neither sleep nor annihilation; rather, death involved a change into another world where the spirits of those once here can be solicitous of our welfare, “can comprehend better than ever before, the weaknesses that are liable to mislead us into dark and forbidden paths.”[45]

Two years later, speaking at a meeting in Salt Lake City in February 1918, he spoke additional words of comfort and consolation, particularly to those who had lost children or whose youthful sons were dying overseas. “The spirits of our children are immortal before they come to us,” he began,

and their spirits after bodily death are like they were before they came. They are as they would have appeared if they had lived in the flesh, to grow to maturity, or to develop their physical bodies to the full stature of their spirits. . . . [Furthermore,] Joseph Smith taught the doctrine that the infant child that was laid away in death would come up in the resurrection as a child; and, pointing to the mother of a lifeless child, he said to her: “You will have the joy, the pleasure and satisfaction of nurturing this child, after its resurrection, until it reaches the full stature of its spirit.”. . . It speaks volumes of happiness, of joy and gratitude to my soul.[46]

Two months later, having recovered from illness sufficiently to speak at the April 1918 general conference of the Church, he gave a talk entitled “A Dream That Was a Reality.” In it, he recounted a particularly poignant and unforgettable dream he had experienced sixty-five years earlier as a very young missionary in Hawaii, a dream-vision that dramatically influenced the rest of his life. He spoke of seeing his father, Hyrum, his mother, Mary, Joseph Smith, and several others who had ushered him into a mansion after he had bathed and cleansed himself. “That vision, that manifestation and witness that I enjoyed that time has made me what I am,” he confessed. “When I woke up I felt as if I had been lifted out of a slum, out of despair, out of the wretched condition that I was in. . . . I know that that was reality, to show me my duty, to teach me something, and to impress upon me something that I cannot forget.”[47]

Just weeks before, on 23 January, his Apostle son, Hyrum, then only forty-five years of age, was struck down in his prime by a ruptured appendix. It was a devastating blow from which Joseph F. never fully recovered, compounded as it was with the further sorrowful news of the death of his daughter-in-law and Hyrum’s wife, Ida Bowman Smith, just a few months thereafter. Wrote Talmage in behalf of the Twelve: “Our great concern has been over the effect the great bereavement will have upon President Joseph F. Smith, whose health has been far from perfect for months past. This afternoon he spent a little time in the office of the First Presidency, and we find him bearing up under the load with fortitude and resignation.”[48] Sick and intermittently confined to bed rest for several months afterwards, he had rallied sufficiently to speak briefly in the October general conference of the Church, long enough to proclaim his particular message of peace to a war-weary world.[49]

He spoke of having lately received, while pondering on the Biblical writings of the Apostle Peter, another, ultimately his final, vision of the dead. While meditating upon these things, he said he “saw the hosts of the dead, both small and great,” those who had died “firm in the hope of a glorious resurrection,” waiting in a state of paradise for their ultimate redemption and resurrection. Suddenly, the “Son of God appeared, declaring liberty to the captives who had been faithful.” Choosing not to go Himself to the wicked and unfaithful dead who waited in the more nether realms of the spirit world, Christ organized a great missionary force among His most faithful followers, dispatching them to minister and teach the gospel of Jesus Christ to “all the spirits of men,” those who had been less faithful and obedient in their mortal lives, including, as Peter writes, “those who were sometime disobedient” in the days of Noah and the great flood. In addition, he saw many of the ancient prophets, including Adam and Eve, involved in this spirit prison ministry of redemption. Likewise, “the faithful elders of this dispensation” were called to assist. His vision closed with the declaration that the dead “who repent will be redeemed, through obedience to the ordinances of the house of God . . . after they have paid the penalty of their transgressions.”[50]

Whereas his earlier discourses have remained memorable sermons, this sixty-verse document was immediately sustained, in the words of James E. Talmage, as “the word of the Lord” by his counselors in the First Presidency and by the Quorum of the Twelve.[51] For reasons not entirely clear, though widely read in the Church, the document was not formally accepted as canonized scripture for almost sixty years. Then, in 1976, President Spencer W. Kimball directed that it be added to the Pearl of Great Price.[52] Later, in June 1979, the First Presidency announced it would become section 138 of the Doctrine and Covenants. Considered an indispensable contribution to a fuller understanding of temple work—especially in an age of very active temple construction—the performances of proxy ordinances for the dead, including baptism for the dead and confirmation, and of the relationship between the living and the dead, it has been heralded as “central to the theology of the Latter-day Saints because it confirms and expands upon earlier prophetic insights concerning work of the dead.”[53] Others have written elsewhere about the contributions of this document to Mormon temple work.[54]

Because this document is far more than a mere sermon to the faithful Latter-day Saint and because it is regarded as the word and will of the Lord—in fact, it is the only canonized revelation of the twentieth century—it bears careful scrutiny. And, as a wartime document, it may have other meanings and applications not plumbed before.

For instance, although a discourse on the dead, it owed nothing to spiritualism. It is a matter of record that public interest in the dead and in communicating with the dead peaked during and immediately following the war. In 1918, Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame published his book, New Revelation, on the subject of psychical research and phenomena, bemoaning the decline in church attendance in England and of Christianity generally and proclaiming a new religion, a new revelation. He urged a belief not in the fall of man or in Christ’s redemption as the basis of faith but in the validity of “automatic writings,” séances, and other expressions of spiritualism as a new universal religion and of communicating with lost loved ones—or, as he put it, “the one provable thing connected with every religion, Christian or non-Christian, forming the common solid basis upon which each raises, if it must needs raise, that separate system which appeals to the varied types of mind.”[55]

In contrast, President Smith’s vision was very much Christ centered, a reiteration of the Savior’s Atonement for a fallen world. Though he certainly believed that “we move and have our being in the presence of heavenly messengers and heavenly beings” and though the dead may even transcend the veil and appear unto loved ones, if so authorized, he steered the Church away from any hint of spiritualism.[56] Latter-day Saints were to seek after the dead—that is, their spiritual welfare—rather than to seek the dead.

His revelation also reaffirmed the Christian belief in Adam and Eve and in a divine creation, for, in President Smith’s words, he saw “Father Adam, the Ancient of Days, and father of all” as well as “our glorious Mother Eve” (D&C 138:38–39). Though nothing is said specifically about evolution and the caustic, contemporary debates of the time over the origin of the species, these verses very simply restated the doctrines of the Church on this subject without argument or ambiguity.

Likewise, in an age of higher criticism with its attack on the authenticity and authority of the Bible, the revelation reestablished, for Latter-day Saints at least, a twentieth-century belief in the primacy and authority of scripture, a belief in the writings of Peter, a belief in Noah and the flood not as allegory but as actual event, and, by extension, a renewed belief in the entire Old and New Testaments. For a Church oft times criticized for its belief in additional scripture, if nothing else, section 138 is a classic declaration of Biblical authority for modern times.[57]

The vision may also be important for what it does not say. There is no discussion of peace treaties, no references to ecumenism or the interchurch movements of the times, no calls for social repentance and the social gospel. Neither prowar nor pacifist, it says nothing about cultural or nationalistic superiorities. The problem of evil is reduced to redeemable limits; and although man will always reap what he sows, there is still hope and redemption. Meanwhile, the Church retains its own mission as the gospel of Jesus Christ upon the earth as preestablished in its restoration a century earlier.

Finally, it proclaimed God’s intimate involvement in the affairs of humankind and His benevolent interest in His children. Steering the Church away from the yawning secularism that stood to envelope many other faiths in the postwar era, President Smith spoke confidently, above all, about Christ and His triumphant victory over sin and death.[58] To the utter waste and sheer terror of the just-concluded catastrophe,