Mitt served an LDS mission, or mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Missionaries are young men and women who consecrate two years of their lives to bringing the light of the gospel to the world.
A Pew interviewer asked two Mormon leaders about members and missionaries involvement in international issues. The conversation is recorded below.
The church has more than 50,000 missionaries. Many of them are presumably knowledgeable about world affairs because of their missionary work. Does the church take positions on international issues, such as the Arab-Israeli conflict?
Nelson: Our first mission is to teach the gospel and to care for our members. We are an international church. We have more members residing outside of the United States than we do within the bounds of this country. Our members come from all sides of all political questions. We don’t wade into the political debate on such controversial issues as Darfur and the Arab-Israeli conflict, but the church has committed to providing relief and development projects for humanitarian purposes in those countries and in other countries all over the world.
For example, the church provides relief to both the Israelis and the Palestinians, and in the year 2006 we responded with significant relief for the people suffering in Sudan.
Wickman: For the very reasons we talked about earlier when you were asking about political involvement, the church really tends not to get involved in political controversy, whether it’s here or abroad. It does teach the principles we’ve talked about. It does have a very significant humanitarian effort. Elder Nelson gave some examples of that.
Another notable example from the recent past would be the tsunami relief that the church provided, across the Indian Ocean from Indonesia to India and beyond, and here in our own country, of course, with Katrina.
But the church is more interested in teaching its principles and lending a hand to people where it can than it is in weighing in on politics, and that’s one of the reasons why you don’t hear us saying much about those events.
One comes away with a sense of the church having this determinedly circumscribed role in public life, that while the church – through its missionaries – actively proselytizes, the church’s official position is, “We’ll let our religious life be our role in public life; we’ll let it speak for itself.”
Nelson: It’s pretty simple. We care, and we would like to do unto others as we would like them to do unto us. We love one another and we show that by helping, by serving. There is a lot of interest in the humanitarian assistance that we give throughout the world, and it’s very, very significant. But even more significant is why we do it. We do it because we care, and how we do it is that we teach our people to go without meals one day a month and contribute the money they would have spent on those meals to a fund that is used for the care of the poor and the needy.
It would be a misperception to view this church as wealthy, well-provisioned, with storehouses that are bulging and so on. Our welfare efforts come from people. There are people who are going without their food and contributing their money, time and talents just for the privilege of helping to serve other people.
That’s the story; not the largesse of our gifts, but the hearts of the people who want to help.
Wickman: Institutionally [the Forum has] described the church’s position about things, but, again, church members individually, acting in their capacity as citizens, are encouraged to get involved and express their views, and obviously there are some in our own country who are doing that every day.
See Mormonism in Modern America, Pew Forum
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