The young Mormon who, for the first time, undertakes a serious study of the life and teachings of Christ in the New Testament, and especially the Sermon on the Mount, may find it disconcerting. The message of peace strikes a very dissonant chord against the zealous patriotism and near-worship of the military in modern Mormonism. Assuming a commitment to Christ’s example and teachings, I propose here a Mormon theology of peace as an alternative to the predominant militant Mormonism.
 
Man in the Image of God
 
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”¹ Thus reads the story of the creation of man, which forms the basis for divine law regarding his interactions with his fellow beings. Our relationship to God is so fundamental to the divine plan that Joseph Smith taught: “If men do not comprehend the character of God, they do not comprehend themselves.”²
 
Building on the concept of man in the image of God, Mormonism teaches that a human being is made up of two principle parts: the tangible, physical body, and the intangible, spirit body. The spirit body, could it be seen, would appear in the same form as the physical body. This spirit body is the literal offspring of God, and has its origin in heaven, long before the birth of the physical body.³ “And I, the Lord God, had created all the children of men; and not yet a man to till the ground; for in heaven created I them; and there was not yet flesh upon the earth”.⁴
 
President George Albert Smith taught: “It is regrettable that in the world today in many cases men do not appreciate that this temple of the body is sacred and should be so held, that this body of ours was given to us as a tabernacle for the spirit while we are here in mortality, but that the spirit that is in this tabernacle came from God. He is the Father of it. If men realized that, how much more careful they would be to protect this tabernacle and keep it wholesome and delightful.”⁵ Thus the relationship of man to God is the basis for his duty to respect his body. By the same reasoning, the bodies of others receive equal respect, since they are also in the image of God and house other children of His.
 
Thou Shalt Not Kill
 
The divine law against killing is so important that murder is the first sin mentioned after the scene for humanity is set by the Adam’s fall. “Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.... And [the Lord] said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.”⁶ Yet if killing out of jealousy was wrong, so was killing for the sake of so-called justice. The Lord responded to the first murder by saying of the perpetrator, “whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.”⁷ The law given in Adam’s day, then, was not only against murder, but also against revenge killings or the death penalty. The death penalty appeared after the world had proven wicked enough to warrant its destruction by flood,⁸ and was only given to Israel as part of the “law of carnal commandments”⁹ given in “wrath” (or as a punishment) and oriented toward a wicked people. Despite the existence of a death penalty, one of the central points of even the lesser law was: “Thou shalt not kill.”¹⁰
 
The aforementioned postdiluvian proscription of bloodshed is a particularly important variant of the commandment not to kill, since it links it back to man’s relationship to God. “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.”¹¹ Since man is in the image of God, killing is a form of sacrilege: It is a simulation of violence against God. For similar reasons, humane treatment of convicts was required even in the lesser law given to Israel, “lest... thy brother should seem vile unto thee.”¹² Additionally, as man is a child of God, murder of a child is particularly offensive to his parent. Mormons in particular have a point of view that allows us to look upon humanity as members of a single family, a perspective which leaves little room for justifying violence.
 
Joseph Smith taught that: “A murderer, … one that sheds innocent blood, cannot have forgiveness.”¹³ Joseph Smith’s definition of a murderer as someone who sheds innocent blood will indeed come as an uncomfortable one in a military-oriented religion, considering that, especially in modern warfare, innocent blood is frequently shed on the battlefield in the form of collateral damage. The commandment against bloodshed was the basis of the First Presidency’s statement on December 14, 1945, against universal compulsory military training, in which they stated, “We shall give opportunity to teach our sons not only the way to kill but also, in too many cases, the desire to kill, thereby increasing lawlessness and disorder to the consequent upsetting of the stability of our national society. God said at Sinai, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”¹⁴ The fact that this statement was given in connection with the topic of the military indicates that war is not always an exception to the commandment not to kill.
 
Note that in Mormonism the commandment against killing is extended even to animal life as part of God’s creation. After the flood, the Lord instructed Noah that “blood shall not be shed, only for meat, to save your lives; and the blood of every beast will I require at your hands.”¹⁵ The same permission to eat meat, with the restriction that it be done sparingly and only as necessary to preserve life, was repeated to the Saints through Joseph Smith.¹⁶
 
Jesus on Rhetoric
 
“Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”¹⁷ The second great commandment flows naturally from the first in the context of man being in the image and family of God.
 
This love for our fellow human beings is the basis of the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus taught us to “resist not evil”,¹⁸ “Love your enemies”,¹⁹ and “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”²⁰ This discourse is likely the basis for the reader’s interest in pacifism. The principles taught flow naturally from the creation story and additional theological structure built around it in Mormonism. If man is in God’s image, man must be respected so as not to offend God. Furthermore, since man is a spirit who lived as the offspring of God before the world’s creation, and came down to be housed in a body of flesh in the appearance of his Eternal Father, he is to be loved not only as one who appears like God, but also as one’s literal brother. One who loves his brother does not kill him, no matter what evil he may have committed, and one definitely does not kill the child of the deity one worships.
 
The commandments of Jesus, then, go beyond physical actions against others and into control of our thoughts and passions. We are not only prohibited from killing our enemies, we are to love them. Our inward sins of hatred or contempt for others is betrayed by our speech: “A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is evil: for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh.”²¹ Evil speech necessarily corrupts a person, according to Jesus: “But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man.”²² Even the rhetoric put out in support of wars, which necessarily dehumanizes the enemy and engenders hatred toward our fellow man, is considered evil and defiling. One must recall that our enemy is also in the image of God, and of his household, and therefore evil speech toward him would naturally be an offense against God.
 
Speech, then, according to Jesus, does more than simply “describe reality … it participates in reality independent of human intentionality.”²³ Because of this, “every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgement.”²⁴ Mormonism gives some credence to this understanding of speech, and thus the saints are counseled to avoid “excess of laughter”²⁵ and “evil speaking”.²⁶ In the school of the elders it was taught that: “It is by words, instead of exerting his physical powers, with which every being works when he works by faith.”²⁷
 
Joseph Smith taught the same principle against violent rhetoric: “When you find a spirit that wants bloodshed,—murder, the same is not of God, but is of the devil. Out of the abundance of the heart of man the mouth speaketh.”²⁸ Indeed, to the degree that reality is created by words, much of the evil in this world origins in rhetoric, especially the rhetoric in favor of war.
 
Idolatry
 
The first commandment prohibits idolatry: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”²⁹ This naturally follows from the first great commandment cited to love God with all our hearts; we are not to divide our love between Him and other gods. Mormonism has an expansive definition of idolatry: “Whatever thing a man sets his heart and his trust in most is his god; and if his god doesn’t also happen to be the true and living God of Israel, that man is laboring in idolatry.”³⁰
 
President Kimball specifically expanded this line of thinking to include war: “We are a warlike people, easily distracted from our assignment of preparing for the coming of the Lord. 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. When threatened, we become anti-enemy instead of pro-kingdom of God; 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”.³¹
 
This form of idolatry demonstrates a lack of faith in the God we are supposed to love with all our hearts: “We forget that if we are righteous the Lord will either not suffer our enemies to come upon us—and this is the special promise to the inhabitants of the land of the Americas (see 2 Ne. 1:7)—or he will fight our battles for us (Ex. 14:14; D&C 98:37, to name only two references of many).”³²
 
Pacifist Christology
 
Much has already been written on Christ as the prototypical pacifist, but a brief summary is in order. We have already mentioned that Jesus taught a pacifist philosophy of loving one’s enemies—“Blessed are the peacemakers”³³—in the Sermon on the Mount and throughout His life. Noting that creative exegesis has been used to turn Jesus’ message into the opposite of its apparent meaning, and therefore justify war and other forms of violence, it is of great benefit to us that he put his pacific teachings in practice so clearly at the end of his life that we are left with no excuse for such misunderstandings.
 
After Jesus’ intense suffering in Gethsemane, Judas arrived with armed men to arrest his master. Elder Talmage told the story thus: “When the officers approached and seized Jesus, some of the apostles, ready to fight and die for their beloved Master, asked, ‘Lord, shall we smite with the sword?’ Peter, waiting not for a reply, drew his sword and delivered a poorly aimed stroke at the head of one of the nearest of the crowd, whose ear was severed by the blade. The man thus wounded was Malchus, a servant of the high priest. Jesus, asking liberty of His captors by the simple request, ‘Suffer ye thus far,’ stepped forward and healed the injured man by a touch.”³⁴ Jesus at this point chastised Peter for his violence, saying: “Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.”³⁵ It is noteworthy that He not only refused to engage in violence in defense of this “illegal night seizure”³⁶ which would ultimately result in His execution, but He additionally healed the wounded ear of one of His kidnappers.
 
Jesus, while being crucified, pleaded for the soldiers engaged in this act of murder to be forgiven.³⁷ Rather than to commit violence against another human being, or even call down the powers of heaven to do so, He willingly gave up His life and so effected the atonement, amidst an exemplary display of the pacifism He had spent the previous years teaching. Christ thus broke the chain of evil that plagued the earth since the fall of man (and particularly the murder committed by Cain), allowing us a way out if we follow Him. Symbolically, Jesus’ sacrifice ended the requirement for the ritual shedding of blood,³⁸ thus indicating that although death had been brought into the world through the fall, life was to be the new rule.
 
Conclusion
 
We’ve started, appropriately enough, in the beginning. The creation of man and his relationship to God, and therefore to his fellow man, is the basis for loving God with all our hearts and loving our neighbor as ourselves. This love of God, in turn, is the basis for the prohibition of idolatry, not to mention obedience of all the commandments. At every step of the way, we see the impropriety of killing our fellow man, whether because he’s in the image of our deity, because he’s literally a family member, or because it would be antithetical to love.
 
It is interesting to note that although the fall of Adam ostensibly brought death into the world, the first physical death recorded is the result of the murder of Abel by his brother, Cain. God warned about continuing the cycle of violence in his instruction that Cain was not to be executed for the murder of his brother. Revenge, whether we term it “justice” or refer to it by any other name, continues the work of evil, staining the world with blood. This cycle of evil could only be broken by a Savior who refused to return evil for evil and instead willingly gave up His life in the ultimate pacifist act. We’ve been instructed to flee from Babylon,³⁹ but we’ll only escape when we begin to follow His example.

1. Genesis 1:27
2. Roberts, B.H., ed. History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Vol. VI (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1980) 303.
3. Hinckley, Gordon B. What of the Mormons? (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1947) 21-22.
4. Moses 3:5
5. Smith, George Albert. Teachings of George Albert Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1996) 13.
6. Genesis 4:8,10.
7. Genesis 4:15.
8. Genesis 9:6.
9. D&C 84:27.
10. Exodus 20:13.
11. Genesis 9:6.
12. Deuteronomy 25:3.
13. Roberts, History of the Church, Vol. VI 253.
14. Clark, James R., ed. Messages of the First Presidency, Vol. 6 (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1975) 240.
15. JST Genesis 9:11.
16. D&C 49:18,21; D&C 89:12-13.
17. Matthew 22:37-40.
18. Matthew 5:39.
19. Matthew 5:44.
20. Matthew 7:1.
21. Luke 6:45.
22. Matthew 15:18.
23. Brant, Jo-Ann A. “Jesus' Prohibition Against Swearing and his Philosophy of Language”, GC publications on the Web, 1997.
24. Matthew 12:36.
25. D&C 88:69.
26. D&C 20:54.
27. Lectures on Faith 7:3.
28. Roberts, History of the Church, Vol. VI 315.
29. Exodus 20:3.
30. Kimball, Spencer W. “The False Gods We Worship”, Ensign June 1976: 3-6.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Matthew 5:9.
34. Talmage, James E. Jesus the Christ (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1915) 571.
35. Matthew 26:52.
36. Talmage, James E. Jesus the Christ 571.
37. Luke 23:34.
38. See 3 Nephi 9:19.
39. See D&C 133:5,7,14.