{"id":95382,"date":"2022-06-10T16:07:03","date_gmt":"2022-06-10T22:07:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=95382"},"modified":"2022-06-10T16:07:03","modified_gmt":"2022-06-10T22:07:03","slug":"are-latter-day-saints-immune-to-doing-great-evil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2022\/06\/are-latter-day-saints-immune-to-doing-great-evil.html","title":{"rendered":"Are Latter-day Saints immune to doing great evil?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen, near Linz, Austria, on 5 May 1945, by elements of the Eleventh Armored Division of General George Patton\u2019s Third Army. My father was there that day, although I can\u2019t identify him in this photograph. He raised me with the express moral obligation that he himself felt, to try to help ensure that the crimes committed at Mauthausen and at other such camps must never be forgotten. And I HAVEN\u2019T forgotten.
(Photo from Wikimedia Commons public domain)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Back in July 2018, I wrote a newspaper column devoted to the question \u201cWas Adolf Hitler religious?\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 My answer to that question was that he was not<\/em> religious.\u00a0 Certainly not in any common understanding of the term, whether Christian or simply theistic.\u00a0 I\u2019ve sometimes been challenged on my answer, but I stand by it.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

One of the titles that I bought at the book shop at KZ-Dachau a couple of days ago is Hitler: Die 101 wichtigsten Fragen<\/em> (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2019).\u00a0 It was written by Volker Ullrich,\u00a0 who has also written several other books on German history, including a two-volume study of Adolf Hitler<\/em> (2013, 2018).\u00a0 Here, in my translation, is a relevant extract from Hitler: Die 101 wichtigsten Fragen<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hitler grew up in a Catholic milieu.\u00a0 He practiced as a choirboy at the Benedictine cloister in Lambach. . . .\u00a0 His confirmation took place on Pentecost 1904 in the Cathedral of Linz.\u00a0 However, according to his later account, the fifteen-year-old submitted to this ceremony only reluctantly.\u00a0 Nevertheless, over the course of his life Hitler never formally exited the Church.\u00a0 But he was surely never a believing Christian.\u00a0 If Hitler believed in anything, it was, above all, in himself, in his mission, which was supposedly assigned to him by \u201cprovidence.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Accordingly, National Socialism was framed as a political religion, and the F\u00fchrer presented himself as the Messiah sent by the \u201cAlmighty\u201d who would redeem the German people from all evils.\u00a0 The sacralizing of his person expressed the exaltation of the Party to the status of a \u201ccommunity of faith\u201d and of the Party program to a \u201cconfession of faith.\u201d\u00a0 In his speeches, especially in his concluding \u201capotheoses,\u201d Hitler liked to resort to a religious vocabulary \u2014 for instance, when he ended his rally in the Sportpalast on 10 February 1933 with the cry of \u201cAmen!\u201d . . .<\/span><\/p>\n

After 30 January 1933 [when he was appointed chancellor of Germany], Hitler first took the stage in the robe of a Christian statesman who intended to bring about a national rebirth in concert with the Christian confessions.\u00a0 It remained his long-term goal, of course, to subject the churches to absolute ideological claims of National Socialism.\u00a0 Nonetheless, Hitler knew that he could not attain this goal through brute force if he didn\u2019t want to alienate large portions of the population.\u00a0 Therefore, he followed a double strategy \u2014 on the one hand to come to a modus vivendi<\/em> with the Catholic and Protestant church and, on the other, to engage dissenting priests and pastors with repressive measures.\u00a0 The decisive confrontation with the churches was to be delayed until after the successful conclusion of the war.\u00a0 (101-103)<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Today, we visited the Upper Austrian city of Linz, where we walked around a bit both before and after we had lunch.\u00a0 (We visited the former cathedral, for example, where Anton Bruckner was the organist and choir master and where, as noted above, Adolf Hitler was confirmed.)\u00a0 Thereafter, we spent a couple of hours at the former Nazi concentration camp of Mauthausen, which is not very far from Linz.\u00a0 I\u2019ve brought this up here several times before:\u00a0 This is at least my fourth visit to Mauthausen, in fulfillment of a sense of obligation to my father, who, as a member of the 11th Armored Division of Patton\u2019s Third Army, participated in the liberation of the camp and was forever marked by it.\u00a0 He charged me to always remember his testimony about Mauthausen, and to keep the memory of it alive.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

One of his assignments, as the war was effectively over by the time Mauthausen was liberated (the last of the camps to be taken by the Allies) \u2014 Hitler had committed suicide about a week before Mauthausen\u2019s liberation \u2014 was to document in photos the appalling and unbelievable things that he and his fellow soldiers had encountered upon entering the place.\u00a0 Thereafter, he created a display of some of his photographs in the main square of Linz, directly in front of the City Hall, titling his display \u201cNazi Kultur<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0 For decades thereafter, he remembered Austrians walking by, looking at the images, shaking their heads, and saying \u201cDas habe ich nie gewusst!\u00a0 Das habe ich nie gewusst!\u201d\u00a0 (\u201cI didn\u2019t know that!\u00a0 I didn\u2019t know that!\u201d)\u00a0 He didn\u2019t altogether believe them.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Today, once again, I walked through KZ-Mauthausen.\u00a0 And today, yet again, I stood in front of what is now called the \u201cOld City Hall,\u201d exactly where my father\u2019s photographic display of \u201cNazi Kultur\u201d stood just slightly more than seventy-seven years ago.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I note that I\u2019m being accused by the usual small handful of people of ignoring the Mountain Meadows Massacre while I\u2019m posting about Nazi concentration camps and, I guess, of suggesting that religious people in general, or Latter-day Saints in particular, do not commit evil deeds.\u00a0 Or something like that.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

But I haven\u2019t<\/em> ignored the Mountain Meadows Massacre.\u00a0 Here, for example, is a blog entry that I posted here back in 2019:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAt Mountain Meadows\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

And let me append two basic observations:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

1)\u00a0 When I write anything for the public, at least some entirely predictable people will misread it in the most negative way that they possibly can.<\/p>\n

2)\u00a0 The Mountain Meadows Massacre is, for quite manifest reasons, a controversial topic.\u00a0 And, accordingly, it\u2019s one that some people are strongly inclined to exploit for ideological ends.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The perpetrators of the Massacre interest me very particularly because, overwhelmingly, they do not seem to have been conventionally bad people \u2014 thugs, murderers, and the like \u2014 either before September 1857 or, for the most part, thereafter.\u00a0 So the question that puzzles me (in this case as in more than a few others) is, What makes ordinary, decent people commit so extraordinarily horrific a crime?\u00a0 Which\u00a0is precisely<\/em> the topic that I raised in yesterday\u2019s post about KZ-Dachau<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Reading the Oxford book Massacre at Mountain Meadows<\/em>, by Ron Walker and Rick Turley and Glen Leonard, when it first came out many years ago, I felt as if I were seeing a Greek tragedy unfold.\u00a0 There was a certain inexorable logic to what ultimately happened \u2014 a horrible logic, obviously, but one in which it made a certain degree of sense, after one bad step had been taken, to take the next one.\u00a0 I found myself wanting to scream \u201cNo!\u00a0 Stop!\u201d while knowing what the outcome was inevitably going to be.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

To me, if we see the people who committed the Mountain Meadows Massacre as utterly unlike ourselves, we\u2019re not only falsifying history (and not merely in the sense that they, like me and many of my readers, claimed membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) but refusing to see a lesson (or, more aptly, lessons) in what happened.\u00a0 If they were something of a different species, their cautionary tale can have little if anything to teach us.\u00a0 Precisely the same thing can be said about the Nazi concentration camps:\u00a0 If we think that only Germans and Austrians are capable of such things, we\u2019re both demonstrably wrong and utterly missing the most important principles to be learned.\u00a0 As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wisely said,<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either \u2014 but right through every human heart.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

In order to understand what the perpetrators of the Mountain Meadows Massacre did, we need to understand what factors acted upon them.\u00a0 And, beyond any reasonable dispute, one of the most important of those factors was a prior history of persecution and forced migration.\u00a0 But that doesn\u2019t mean that the Missouri mobs bear legal and moral responsibility for the Mountain Meadows Massacre any more than an abusive father is responsible for the violent acts committed much later by a criminal son.\u00a0 However, neither are the two completely unrelated.\u00a0 Human evils ramify.\u00a0 They do damage, among other things to human psyches.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Mountain Meadows Massacre certainly isn\u2019t the Restoration\u2019s finest hour.\u00a0 It\u2019s anything but faith-promoting.\u00a0 But it shouldn\u2019t be exploited as a weapon against the Church or against religious belief, either. \u00a0It\u2019s too complex to be reducible to a self-serving slogan on a partisan bumper sticker.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Posted from Ruhpolding, Upper Bavaria, Germany<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 Back in July 2018, I wrote a newspaper column devoted to the question \u201cWas Adolf Hitler religious?\u201d\u00a0 My answer to that question was that he was not religious.\u00a0 Certainly not in any common understanding of the term, whether Christian or simply theistic.\u00a0 I\u2019ve sometimes been challenged on my answer, but I stand by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nAre Latter-day Saints immune to doing great evil?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"    Back in July 2018, I wrote a newspaper column devoted to the question "Was Adolf Hitler religious?"\u00a0 My answer to that question was that he\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, 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