Mormons Begin Edging Away From The Iraq War

Utah, the reddest state in the country, is reconsidering:

A January poll by The Salt Lake Tribune showed a precipitous drop in support for Bush's handling of the war among Utah's Latter-day Saints.

In the survey, just 44 percent of those identifying themselves as Mormon said they backed Bush's war management. That's a level considerably higher than Bush gets from Utah's non-Mormon population and the nation at large, but it's also a 21 percentage point drop from just five months earlier. The poll's margin of error was plus or minus 4.7 percentage points.

Such abrupt moves in group opinion are uncommon. Pollsters say numbers generally move gradually, unless "spooked" by something. But what?

...Rather than one unmistakable message from the church, the change may have been ushered by a rapid series of more subtle signals that it was indeed acceptable for Mormons to question their president during wartime. And it all may have started at the very top.

Speaking to Brigham Young University students on Oct. 31, LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley lamented "the terrible cost of war."

"What a fruitless thing it so often is," he said. "And what a terrible price it exacts."

Hinckley recalled standing at the graves of some of history's most powerful military and political leaders. "In their time they commanded armies," he said. "They ruled with near omnipotence, and their very words brought terror into the hearts of people," he said.

And yet, he noted, all of them were now dead: "They have all passed into the darkness of the grave."

Though brooding heavily on the consequences of war in general, Hinckley never mentioned Iraq or President Bush specifically. But in the following days, online message boards and e-mail discussion groups lit up with conversation about what Hinckley - "prophet, seer and revelator" to millions of Mormons worldwide - might have meant in regard to the nation's current wars.

"He may or may not have intended anything by it, and he certainly didn't mention Iraq in that speech, but the speech certainly may have been interpreted by the LDS community as an indictment against the world's violence," said Kirk Jowers, director of the University of Utah's Hinckley Institute of Politics. "Small phrases by President Hinckley are to the LDS community as Alan Greenspan's words were to the financial community."

...The month after Hinckley's speech, Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. - one of the more prominent politicians who are LDS members - returned from Iraq with an unfavorable report about the chaos he saw in the war-torn nation's capital city.

"The security situation is Baghdad is out of hand," said Huntsman, who enjoys wide popularity among Utahns. "I am less optimistic about a successful outcome."

Huntsman's dismay echoed that of other well-known Mormon politicians from both sides of the aisle - Sens. Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, and Republican Gordon Smith of Oregon - who were also issuing disappointing proclamations about what the Bush administration had hitherto referred to as Iraq's "progress."

..."It's true that, in general, LDS members are more conservative as a whole, but at one point the whole country backed this war and this president," said [blogger Guy] Murray. "Over the years, the country has soured on this war, and Mormons may be just following the national trend."