Utah residents are being targeted in a strategically timed national campaign against Mormonism that was launched Sunday — one week before the semi-annual General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
By the end of this week, an estimated 300,000 "Jesus Christ/Joseph Smith" DVDs will be delivered by mail and by hand to Utahns' doorsteps as a part of a collaborative effort "exposing what we believe are the problems with Mormonism itself," said Daniel "Chip" Thompson, general director of the Solid Rock Christian Fellowship located near Snow College.
Thompson says the distribution campaign is being propelled by "thousands" of people involved with various Christian denominations, not just one single organization.
One of the groups distributing the video in Arizona was denounced in the early 1980s by the National Conference of Christians and Jews and by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith after showing the film "The God Makers" at the Mesa Convention Center.
Another estimated 200,000 videos will be distributed by the various groups this week to Washington, California, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, Texas, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, New York, Virginia, Montana, Nevada, Nebraska, Tennessee and Oregon. Areas where the LDS church has a strong presence have been chosen as a focus of the campaign, said Floyd McElveen, who produced the video.
McElveen, a retired Baptist pastor who is based in Petal, Miss., also wrote a corresponding book, "Jesus Christ/Joseph Smith: A search for the truth," to accompany the video upon request. For McElveen, mass-distributing information is not new.
About 20 years ago, McElveen says, he handed out in Utah more than 400,000 copies of another of his books, "God's Word, Final, Infallible and Forever."
"We thought after 20-something years it's time to do it again and try to make it more powerful," McElveen said in an interview with the Deseret Morning News. "The truth of the matter is, there's probably nobody who loves Mormons more in the whole world. We would give our lives and money to see (them) not deluded into this Mormon thing."
McElveen said he wrote "Jesus Christ/Joseph Smith" to "reach Mormons for Christ" and "save" them. According to Thompson, the DVD, which has a picture of an LDS temple and Joseph Smith on the cover, is being distributed as "a response to the emphasis the Mormon church has placed on Joseph Smith within the last year to try to make him be bigger than life ... hopefully this is going to bring him back down to a human level."
Mark Tuttle, spokesman for the LDS Church, says the video is inaccurate and hurtful.
"The accusations, innuendo and mischaracterizations portrayed in the video are divisive and hurtful to open dialogue and conversation," Tuttle said. "It does not accurately represent the life of Joseph Smith or the doctrine and history of the church. Either deliberately, or out of ignorance, the video ignores volumes of scholarly work, which address the concerns raised. These criticisms are old and long ago asked and answered."
Tuttle said anyone who is interested in learning about the LDS Church should look to "official sources on what we teach and believe."
Because of the LDS-themed pictures on the DVD's cover, some recipients have been confused, thinking the video came from the LDS Church. While copies of the video were mailed on Tuesday to rural areas of Utah, hand deliveries were made on Sunday to St. George, Ogden, Salt Lake County and several cities in Utah County.
Judy Harper, an American Fork resident, said two men left the video hanging from her doorknob in a plastic bag.
"It was strange, it just looks like something the (LDS Church) would send you home from Relief Society with," Harper said. "We just assumed it was from the church and we threw it on the fridge for later."
Harper said she didn't realize what the video was until the next day when a friend, Gloria Parker, who also received the video, told her.
In Parker's LDS congregation, the DVDs' delivery came up as church members questioned whether the video was a new project made by the LDS Church.
Despite the images on the DVD's cover, when Parker's son, Brian, saw his parents' video, he knew it had to be made by someone else.
"In my opinion, the (LDS Church) ought to go after whoever's (making the video)," Brian Parker said. "I don't go bother their religion. Why can't they just leave me alone? I don't know why they have to try and bash people, but I guess they're just going to do what they're going to do."
E-mail: achoate@desnews.com