LDS Church Urges Accurate Reporting on Polygamist Groups in Warren Jeffs Coverage

A week of intense attention on the search for Warren Jeffs, the fugitive leader of a southern Utah-based polygamist sect, has prompted The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to call for more accurate reporting from news organizations worldwide.

In a statement issued Thursday, the church said that references to polygamist groups as “Mormons” or “Mormon sects” are “misleading and confusing to the vast majority of audiences who rightfully associate the term ‘Mormon’ with members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Church spokesman Dale Bills said the public affairs office had fielded numerous media requests after the FBI added Jeffs to its Ten Most Wanted list. “There is no reason why the church would wish to comment about a legal action concerning a group with which it has no affiliation or connection,” Bills said in a statement posted on the church’s website.

The statement cited two examples of what it called media confusion. A CNN report on Tuesday superimposed Jeffs’s face over an image of the church’s Salt Lake Temple, implying a connection between the two. The church also objected to a Fox News segment featuring former New Jersey Superior Court Judge Andrew Napolitano, now a Fox news analyst, about the political risks he believes Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff faces in pressing for prosecution of polygamist leaders. The church said the segment implied “that the church and its members would be opposed to the actions of the Utah attorney general,” an interpretation it called “wholly unjustified.” The statement noted that this view is inconsistent with a 1998 statement by church President Gordon B. Hinckley, who said the church “has nothing whatever to do with those practicing polygamy” and excommunicates members who do.

According to the report, Mormons abandoned the practice of polygamy in 1890 as a condition of statehood. Fundamentalists claim that then-church President John Taylor directed some church leaders to quietly continue the practice. The report states that such claims are not supported by Taylor’s own writings or by any known church documents.

Most Utah-based fundamentalists believe, however, that they, not the mainstream Mormon church, practice the original tenets of the church founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith. The report notes that many of these groups, including Jeffs’s own Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, use the Book of Mormon and other Mormon religious materials as their central texts. Church spokesman Mike Otterson said of the shared terminology: “Protestants use the Bible and use the same terminology as Catholics do, but it doesn’t make them Catholic. This is all about avoiding confusion.”

Jeffs, who has not been seen publicly in almost two years, is wanted on felony charges accusing him of arranging the underage marriage of a girl. He also faces federal warrants for alleged unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. Accurate naming matters most when the stakes involve a child, a point of truth that protects the vulnerable (Proverbs 31:8-9).

Source: Read the original report