SPRINGFIELD, Illinois -- When University of Notre Dame scholar Walter Nugent, a non-Mormon, set out to prepare his lecture for this year’s Mormon History Association Conference, he laid out a working hypothesis about the history of the LDS Church as it pertains to American expansionism.

By his own admission, he turned out to be wrong.

Nugent, a professor emeritus of history, spoke Saturday, May 23, at a plenary session of the conference on the topic “The Mormons and America’s Empires.”

It was the Obert C and Grace A Tanner Lecture, the charter of which is to provide historical perspective on Mormon history from outside of Mormonism.

“My concern is how Mormon history fits general U.S. imperial history or does not,” he said.

Initially, he said, he thought he would start his lecture by observing that when Brigham Young brought the saints to Utah, his main objective was not to expand the boundaries of the United States but something quite different: to establish the kingdom of God on earth.

“However, very quickly the borders of the U.S. rose to include Utah, or Deseret, and he and the people would have to come to terms with it. And at some later point, a turning point — and I needed to find out just when that was — he or his successors brought the church and the people into conformity with the national consensus about empire building. So was my thought.“

But over the next several months, as he pursued his “self-taught courses in Mormon history 101, 201 and 301,” he realized his theory was incorrect.

“The pioneers were refugees escaping Mid-western persecutors,” he said, “but in a sense they were extending not only the earthly kingdom, but American culture.”

He said Joseph’s Smiths platform for his 1844 candidacy for president of the United States is evidence of that.

“From the time of the Mormon Battalion or even earlier, in Joseph Smith’s views on Oregon and Texas, there never was a wide separation between Mormon and general American ideas of empire,” Nugent said.

“I find that as far as I can trace Mormons’ positions on the matter, they were strongly patriotic, expansionist, pro-imperial, Manifest Destinarian from the start. And as a group — not everybody, but in general as a group — they have not stopped.”

He acknowledged that dissenters have emerged in substantial numbers, and even high places, since 1919, when the establishment of the League of Nations just after World War I caused controversy, even among leaders of the LDS Church.

“What is relatively new since 1919 or perhaps the 1960s,” Nugent said, “is that there is now expressed a critical Americanism — a left point of view — of pacifism that is theologically and scripturally grounded. It appears to me that the transformations of 1890 to 1920 permitted this to happen.”

Nugent said that in the apostolic era of the church, roughly before 1890, it was not the American empire, but the Mormon concept of the Kingdom of God on earth that was being fostered. “The practical result may have been roughly the same, but the theology was unique.”

He added: “Perhaps it is fair to say that the United States itself has always been, in some sense, a millennial project, and that the existence of a specific kind of millennialism within it or beside it meant natural congruence, if not immediately so. By 1919, it was possible for Mormons high and low, from General Authorities to rank-and-file, to espouse varying or opposing positions on U.S. foreign policy, yet to do so within the Mormon framework. It just took a little time to find the flexibility within that framework.”

The Mormon History Association Conference concludes Sunday.

E-mail: rscott@desnews.com