University of Utah President Michael Young put the secular rivalry between his school and Brigham Young University aside on Tuesday, asking LDS students to help create an environment that promotes religious freedom for all nations.

Speaking during a devotional assembly at BYU-Idaho in Rexburg, the former chair of the U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom said he believes Latter-day Saints "have the privilege and the opportunity to create a world in which the gospel can prevail. We have the opportunity to create an environment where people can choose whom they will serve," in a religious sense, he said.

Young said he didn't set out as a young man to help foster religious freedom, but became an "accidental traveler" along the way, first serving as an LDS missionary in Japan, and then after college and his early career, moving into roles of increasing responsibility nationally and internationally.

In 1989, he was invited by President George H. W. Bush to serve in the U.S. State Department, where he helped negotiate the Helsinki Accords on human rights, which made nations responsible for how they treat their own citizens, he said. As a result, he was invited to help organize a new human rights curriculum at Columbia University that included training for religious rights activists. His reputation as "an observant and faithful member of the LDS Church" was critical to that assignment, he said.

That role subsequently led to his appointment to the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom, created in 1998 to advise U.S. leaders on how foreign policy could be structured to better encourage religious freedom around the world.

He told students if they are "doing the things the Lord wants and are prepared, he will put you in position to do things for his church and to participate in building his kingdom in ways distinctive" from those that others may do.

Because religion is so important to people individually, it was historically and is today a central component of geopolitical activity because it addresses life's basic questions. He noted the role of the Catholic Church in bringing down the Iron Curtain, the black church in the U.S. civil rights movement, and the Lutheran Church's involvement in the reunification of Germany.

Religion also has manifest itself in brutal ways, as exemplified by the Taliban in Afghanistan, Japan's use of the Shinto principles to incite a virulent form of nationalism during World War II and the current Islamic extremism prevalent in African and Middle Eastern conflicts.