Before migrating West, early Latter-day Saints were persecuted, in part, because government officials at the time were concerned about maintaining political power in the face of a growing LDS minority with different religious views.

That's one way modern theory about the intersection of government and religion can be applied to LDS history, which is the topic of the three-day Mormon History Association meetings that began Thursday night with a speech by University of Utah President Michael Young.

The former chair of the U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom, Young said governments have various ways of dealing with religion based on their beliefs about their own legitimacy and the loyalty they are able to engender among their own citizens. He sees four "archetypes" of how religion and government mesh:

• Authoritarian regimes that suppress any religious expression in order to maintain social and political control, and see religion as a rival center of power. North Korea, Vietnam and, to a large extent, China fit that model.

• Politicians who use state-sponsored religion to provide government with a legitimacy it is unable to generate on its own. Such governments use religion as a moral force to engender loyalty among citizens and to perpetuate laws that maintain the power and authority of both the state and the dominant faith. Iran is a prime example of a nation that engages in sanctioned discrimination against those who don't belong to "the faith."

• Governments that are either unable or unwilling to protect citizens from human-rights abuses carried out by religiously based organizations that use their ideology as an oppressive moral force. Indonesia, India and Pakistan are examples.

• Functioning governments that are secure in their own legitimacy and power but are insecure about the strength of their own people to determine truth. In recent years, both France and Belgium have attempted to shield their citizens from being approached by groups they consider to be "cults" that engage in "overbearing of the will." Latter-day Saints are considered members of a cult by many in Europe, Young said.

Yet many European governments cut a broad swath for and provide economic aid to a growing minority of Muslims within their borders, while also marginalizing them politically and socially. Such an approach comes from "failing to take religion seriously," he said.

Much the same can be said of academe, "which has failed as much as any institution in failing to take religion very seriously as a political, sociological, economic and historical force." Young said he wonders at all the hand-wringing over the political force of evangelical Christians in American politics, and laid part of the blame on media that he said also fail to take religion seriously.