Anti-Mormon DVD triggers a strong LDS Church rebuke

A recent mass distribution of anti-Mormon DVDs has triggered a strong rebuke from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The DVD, "Jesus Christ/Joseph Smith," is part of a campaign targeting Mormonism that was launched by various Christian organizations on Sunday in the United States and Canada. Areas with a high concentration of LDS Church members — like Utah — are expected to receive the bulk of the DVDs, but an estimated 500,000 copies are expected to be delivered across the United States and Canada by the end of the week.

"Groups opposed to the (LDS Church) have a perfect right to distribute their materials in ways that are legal," said a statement posted Thursday on the church's Web site, www.lds.org. "The issue is not one of rights. Rather, it is that one religious group chooses to target another with a DVD full of distortions of its doctrine and history, and misrepresentations so stark that they call into question the integrity of the producers."

The video — which features an LDS temple and a picture of Joseph Smith on the cover — is designed to expose the "fatal flaws" of the LDS Church, said Floyd McElveen, who helped create the DVD.

McElveen, a retired Baptist preacher from Petal, Miss., said he helped create the video to warn Mormons and "save" them.

"We may be wrong — I'm 100 percent convinced that we're not — but we believe the doctrines of the LDS Church cause people to be deceived and go to hell," McElveen said. "Now if they believed that about me, even if they were wrong, they would be monsters if they didn't try to reach me and warn me. ... As long as I have breath, I'll try to reach Mormons for the real Christ, the biblical Christ."

McElveen said the video has been finished for several months, but efforts were made to keep the project hidden from public knowledge until March 25, the campaign's kickoff day. The campaign was planned to coincide with the semi-annual General Conference of the LDS Church, which begins Saturday.

"We knew what would happen (if the information got out)," McElveen said. "We knew when the (LDS) bishops heard about it they would say, 'Throw it in the wastebaskets,' and that's a lot of money to throw away. We wanted a fair shake."

McElveen says he helped plan the distribution out of love, but the campaign has come under fire from other religious organizations who disapprove of the effort.

In Arizona, where a door-to-door distribution was organized, Jewish Anti-Defamation League Regional Board Chairman David Bodney criticized the effort, saying that "hate directed at any of us is hate directed at all of us."