Utah held its primaries back on June 23. The contest for the Democratic Party’s nomination in the 1st Congressional District attracted outsized, even national attention. Like many Democratic Party primaries this year, it featured several candidates calling themselves socialists.

Luis Villarreal was one. Liban Mohamed, who won the endorsement of the state’s party convention, acknowledged the label. Nate Blouin declined to identify as a socialist but asserted, “I certainly align with those politics.”

It may seem odd to have self-identified socialists so prominent in a state that has become deeply red in the past 30 years. But these candidates are hardly the first socialists to run for office in Utah, and many of their predecessors were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The Mormon socialists

Utah historians John Sillito and John McCormick remind us that the Socialist Party of America flourished for the first two decades of the 20th century and won nearly a million votes, 6% of the total, for its candidate, Eugene Debs, in the 1912 presidential election.

During those years, the Socialist Party elected more than 100 people to local offices all over Utah and attracted hundreds of Latter-day Saints. There were socialists with names like Parley Pratt Washburn and Joseph Smith Jessop.

Alexander Matheson was serving as a bishop in Cedar City when he ran for local office on the Socialist Party line.

Wilford Woodruff Freckleton was a Socialist Party member of the Eureka City Council when Joseph F. Smith, then president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, called him on a mission to England in 1907. He resigned his office, served his church stint and was reelected when he returned.

Socialist Theresa Viertel was a leader in Eureka’s women’s Relief Society when she was elected town treasurer in 1917.

A.L. Porter, who lived in Springville, was the Socialist Party’s candidate for multiple state offices, including governor and Utah Supreme Court. “Our political faith is Socialism,” he wrote. “Our religious faith is (Mormon) the Latter-day Saints.”

Erik Freeman’s upcoming book, “A Radical Convergence: Latter-day Saints and Their Utopian Socialist Origins,” notes that many Latter-day Saint socialists were miners and railway workers, more inspired by the union movement than Karl Marx. Unions fueled early 20th-century American socialism’s vision of greater protection for workers and public ownership of major industries like railroads.

Many of those socialists believed that the history of their own faith — the experiments in communal ownership and redistribution of property that church founder Joseph Smith and successor Brigham Young called “the law of consecration” or the “united order” — offered plenty of reasons for their political leanings.

Other American socialists also believed their politics were basically Christian. One of Eugene Debs’ applause lines was “What is socialism? Merely Christianity in action.”

The Mormon turn against socialism

There are, of course, relatively few Christian socialists in the United States today. That is because, in 1917, the Bolshevik Party — a group of ideologues who enjoyed arguing about Marx — seized power in Russia and established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a Marxist and atheist state that soon degenerated into an authoritarian dictatorship.

U.S. socialists like Debs and many of these Latter-day Saints, children of the American union movement, were not nearly as doctrinaire as the founders of the USSR. By the time of the Cold War, it seemed to most Americans that socialism equated to Soviet communism and was, by its very nature, opposed to Christianity.

So, in 1942, J. Reuben Clark of the church’s governing First Presidency delivered a talk in General Conference designed to dispel the notion that the law of consecration could be called “communist.”

The key distinction Clark saw between the faith’s law and contemporary socialist and communist movements was state power. “It was not contemplated that the church should own everything,” he insisted, “or that we should become in the church, with reference to our property and otherwise, the same kind of automaton, mannequin, that communism makes out of the individual, with the state standing at the head in place of the church.”

Of course, the main reference point Clark had was the dictatorial regime of the Soviet Union. So he thought about the question of socialism in terms of state authority and civil liberties, an approach characteristic of the Cold War.

Socialism and Mormonism

It would be easy to see Clark as historically ignorant or to see Wilford Woodruff Freckleton as naive. But I do not want to argue — because I don’t believe it is true — that either Clark or Freckleton was right. It is simplistic to argue that the church is either inherently socialist or inherently anti-socialist.

That’s in part because there is no one thing we can call “socialism.” By the time of his death in 1926, Eugene Debs was a firm critic of the Soviet Union, even though he and Josef Stalin claimed to be “socialists.” The politics of Vladimir Lenin and those of Bernie Sanders, America’s best-known socialist politician, are profoundly different. When Clark denounced the Soviet Union, many Latter-day Saint socialists would have been right there with him, which probably would have frustrated all of them.

Similarly, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were both reported as saying harsh things about “socialism.” At the same time the church had a strong record of attracting socialists who saw the church as a safe haven for them. Famous French socialist Louis Bertrand was baptized in 1850, declaring that the church was the most “interesting” form of Christianity. Mexican socialist Plotino Rhodakanaty told church President John Taylor he was relieved to find a form of Christianity that embraced socialism. And, in the 1950s and ’60s, European Latter-day Saints — residents of a continent where many mainstream political parties had adopted some variant of socialism — were alarmed when American leaders like the then-apostle Ezra Taft Benson, who would become church president, declared socialism incompatible with Christianity because they had assumed the opposite.

This doesn’t mean that any of these people — from Smith to Clark to those dismayed Swedes or even Benson — were confused about what their religion taught. Instead, it shows that the broad Mormon tradition, which includes The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is capacious and bustling, full of ideas and possibilities. There is much in its history and theology that might lend support to certain aspects of socialism and much that might be marshaled to attack socialism.

The mistake we often make is to assume that many of these categories — religious, political and others — have clear boundaries that never change, to assume that people who called themselves socialist before Marx could even walk believed the same things as the contemporary Chinese Communist Party, or to assume that the vast welter of Latter-day Saint theology and history could be boiled down to a single political policy agenda. The church General Handbook says “Faithful Latter-day Saints can belong to a variety of political parties.”

J. Reuben Clark and Wilford Woodruff Freckleton could lay claim to their faith, but neither could claim to fit it entirely into the framework of their political ideas — because the faith continues to grow and evolve beyond both their lifetimes. There are high-ranking Latter-day Saint politicians in socialist parties in the United Kingdom and South Africa. In other parts of the world, church members belong to royal families. The point is not whether Latter-day Saints can support socialism or not; the point is that they have — and many other forms of politics along with it.

Note to readers • Matthew Bowman is the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University and the author of 2024’s “Joseph Fielding Smith: A Mormon Theologian,” and co-author of 2025’s “Game Changers: AJ Dybantsa, BYU, and the Struggle for the Soul of Basketball.”