Johan Jensen was a tempestuous sea captain newly committed to Jesus Christ and religious freedom when he landed in jail in Norway in 1852.

There is a direct tie from Jensen’s arrest and stay at the Fredrikstad Jail to the leadership of President Russell M. Nelson of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Jensen underwent such a deep conversion to Christ’s teachings in 1849 that he gave most of his possessions to the poor. His new fervor was a direct result of the arrival of a Methodist preacher in Norway that year, but it was a bumpy fork in the road to take in a country where Lutheranism was the state religion.

In October 1852, he found himself locked up in the Fredrikstad Jail’s citizens’ room with five Latter-day Saint missionaries who had been arrested for preaching the doctrine of another faith not sponsored by the government.

“I now forbid you to mislead any more souls by your false doctrines,” the chief interrogator told one of the missionaries, Christian Larsen.

“No freedom of religion there,” Elder Marcus B. Nash, a General Authority Seventy, said at BYU’s recent Religious Freedom Annual Review. Elder Nash is Larsen’s third great-grandson.

Larsen spent six months in the room singing hymns with his companions. Jensen joined the missionaries in the room after officials objected to a letter he wrote about his religious convictions. The local newspaper, the Christianposten, published the letter and a judge sentenced Jensen to a year in prison.

The jailer, Jacob Fjelstad, allowed the missionaries to leave the jail with him to visit local Latter-day Saints. He also listened to their preaching with his children. On a Sunday morning in April 1854, he and his son visited the room and Jensen joined the conversation as the missionaries preached.

During the discussion, Jensen suddenly began to weep. He declared the missionaries’ message was true , and after he was released from prison, Larsen baptized Jensen in the Glåma River, on Feb. 25,1854.

Jensen is President Nelson’s great-grandfather.

“The topic of religious freedom is personal for me,” Elder Nash said at BYU.

He noted that Jensen’s conversion led to President Nelson’s leadership and teachings about the gospel of Jesus Christ.

“President Nelson’s religious teachings have helped millions of humans, literally millions of humans, including me and my family,” he said. “Millions more will flourish to the degree we take to heart his charge to be peacemakers. So my invitation today is that we actively live our faith and engage with others as peacemakers in our factious world.”

President Nelson and his first counselor in the First Presidency, President Dallin H. Oaks, and other Latter-day Saint leaders have called for church members and others to reject fractious polarization and work to understand others.

“I advocate the moral and political imperative of reconciling existing conflicts and avoiding new ones,” President Oaks said at the University of Virginia in 2021. “The goals of both sides are best served by resolving differences through mutual respect, shared understanding and good-faith negotiations, and both must accept and respect the rule of law.”

Those teachings became the centerpiece of a chapter in a recently released book that argues that Latter-day Saint leaders have articulated a Christ-centered doctrine about reconciling political and other differences.

“One of the reasons that I’m here,” said the book’s author, Jonathan Rauch, during a speech at BYU this year, “is that in all of Christian America, I can only think of one church that has worked out an articulated civic theology of how Christians should address politics and the public world.

Elder Nash reiterated those teachings at BYU to an audience of lawyers and academic experts in human flourishing.

“As we seek to moderate and unify, according to just and holy principles, we can help lift our families, our communities and nations to a higher, better place,” he said. “As we weave faith, morality, love and fairness into the political tapestry of the nations in which we live, religion will thrive and the people and the nations will flourish.