The Bible in American Law and Politics. John R. Vile
Reconstructionism.” Church History 77 (June): 399–437.
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, colloquially known as the Mormons or the LDS, is an indigenous American religion that grew out of 97visions of Joseph Smith of Palmyra, New York. By his testimony, an angel named Moroni appeared to him and revealed the presence of golden plates that, with the help of the Urim and Thummin, parts of the priestly vestments mentioned in the Old Testament, he was able to translate as the Book of Mormon, which was first published in 1830.
This book, which has since been recognized as an additional Scripture by the LDS, described how a Hebrew prophet named Lehi, with the help of his sons Laman and Nephi, fled before King Nebuchadnezzar attacked Jerusalem in 586 BC and sailed to America. Nephi’s sons remained godly whereas the sons of Laman were unrighteous and were cursed by God with darker skin (Wood 2000, 170–71). After Jesus was crucified, he came to America to preach to both peoples and initiated a period of peace that lasted until the Lamanites finally wiped out the Nephites in the fifth century AD, leaving Moroni to write their history, which Smith later recovered.
Like other Restorationist movements of his day, Smith sought to restore religious practice to that of the Old Testament and the early church. The church puts great emphasis on its temples, where couples can be married for eternity. To this day, the church has a hierarchical arrangement that allows, like the Book of Mormon, for continuing revelation. According to Timothy Wood, Smith had a looser conception of monotheism that essentially regarded the differences between God and man more as what Wood describes as “differences in degree, not of essence” (Wood 2000, 173). In time, believers could progress into godhead; unions that were blessed in the temple would be united forever in heaven. LDS members are to refrain from tea, coffee, tobacco, and alcohol.
The LDS Church regards the translations and writings of Joseph Smith as revelations that supplement the Bible, which they also revere, but the translation of which they believe has been corrupted over time. In addition to translating the Book of Mormon, Smith also wrote the Doctrine and Covenants, The Pearl of Great Price, and his own emendations of the King James Bible (Joseph Smith Translation, or JST). One scholar observes that this retranslation “was not a traditional rendering of the text. The project bore a certain resemblance to targumic translation, a tradition of expansive interpretation that often meant the pursuit not just of what the Bible had originally said, but of what the Bible should have said” (Holland 2017, 617). He further observed that “Smith’s translation of the Bible not only altered certain phrases and reworked particular passages; it created entire new chapters. Engagement with the text became the setting for both exegesis and ongoing revelation. Most of the textual changes that emerged from his translation drew more heavily from Smith’s sense of inspiration than his philology” (617). Two scholars who have studied the subject observe, “While expressing a strong and basic general belief in the Bible, early Mormon leaders limited the authority of the Bible by (1) promulgating an extra-Biblical canon, (2) placing primacy on living prophets over received Scriptures, (3) representing Scripture as but one source of truth among others, (4) stressing the corruptions in the received text of the Bible, and (5) dismissing portions of it as uninspired” (Mauss and Barlow 1991, 406). As the LDS Church has become more conservative in recent years, it has joined fundamentalist Protestant churches in recognizing the King James Version of the Bible as the most accurate (Mauss and Barlow 1991).
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The LDS Church encountered significant resistance in its early years, both from those who believed that the existing Bible was complete and from those who were concerned that the tight-knit communities, often composed of a high number of immigrants, formed in a tight hierarchy threatened traditional republican ideals of government. In 1838, Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs ordered the Church to leave the state or be met with force. Church members then moved to Nauvoo, Illinois, where they built another temple. It was there that Joseph Smith launched a bid for the presidency before being assassinated by a local mob.
In time, the LDS Church moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, where it established its national headquarters and build its most impressive temple. It was there that Brigham Young, who had succeeded Smith as the head of the Church, announced that the LDS had embraced polygamy, a practice that, although not uncommon in the lives of some Old Testament patriarchs, many Americans associated with slavery and with uncivilized nations. Although the United States had to this point left matters of family law to the states, it adopted the Morrill Act and others that sought to limit such practice in Utah and other areas that remained territories and arrested many members for violating the law. In Reynolds v. United States (1879), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law against charges that it violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment by arguing that while leaving individual beliefs intact, the amendment did not prohibit the regulation of conduct. Perhaps because of this and similar decisions, the nation did not adopt a constitutional amendment prohibiting the practice.
In 1890, the Church announced an official end to polygamy, and in 1891, it dissolved its People’s Party. In 1896, Utah was admitted into the Union as the forty-fifth state. Even in 1902, however, the U.S. Senate questioned whether Reed Smoot, who was one of the LDS apostles, should be permitted to sit in this body. Although the Senate ultimately ruled in his favor, Mormon candidates for nationwide office have faced concerns, similar to those once expressed about Roman Catholics, about their independence from the Church.
In recent years, the LDS Church has become increasingly identified with the Republican Party and with conservative ideology. Its members have taken strong stands against same-sex marriage and abortion. In 2008, Mitt Romney, a member, won the Republican nomination for president.
See also Alternate Scriptures; Polygamy; Roman Catholics; Romney, Mitt; Smith, Joseph
For Reference and Further Reading
Campbell, David E ., and J. Quin Monson. “Dry Kindling: A Political Profile of American Mormons.” From Pews to Polling Places: Faith and Politics in the American Religious Mosaic, ed. J. Matthew Wilson. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, pp. 105–29.
Cannon, Mark W. 1961. “The Crusades against the Masons, Catholics, and Mormons: Separate Waves of a Common Current.” Brigham Young University Studies 3 (Winter): 23–49.
Dias, Elizabeth. 2019. “‘Mormon’ No More: Faithful Reflect on Church’s Move to Scrap a Moniker.” New York Times. June 29.
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Gordon, Sarah Barringer. 2002. The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Holland, David. 2017. “The Bible and Mormonism.” The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in America, ed. Paul C. Gutjahr. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 611–26.
Mauss, Armand L ., and Philip L. Barlow. 1991. “Church, Sect, and Scripture: The Protestant Bible and Mormon Sectarian Retrenchment.” Sociological Analysis 52 (Winter): 397–414.
Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1879).
Talbot, Christine. 2013. A Foreign Kingdom: Mormons and Polygamy in American Political Culture, 1852–1890. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Turner, John G. 2012. Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wood, Timothy L. 2000. “The Prophet and the Presidency: Mormonism and Politics in Joseph Smith’s 1844 Presidential Campaign.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 93 (Summer): 167–93.
Cincinnati Bible War of 1869
Although the U.S. Supreme Court did not outlaw devotional Bible reading in public schools until its decision in Abington v. Schempp in 1963, the issue had flared in a number of cities during the nineteenth century including Philadelphia, New York, and Cincinnati. The latter controversy