The Mormon question and Mitt Romney
Share with others:
In 1890, the Supreme Court upheld a federal law that abolished the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' corporate charter and authorized the U.S. government to seize its property. This collective punishment was constitutional, the court ruled, because the Mormons' crime, polygamy, was "barbarism" and "contrary to the spirit of Christianity."
Facing institutional destruction, the Mormons renounced polygamy; this, in turn, enabled Utah's admission as a state in 1896. Over time, the twin cases that produced the court's ruling -- Late Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints v. U.S. and Romney v. U.S. -- faded into obscurity.
They're relevant again. If he wins the presidency, Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and Mormon bishop, would not be the first president to confess a historically disfavored faith. But Mr. Romney would be the first who belongs to a church that the U.S. government actually tried to crush.
The Latter-day Saints broke all the rules of Protestant-dominated 19th-century America. They considered the church's founder, Joseph Smith, a prophet, and his Book of Mormon a work as sacred as the Bible. Mormon men professed a religious duty to take multiple wives.
The "Mormon question" was also deeply political. Polygamy in the Utah territory created a constitutional crisis eerily similar to those raised by attempts to bring slavery into Kansas.
Just as anti-slavery Americans saw that institution as the basis of a corrupt, expansionist "slave power," so did anti-polygamists see plural marriage as enslavement of women and the foundation of a theocracy that could spread from Utah.
In 1856, the Republican Party platform urged Congress "to prohibit in the territories those twin relics of barbarism -- Polygamy, and Slavery." In 1857, President James Buchanan, a Democrat, sent troops to skirmish with Mormon militia in Utah. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, the first of several such laws.
Slaveholders invoked property rights; Mormon polygamists claimed religious freedom. They took their case to the Supreme Court, which ruled against them in 1879 -- holding that the Constitution did not protect polygamy any more than it protected human sacrifice.
Next came mass arrests of Mormons, denial of their rights to vote and sit on juries, threatened confiscation, and, in the end, Mormon abandonment of plural marriage -- which only a minority actually practiced.
First Published February 5, 2012 12:00 am
