I have a very good friend who is a mormon, and he comes from a household completely ran by a very right wing father. My friend is very smart but basically grew up in a bubble of exposure to mormonism and right wing viewpoints only.
During a discussion it seemed like my good friend, talked about the founding fathers almost in the way non-mormon christians would talk about Christ…as if their “vision” for America 200+ years ago was something sacred that we could not change in any way. When I asked him why, he stammered and really had no response, but I didn’t want to push him further.
I’ve caught him basically talking in right-wing talking points before, but I’ve also heard other mormons talk so highly of the founding fathers too. I know mormons skew extremely conservative overall, so it would be hard to divulge but I am curious whether:
a) Mormons overall don’t worship the ground the founding fathers walked on, my anecdotes are not data,
b) Conservatives in general salivate over (their interpretation of) the visions of “founding fathers”, and Mormons tend to be conservative,
or C) There is a doctrinal explanation for why Mormons tend to worship the conservative interpretation of the founding fathers and think that we can not and should not ever change the constitution or our understanding of it. I think since the mormons have an…alternate understanding of the history of the Americas compared to what science tells us, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the case either.
Most active, faithful Mormons around here do indeed revere the Founding Fathers, and believe that most of them are now (heavenly) Mormons themselves, having all been baptized into the faith after their deaths, which is a very common practice for famous (and not-so-famous) people after they die.
(You may remember that the Mormon Church got into a bit of PR hot water when it came to light that they were posthumously baptizing Holocaust victims. For the record, they promised to knock it off, but I would bet anything that it still happens on a daily basis, all over the world in LDS Temple ceremonies)
The basic story goes like this. The founding of the US was a necessary step to the re-introduction of the “One True Church” to the world. So God made sure it happened. The founders were good men directly inspired by God.
The topic is pretty well covered here in an article written by the apostle Dallin Oaks. It includes the references to where in Mormon scripture (mainly the Doctrine and Covenants) it references the establishment of the constitution by the will of God.
The same way they explain polygamy and blood atonement and denying persons of color the priesthood. They do their best to dodge the question, and if they address it they only offer a superfluous “that was god’s will then, this is god’s will now, that was completely perfectly right then, and this is completely perfectly right now” answer. It’s religion, and a fairly young and clumsy one at that.
This is not an good GQ answer, as it appears to be a guess, and is pretty much wrong. I have never heard an LDS person say that slavery was God’s will for the Founding Fathers, and that it was completely right then.
LDS people do generally revere the FF, but their explanation for slavery is pretty much the same as anyone else who reveres them. They were good, inspired people, but they were not perfect. LDS folks would generally say that while the FF were inspired and pushed forward by God, this does NOT mean that every single thing they did came straight from the lips of Jehovah.
I was raised in a Mormon family. I attended church for many years. If this answer is indeed a guess, it was either independently made by many people at a lower level who were put in a position to teach me this answer or it was made by one person with high enough authority to make it a legitimate policy. Keep in mind that official doctrine today differs from official doctrine 15 years ago (when I was able to distance myself from mormonism) just as it differs from official doctrine in the early days of Mormonism when slavery would have been a more pressing issue. The idea that god changes his mind is not strange to Mormons, it is the cause and effect of having a living prophet.
There is a popular LDS painting depicting the founding fathers appearing in a vision to Wilford Woodruff, who was an LDS apostle and president of the St. George temple at the time (he later became the president/prophet of the LDS church).
I was taught this story as a fact (although I didn’t realize until today that Woodruff wasn’t the prophet at the time of the vision). While the founding fathers are not seen as infallible, there is a lot of hero-worship. I can’t really say how much of that is Mormon culture, how much is Utah culture, and how much is conservative culture.
Back in my Mormon days I read a series of books by Ron Carter called Prelude to Glory. It was basically a prequel to Gerald Lund’s The Work and the Glory series about early LDS history. Prelude is a fictional story whose characters interact with the founding fathers. There’s a lot of musing by Washington et al along the lines of “gee, I wish there was a religion that taught [insert unique mormon doctrine here]; I would totally join that religion.”
The Book of Mormon has a brief account of the discovery of America, colonization, revolution, and establishment of a democracy as paving the way for the restoration of the the real Christian church [Mormonism] as an alternative to the “whore of the earth, that great and abominable church” [mainstream Christianity]. So the founding of the United States is an important piece of God’s plans.
My seminary teacher taught that the Declaration and the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, are scripture. That may or may not be the the majority LDS opinion, but there is certainly a lot of respect for those documents.
From the Dallin Oaks article cited above: “Personally, I have never considered it necessary to defend every line of the Constitution as scriptural. For example, I find nothing scriptural in the compromise on slavery or the minimum age or years of citizenship for congressmen, senators, or the president.”
This is closest to my understanding of the teachings of the Church on the subject; inspired but not necessarily opening-of-the-heavens-revelation, not perfect or complete, as evidenced by the wisely included process of amendment.
It is not necessarily the view of many of the more conservative LDS members, especially in Utah. (I’m a Utah Mormon Democrat, FWIW.)
After Joseph Smith was arrested and then lynched the mormons were chased out of Illinois and into Utah. Their relationship with US settlers were often poor and there was the occasional massacre. Then the Utah war happened and the mormons accepted the sovreignty of the US government. Because of all of this there was a great suspicion and distrust of the US among the mormons. This is reflected in that there used to be an oath sworn by the mormons pledging undying enmity toward the US government to avenge the death of Joseph Smith and his brother.
When the mormons wanted to be accepted into the mainstream of American life they had to overcome all of this history. One of the ways they did it was to become very patriotic in reaction to what had happened before.
In my readings, I thought the LDS Church felt it had a God-given right to the eventual governing of the United States, because the Book of Mormon describes the visit that Jesus Christ made to the American continent(s), thereby granting a special Divine inheritance that Mormons have to the US.
~VOW
In LDS doctrine America is an especially blessed promised land. Opinions vary on what precisely that means, how it works or even on what is included in that promised land; like if that includes all of North and South America. But it almost always includes the whole of the continental US.
This supposedly goes all the way back. The Garden of Eden was in Missouri. And after getting kicked out Adam and Eve moved to Adam-ondi-Ahman in Caldwell County Missouri. That is also where Jesus will re-appear and will rule over earth during the Millennium. Basically prior to the flood, everything takes place in North America.
After the Tower of Babel incident, the Americas were forcibly separated from Afroeurasia. And God since then has led a series of blessed people from the old world to the new, Jaredites, Nephites, and so on. Each one wiped out and replace by a new one. We are the current blessed people to get it. And we were even prophesied about in the Book of Mormon. Columbus gets a verse. The American revolution gets a couple of verses. Joseph Smith and the establishment of the church get a few rambling chapters with the promise that: “if the Gentiles shall hearken unto the Lamb of God in that day… they shall be numbered among the seed of thy father; yea, they shall be numbered among the house of Israel; and they shall be a blessed people upon the promised land forever;” - 1 Nephi 14:1-2
So if they stay good the Mormons get the promised land of Lehi, ie America.
I confess I haven’t been inside a Mormon temple, or even a meetinghouse, for a few years. That’s exactly how I remember the painting, except in color. On google I also found this one and this one and this one.
There’s a big painting of the vision in the foyer at the St George temple. I remember it because my uncle pointed out a guy in the front row who is his ancestor.
