NOTE: This is a rough draft of an article which well eventually be published by De Paul University.  When the final version becomes available it will be posted through LDS Papers.

INTRODUCTION

Mormons have a well deserved reputation as a practical people. In the past their greatest achievements have been matters of organization and work: transcontinental migrations, massive building projects under primitive conditions, international missionary work. Comparatively few Mormons have tried to sketch theoretical approaches to problems based on their faith. Thus any attempt to sketch a Mormon theory of Church and state confronts the absence of a sustained theoretical literature addressing this question. There is no Mormon Summa Theologica from which a theorist can begin. Although there have been interesting and insightful Mormon writers, there is no historically continuous discussion of church-state issues upon which one can hang a theory. For a writer approaching the issue it is an excitingly open field but also one that creates a difficult question of how to proceed.

A practical way to begin the theoretical problem of a practical people is to look at their experience. This paper will argue that within the church-state practice of the Mormons a consistent theme emerges that flows from their religious beliefs. That consistent theme is the primacy religious institutional autonomy. During the course of the twentieth century there have been fairly radical shifts in the external policy of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, yet within that shifting pattern of practice there emerges a consistent and structuring concern for the autonomy of the Church. This concern for autonomy flows from Mormon theology. Part of the imperatives placed on Latter-day Saints by the Lord is the requirement to build up a community according to his pattern. This places a great deal of theological emphasis on the need for the Church to pursue its program of community building independent of state interference.

To begin the story of Mormon church-state relations in the twentieth century, we must go back a little bit more than a century to the watershed year of 1890. A snap shot of the Church in that year will provide a ready contrast to the Church today. Understanding the shift in practice from 1890 to today will give us a background in the twentieth century experience of Mormon church-state relations. That experience, coupled with an understanding of certain Latter-day Saint religious doctrines, provides the basis for constructing a Mormon theory of church and state based on the primacy of institutional religious autonomy.

THE CHURCH IN 1890

In 1890 the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was an embattled and relatively small organization. Although the Church had been marked by steady growth since its beginning 60 years earlier, in all there were only 188,263 Mormons in 1890. They were concentrated almost exclusively in Utah and the surrounding territories and states. The Church was pursuing an international missionary effort, but it was small, with only 283 missionaries concentrated mostly in the United States and Western Europe (Mortimer, et al. 1998, E6). Politically, the Church was in perhaps the most precarious position of its history. After years of tangles with local authorities and mobs, the Church was locked in a life or death struggle with the federal government. 1890 would see the resolution of that struggle with the Church’s abandonment of polygamy. The year would mark an important turning point for the Church.

To understand the importance of this year we first must take a brief tour of even earlier Mormon history. Founded in 1830, the early history of the Latter-day Saints was defined by persecution, flight, and more persecution. In December of 1830, Joseph Smith announced a revelation instructing the Latter-day Saints to gather in Kirtland, Ohio (D&C 37; see also Allen and Leonard 1992, 63-67 and Bushman 1984, 174-76). Over the next sixteen years the Lord commanded the Saints to gather successively in Ohio; Independence, Missouri; Far West, Missouri; and finally in Nauvoo, Illinois. Each time they were forced from their homes by hostile and suspicious neighbors. Their final expulsion from Missouri was by order of Governor Wilburn Boggs who declared that "the Mormons must be treated as enemies and must be exterminated or driven from the state, if necessary for the public good" (HC 3:175).

The Mormons found temporary haven in Illinois. On the banks of the Mississippi, they founded the city of Nauvoo and obtained a charter from the state legislature that granted the city a quasi-independent status (Roberts 1965, 2:53-57). Protected within their semi-autonomous city-state, for a time the Saints prospered. At one point Nauvoo was the largest city in Illinois, and at its peak in 1845 it had 15,000 inhabitants (Roberts 1965, 2:85 and Ludlow 1992, 990). But their hiatus was temporary. Persecution began again. On June 27, 1844 a mob murdered Joseph Smith at Carthage, Illinois, and by 1846 the Latter-day Saints had completely abandoned the state and begun their exodus to Utah.

For ten years the Mormons in Utah enjoyed almost complete independence. In 1856, that began to change. In that year, the newly formed Republican Party ran John C. Fremont for president on a platform promising to eradicate "the twin relics of barbarism: slavery and polygamy" (Allen and Leonard 1992, 305). First announced publicly in 1852, Mormons considered the practice of plural marriage to be a direct command from God, but to the rest of Victorian America it was an affront to religion, civilization, and family. It had to be destroyed (see Ludlow 1992, 1091-95 and D&C 132). Fremont lost the election, but in 1857, acting on false reports of a Mormon rebellion, President James Buchannan dispatched the bulk of the United States Army to occupy the territory of Utah. Thus began the process of federal pressure that would lead to the events of 1890.

In 1862 Congress passed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, criminalizing polygamy in the territories. Over the next twenty-five years Congress passed a succession of increasingly harsh measures directed at the Mormons. Although these acts were ostensibly aimed at stamping out polygamy, they had the broader goal of destroying the unique political and economic order established by the Mormons in the intermountain west. Harking back to the Puritan ideal of a "City on a Hill," the Mormons sought to establish what they called "Zion," a society based on their interpretation of the Gospel and marked by love, harmony, rough social and economic equality, righteousness, and divinely inspired leadership (see Ludlow 1992, 1624-26). To outsiders, however, the Mormon Zion looked like an anti-democratic, un-American, and dictatorial theocracy.

The Mormons challenged the anti-polygamy legislation in court, claiming that it infringed on their first amendment right to free-exercise of religion. The Supreme Court, however, was not persuaded and upheld the anti-Mormon laws in Reynolds v. the United States (98 US 145 [1879]). Over the course of the 1880s pressure against the Church increased. In 1882, Congress passed the Edmunds Act making it easier to prosecute polygamists. Coming just after Reconstruction, the 1880s was a time when lawmakers, especially Republican lawmakers, felt very comfortable with using sometimes harsh federal measures to coerce recalcitrant citizens into line. During this time, known among Mormons as "the Raid," anti-Mormons passed a series of laws attacking the Latter-day Saints. Federal marshals and bounty hunters flooded Utah in a search for "polygs" and "cohabs." Thousands of Mormon men were incarcerated or forced to go into hiding. All polygamists were disenfranchised. Wives were forced to testify against their husbands. Women's suffrage, which had initially been supported in an attempt to "liberate" Mormon women, was revoked when it was found that Mormon women voted exactly like their male counterparts. Polygamists were excluded from public office. Finally, in Idaho all Mormons were disenfranchised, barred from jury duty, and completely excluded from political office (Allen and Leonard 1992, 399-407).

The final blow came in 1887 when Congress passed the Edmunds-Tucker Act. This law aimed at nothing less than the destruction of the Church as an institution. The Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was formally dissolved and the federal government confiscated all Church property in excess of $50,000. In addition the Perpetual Immigration Fund, which had financed the immigration of Mormon converts from abroad, was dissolved and all of its property confiscated. During the course of its forty-year attempt to build Zion in Utah, the Church had become deeply involved in the economic life of the territory, financing fledgling industries in an attempt to make Mormondom economically self-sufficient. All of these assets now flowed into the hands of the federal government. More importantly, Edmunds-Tucker threatened the sacred and secret Mormon temples with confiscation and desecration by federal officials. Forced to borrow money to meet its operating expenses, fight legal battles, and rent its property back from the federal government, the Church was sinking ever farther into debt, while its precarious legal status made it increasingly difficult to obtain the credit it needed to survive. And all the while the lawyers appointed as trustees by the federal government ate away the Church’s assets in a free-for-all of attorney's fees (see Arington 1958, 360-79 and Firmage and Mangrum 1988, 197-209).

In the face of this pressure, the Church relented. In October of 1890, then Church President Wilford Woodruff announced what is known as the Manifesto abandoning the practice of plural marriage (D&C Official Declaration 1). With the end of plural marriage, animus against the Church slowly began to dissipate and federal pressure relaxed. The property of the Church was returned, and in 1894 President Cleveland issued an amnesty to all Latter-day Saints (Allen and Leonard 1992, 422-23).

THE CHURCH TODAY

Today the Church presents a very different picture, the defining characteristic of which is explosive growth. At the beginning of 1999 there were 10,354,241 Latter-day Saints throughout the world (Church 1999). The huge increase in membership in the last one hundred years is the result of a massive missionary out reach. Today there are approximately 60,000 LDS missionaries, and during the course of the 1990s they have won about 300,000 converts each year (Church 1999). In all, today there are 25,551 Latter-day Saint congregations around the world, speaking 175 languages (Church 1999).

The distribution of this membership is also very different from 1890. A hundred years ago the typical Mormon was a second or third generation member living in Utah (Ludlow 1992, 1525). Today, the typical member is a recent convert living outside of the United States. On February 25, 1996, the Church passed an important milestone on its road to internalization. On that day the balance of Church membership tipped, with more members living outside the United States than inside (Todd 1996, 76). There are now over 300,000 more Latter-day Saints outside the United States than inside of it, and the gap between the number of international and American members continues to widen (Church 1999).

According to sociologist Rodney Stark, if Latter-day Saints retain their current rate of growth, they "will soon achieve a worldwide following comparable to that of Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and the other dominant world faiths" (Stark 1984, 18). Stark admits that such predictions seem far-fetched, but he argues that the numbers bear his thesis out. Assuming a steady growth rate of 50 percent per decade (a rate which the Church has exceeded for the last thirty years) by 2080 there will be 265,259,000 Latter-day Saints (Stark 1984, 22). Even at a more conservative growth rate of 30 percent per decade, Stark predicts 63,415,000 Mormons in eighty years (Stark 1984, 22). He thus argues that in Mormonism we can see one of the rare events of history: the rise of a new world faith. If this is correct, he argues, Mormonism will be the first new world faith since Mohammed rode out of the desert 1,400 years ago (Stark 1984, 18).

SHIFTING PERSPECTIVES

During the century between these two snapshots, there has been a shift in the Mormon practice of church-state relations. This shift can be summarized as a move from an integrationist to a seperationist position. Prior to 1890, the public life of the Church was highly integrated. There was, from certain perspectives, little separation between religious and other forms of social ordering. This was not entirely true of course, because Mormonism existed in the territory of Utah, which was ruled by the federal officials who were typically hostile to the Mormons. These federal rulers were "separate" in the sense that enemy rulers are generally separate. Because of this situation, however, actual life within the Mormon community was even more highly integrated that it might otherwise have been. The Church directed and funded cooperative businesses; planned and carried out a massive colonization effort; and, intervened in politics to protect this system (see Arrington 1958, and Arrington and Bitton 1979, 109-45). Institutions like the semi-secret Council of Fifty helped to coordinate the Church's political efforts, selecting and supporting pro-Mormon candidates, lobbying territorial, state, and national legislatures, and conveying the Church's position to loyal Mormon office holders in Utah (see Quinn 1979). Finally, Church courts, originally established to resolve ecclesiastical and doctrinal disputes, expanded to provide a forum for the resolution for virtually every non-criminal case among the Saints (Firmage and Mangrum 1988, 263-79).

By contrast, during the twentieth century the Church has tended to take a lower profile in political affairs. In 1896, after nearly fifty years of failed attempts, Utah was finally admitted to the union as a state (Allen and Leonard 1992, 424). Fear about Mormon dominance of local government delayed statehood, and it was only after a series of informal promises by the Church that Congress relented. Chief among these was the abandonment of polygamy, but there were others as well. The most important of these was an understanding that the Church would no longer attempt to control Utah politics. This deal was implicitly written into the language of the Utah constitution, which declares that no "church shall dominate the state or interfere with its functions" (Utah Constitution, Art. I Sec. 4).

The Church disbanded its local political party, the People's Party, in 1896 and encouraged its members to join the two national parties. Because Republicans had spearheaded the anti-Mormon crusades of the 1870s and 1880s most Mormons were inclined to the Democrats. Some Church leaders, fearful of a Republican controlled Congress, labored to bring members into the GOP. The folklore of Utah politics claims that some Mormon bishops divided their flocks down the middle of the chapel, assigning half the members to one party and half to another (Arrington and Bitton 1979, 247). Ironically, at century’s end the situation (in Utah at least) seems to have reversed itself. Church leaders recently expressed some concern about Utah’s overwhelming GOP majority (reference to Jensen interview).

During the same period, the thickly integrated Mormon society of the nineteenth century gave way to less controversial models. The Church gradually withdrew from Utah's economy, and those interests it maintained were transformed from religious cooperatives into profit making businesses (Arrington and Bitton 1979, 262-63, and Allen and Leonard 1992, 453-55). Likewise, the expansive jurisdiction of Church courts contracted as Latter-day Saints took their disputes to secular forums for resolution (Firmage and Mangrum 1988, 371-72).

Yet the Church was still not free from legal harassment. Although new plural marriages officially ceased in 1890, there were still many polygamous families formed prior to the Manifesto. Although in some cases the law broke up these families, in general there was an informal truce under which prosecutors agreed not to go after polygamists so long as they did not enter into new marriages or continue to advocate polygamy. Thus, even though presidential pardons had rehabilitated polygamists disenfranchised and disqualified from office by the Edmunds-Tucker Act, many Mormons continued to live in technical violation of the law rather than abandon their families. This gave politically minded prosecutors a special point of leverage over the Church and its leaders. In 1895 the United States Attorney for Utah informed Church leaders that he had a list of 350 of the leading men of the Church who were prosecutable under anti-polygamy statutes. Although no formal threats were made, the leaders got the message: activity unacceptable to the U.S. Attorney would be met with reprisals on the Church (Decker 1997, 37). Such threats were actually carried out. When a briefly insurgent anti-Mormon group known as the American Party captured control of the Salt Lake City municipal government in 1905, they immediately charged Church President Joseph F. Smith, who continued to live with his pre-1890 polygamous families, with unlawful cohabitation. Smith paid a $300 fine and the anti-Mormon Salt Lake Tribune gleefully predicted the prosecution of other Church leaders (Decker 1997, 39).

In response to fears of this kind of blackmail, the Church tried to unobtrusively change the law. When Utah was admitted as a state many of the territorial statutes were codified into state law. Among these was an anti-polygamy law that allowed anti-Mormons to bring embarrassing actions against Church members. In 1900, then Church President Lorenzo Snow responded to a national call for an anti-polygamy amendment to the U.S. Constitution by reaffirming the Church’s ban on plural marriage. At the same time, the Church was quietly lobbying the Utah state legislature to repeal the territorial anti-polygamy law. When the Church’s efforts became public, many in the press accused the Church of duplicity and of trying to re-institute polygamy. In the face of public pressure the Church had to back pedal, publicly endorsing Mormon Governor Heber Wells’s veto of the repeal. The storm quieted down, but the harassing law remained on the books (Allen and Leonard 1992, 445).

In this atmosphere of vulnerability, prominent Church leaders continued to play an active role in politics, although their efforts raised howling protest. The first test came in 1898 when B.H. Roberts, one of the Presidents of the Seventy (the third highest governing body of the Church), won a seat in the House of Representatives. Roberts had entered into polygamous marriages prior to the Manifesto, and his election raised a storm of national protest. A group of Protestant ministers in Utah alleged that Roberts’s election violated the "covenant made between the Mormon leaders and the government when Utah was admitted to statehood" (Roberts 1965, 6:364). In an open letter to the New York Telegraph, Church President Lorenzo Snow denied that the Church had supported Roberts, or that he was in anyway "the church candidate" (Roberts 1965, 6:365). A national coalition of mainly Protestant ministers eventually collected seven million signatures on a petition asking that Roberts be excluded from the House. In the face of such pressure, the House voted to 244 to 50 not to seat Roberts (Roberts 1965, 6:367).

The same issue resurfaced with greater intensity four years later. In 1902, Reed Smoot, a monogamous member of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles (the second highest governing body in the Church), won one of Utah's senate seats. The same group mobilized to oppose Smoot. Although the Senate chose to seat him, they referred the question to the Committee on Privileges. Beginning in 1904, the committee launched a thirty-month investigation that quickly shifted focus from Smoot to the Church (Allen and Leonard 1992, 446). Garnering national attention, the Committee subpoenaed and subjected high Church officials, including Church President Joseph F. Smith, to often withering cross-examination. The central issues were whether or not the Church had fully abandoned polygamy and whether or not the Church hierarchy controlled the politics of its members (Allen and Leonard 1992, 446). Although a majority of the committee voted against Smoot, the Senate eventually allowed him to retain his seat. He was reelected four times and eventually rose to become one of the inner circle of kingmakers in the Republican party (Arrington and Bitton 1979, 248, and Decker 1997, 40).

Decreasing Church interest in the day to day struggles of electoral politics marked the era following the Smoot hearings. This was partly the result of the public bruising the Church received during the hearings. However demographics were also at work. In the decades following the Manifesto, the Church had been particularly vulnerable because many members continued to live with the polygamous families created prior to the Church's abandonment of polygamy. As these polygamists slowly died out and the anti-Mormon fervor of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries waned, the Church was less vulnerable in the face of old anti-Mormon laws.

Church leaders, however, continued to maintain their right to speak out on "moral issues." Church President Heber J. Grant campaigned, unsuccessfully, to keep Utah from joining the movement to repeal prohibition. Despite his pleas, however, Utah Mormons, hard hit by the Depression and persuaded by FDR that repealing prohibition was necessary for prosperity, cast the deciding vote for the twenty-first amendment. The London Evening News declared "Prohibition Is Dead! Mormons Killed It! Whoopee! Happy Days Are Here Again!" (Decker 1997, 41). Grant also obliquely endorsed Alf Landon against Roosevelt in 1936, only to be rebuffed by Utah's voters, who cast 70 percent of their ballots for the Democrats (Decker 1997, 41).

During the 1950’s there was a proposal that would have reapportioned Utah so as to virtually guarantee Mormon dominance of the upper house of the state legislature. Several leaders of the Church privately supported the measure and wanted the Church to publicly endorse it. Then Church President David O. McKay, however, allowed a statement to be published stating that "the Church takes no position with reference [to the proposed reapportionment]." He made some reference to the fact that "when the Church was in Missouri as a minority group, it certainly would be opposed to political interference by some other church" (Decker 1997, ??-??). The proposal ultimately failed.

Increasing, the Church has limited its political involvement to moral issues, including the promotion of religious freedom. In contrast to the failed political forays of the 1930s, during the 1970s and ‘80s the Church prevailed in battles against liquor, gambling, the MX missile, and, in conjunction with other groups, the ERA. In more recent years, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has teamed up with Catholics to oppose same sex marriages (Church News 1995, 12). The Church has also been a prominent member of the coalition seeking to expand religious freedom through the Religious Liberty Restoration Act and the Religious Liberty Protection Act. In addition the Church has fought mandatory disclosure laws aimed at the clergy-penitent privilege and worked to protect the independence of religious schools.

THE IMPACT OF INTERNATIONALIZATION

Cole Durham will write a section here in which he discusses the Church’s international expansion and the church-state issues it has raised. I think the basic theme will be something like: internationally government has a been a real pain for the Latter-day Saints, and the Church has done everything they could to just get government out of its way so that the Church could grow in peace.

DOCTRINAL FRAMEWORK

In light of this background, we can start to sketch the contours of a Latter-day Saint church-state theory. On one level much of a Mormon theory is familiar to other Christians. Like other Christians, Mormons are committed to following the dictates of God while living within the power structures of the world. With the rest of Christianity, Latter-day Saints pray to God, "thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven" (Matt 6:10). At the same time they are committed to "rendering to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s" (Mark 12:16). Furthermore, Mormons oppose using the tools of Caesar to impose the will of God. In March of 1842, Joseph Smith sketched out a brief statement of Mormon beliefs known as the Articles of Faith where he endorsed religious freedom and secular obedience:

To understand Latter-day Saint perspectives, however, one must understand certain distinctively Mormon doctrinal positions as starting points. With the rest of Christianity, Mormons pray that "thy Kingdom come" (Matt 6:10). They foresee a final denouement to history in the literal second coming of Christ, who will usher in a final, millennial peace. Yet this vision of the millennial kingdom is also linked to Mormon understandings of life after death. Latter-day Saints have a graded view of the after-life with more post-mortal options than the traditional view of heaven and hell (cf. D&C 76). For Mormons the highest level of the after-life is a life in Christ’s millennial kingdom lived in accordance with God’s commandments. Thus the heavenly and millennial expectations of Latter-day Saints are linked in a single vision of an ideal community under God. This vision of the ideal community is captured in the Mormon concept of "Zion."

In Latter-day Saint thought Zion can have two basic meanings. The first refers to "the pure in heart" (D&C 97:21). A passage from Latter-day Saint scripture states, "And the Lord called his people Zion because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them" (Moses 7:18). The second concept refers to some particular place where an ideal community based on obedience to the laws of God and governed by direct revelation from him (cf. D&C 28:9; Moses 7:19). These two concepts converge in the attempts of the Latter-day Saints to fashion an ideal community.

The striving to build Zion is at the core of Latter-day Saint experience. Furthermore, this experience is more than a yearning for a heavenly kingdom at the end of history or after death. It has been a concrete struggle to realize such a community on earth. From its foundation the Lord has commanded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to "seek to bring forth and establish the cause of Zion" (D&C 6:6). The attempts of the Latter-day Saints to bring forth Zion have taken many forms, but all have been united by a common ideal: the commandment to prepare, in embryo, some imperfect version of the millennial kingdom to meet Christ at his second coming. Thus Latter-day Saints give a communitarian aspect to the teachings of the ancient Apostle John who said, "Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he [Christ] shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is" (1 John 3:2). Latter-day Saints hope to build a community such that when the millennial kingdom shall appear their community will be like it, even though it is only at that moment that they shall truly see Zion as it should be.

The early history of the Church was marked by repeated attempts to fashion such a community. For them this was a temporal as well as a spiritual matter. Indeed, Mormon theology denies any sharp distinction between the spiritual and the temporal or secular. Thus God proclaims in Latter-day Saint scripture, "Verily I say unto you that all things unto me are spiritual" (D&C 29:34). As one early Mormon wrote:

Accordingly, revelations to Joseph Smith contained detailed economic instructions. Members of the Church were to donate all of their property to the common fund of the Church. The Church officer in charge of the fund would then give to each member a "stewardship" sufficient to support himself and his family. The residue would remain with the Church for the care of the poor and common enterprises (cf. D&C 42; Arrington 1988, 116-117). Behind this rather complex arrangement is a concept referred to in Mormon doctrine as "consecration." One Latter-day Saint writer summarized it this way:

Attempts were made to implement the economic program set forth in the revelations to Joseph Smith. First in Kirtland, Ohio and later in Jackson County, Missouri the Mormons deeded their property to the Church, received stewardships, and attempted to live the law of consecration. Ultimately these attempts failed for three reasons. First, external persecution drove the Mormons from place to place, destroying material stability. Second, some Church members apostatized and wished to take their deeded property with them. The Church became embroiled in lawsuits, almost all of which were decided against the Church. The results were expensive legal fees and depletion of the common capital upon which the system rested. Third, and perhaps most important, members of the Church could not maintain the levels of charity and selflessness necessary to make the system function (cf. Arrington 1988). The Lord, in a revelation to Joseph Smith, rebuked the members of the Church saying,

In the 1870s, after the Mormons had been driven to Utah, Brigham Young tried once again to implement cooperative economics. Throughout Utah, "United Orders" as they were called, were established. Ranging in size from small enterprises or factories to entire towns and villages, the United Orders were based on the principles of consecration and sought to create communities based on cooperation and acknowledgment of God’s ultimate ownership of all things (Allen and Leonard 1992,365-72).

One of the most successful of these United Orders was in the tiny southern Utah town of Orderville, near present-day Bryce Canyon National Park. During its hay day, the citizens of Orderville held all things in common and for eleven years at least implemented the divine economic order revealed to Joseph Smith. Wallace Stegner, a sympathetic observer of the Mormons, saved his highest praise for this desert hamlet, writing::

However, like other United Orders of the 1870s, Orderville was eventually failed. A combination of worldliness by the Saints, and federal persecution forced the abandonment of the communal system as the Church was sucked into the maelstorm of "the Raid."

In the twentieth century the Church has worked to actualize the concept of Zion in a number of ways. During the economic crises of the 1930’s the Church established a welfare system. Resources were pooled under ecclesiastical leadership. The Church purchased commercial enterprises such as farms and canneries. Volunteers from local congregations provided labor. Finally, ecclesiastical leaders distributed the necessities provided by these enterprises to indigent members of the Church. This system has expanded in the intervening years, following essentially the same model, and growing into the largest privately operated welfare organizations in the world (Beama 1997 ????????). On another level the Church itself is a community which seeks to provide a place where members can strive to cultivate and apply the principles of love, cooperation, and obedience to divine command which lie at the heart of the concept of Zion. Indeed, the massive missionary program of the Church is explicitly articulated in terms of Zion (Hinckley 1998).

Significantly, however, the kingdom of heaven is "not of this world" (John 18:36). Latter-day Saints pray and act to see that God’s will is honored "on earth as it is in heaven" (Matt. 6:10). However acting in a world which has not yet received the final and ultimate redemption of Christ’s millennial return, Mormons realize that the institutional and person attempts to build Zion are always incomplete and imperfect. Nevertheless, obedience to divine command and hope for the promised blessings continue motivate them to try, however imperfectly, to institute the divine order in their personal lives, families, and congregations.

In Mormon theology Zion and the kingdom of heaven are both organized under the direction of priesthood authority. For Mormons the term priesthood can have two meanings. First, priesthood is the authority of God delegated to man. Second, priesthood refers collectively to the individuals (effectively the adult, male membership of the Church) who hold this authority. The priesthood in both senses governs Zion. First, the divine order is created on earth under authority granted by God. Second, priesthood holders, who are organized hierarchically under divine direction, administer Zion. Yet that organization is not one of dominion or coercion. In perhaps his most important and oft quoted statement on priesthood authority, Joseph Smith said:

When priesthood is properly exercised, Joseph Smith taught, the social order which results "shall be an everlasting dominion, and without compulsory means it shall flow. . . forever and ever" (D&C 121:46).

Autonomy: The Connecting Thread

What then is the underlying idea connecting these threads of doctrine and practice? Theologically, Mormons are committed to a view of God’s work in history that includes the building up of communities governed by obedience to divine law under the authority of priesthood leadership. Practically, during the course of the twentieth century the Church has pursued a largely defensive political course. It has spoken out and acted on a variety of "moral issues," but as illustrated by the late nineteenth century struggles over polygamy, the Church has been primarily concerned with protecting its institutional autonomy. Thus the shift one sees during the twentieth century from a very politically active Church to a much more sporadically active one mirrors the diminishing threat--real and perceived-- governmental and political actors have posed to the Church. This institutional concern for autonomy flows from a theology that places a great deal of emphasis on the need to build Zion according to the Lord’s pattern rather than Caesar’s.

Church leaders have always shared the fears of Roger Williams: state influence and intrusion into Church activities presents the danger of religious corruption. Thus, Dallin H. Oaks, a former state supreme court justice, Chicago law professor, and current Apostle, wrote in a 1985 law review article:

Accordingly, the Church has consistently eschewed government funding or support and has worked vigorously to secure religious autonomy through such measures as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and, more recently, the Religious Liberty Protection Act.

During its early history the Church sought a place where it could pursue its own vision of Zion without outside interference. Its inability to do so ultimately resulted in the Mormon exodus to Utah where it created a highly integrated community as a defense against a hostile federal government. As that hostility ebbed in the wake of the 1890 Manifesto, the Church has pursued a more seperationist course, realizing that in a democratic society separation would provide a greater protection for religious autonomy. The increasing globalization of the Church has reinforced this trend, as Mormonism has been forced to deal with regimes that accord much less autonomy to religious actors. Thus, while radical change in the outer form of things marks Latter-day Saint church-state practice in the twentieth century, beneath this shift in policy there is a consistent concern for the institutional autonomy of the Church. Ultimately, this concern rests on the theological imperative to build up Zion in the last days as part of the preparation for the Second Coming of Christ.

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