We often celebrate the First Amendment as the ultimate shield for religious minorities, assuming that the Founding Fathers’ “godless” Constitution created a neutral public square where all faiths could freely flourish. However, the lived experience of the early Latter-day Saints tells a drastically different story, revealing that the disestablishment of religion actually cleared the way for a powerful, unofficial Protestant establishment to dictate American law and culture. A fascinating new interview over at the Latter-day Saint history blog, From the Desk, features historian Matthew Avery Sutton, author of Chosen Land, who explores how the rise of the Restored Church posed one of the greatest threats to this 19th-century Protestant dominance. Sutton unpacks how the Saints’ communal ambitions, alternative family structures, and claims to new revelation tested the limits of the First Amendment, demonstrating that in early America, religious freedom was conditional for those who challenged the mainstream.

How Did the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Challenge the Protestant Establishment?

The “Feeding Frenzy”

Sutton introduces a compelling paradox: the First Amendment inadvertently made American Protestantism stronger. By refusing to establish a state church, the Founders forced denominations to compete for followers.

The amendment then inspired a feeding frenzy among Protestant groups, all competing for power and influence. To gain that power, they realized they had to offer Americans something they actually wanted…

Over time, the largest, most influential groups concluded that collaboration would allow them to wield far greater influence… Through those institutions, they worked to shape American law, politics, foreign policy, education, and culture.

This “unofficial establishment” defined what acceptable religion looked like. It looked like private, individual belief.

The Threat of the Kingdom

The Latter-day Saints, however, were not content with private belief. They were building a physical Kingdom of God. They introduced continuing revelation, communal economics, and eventually plural marriage. Because they stepped outside the accepted Protestant boundaries, they were met with violence, of both the extralegal and state-sanctioned varieties.

Sutton notes that Joseph Smith’s 1844 run for the presidency was a direct result of this failure of the First Amendment. Because the constitutional guarantee of “free exercise” existed only in theory for marginalized groups, securing political power became the only viable way for the Saints to protect their own lives and property.

The Triangle of Reconstruction and the Utah War

After the martyrdom of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young successfully led the Saints out of the United States. However, the conclusion of the Mexican-American War moved the international border over them without the Saints moving an inch.

Sutton frames the subsequent Utah War and the anti-polygamy raids as part of a larger, post-Civil War effort by the federal government to subdue the American West by enforcing Eastern Protestant moral norms. The Republican Party explicitly paired polygamy with slavery as the “twin relics of barbarism.”

The Utah War grew out of this moral panic: federal leaders believed they were defending “civilization,” Christianity, and republican virtue against a deviant religious system. The war demonstrated how Protestant moral judgments became the basis for intense and relentless federal coercion.

The Legacy of Reynolds

This federal coercion culminated in the 1879 Supreme Court decision Reynolds v. United States, which upheld anti-polygamy laws. Sutton points out that the Court justified this by drawing a sharp line between protected belief and prohibited practice. If your practices offended the Protestant establishment, they were deemed “socially harmful” and criminalized. It was a stark reminder that in 19th-century America, religious freedom belonged primarily to those who already held cultural power.

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For more of Sutton’s insights on the demonization that led to the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the exclusion of Latter-day Saints from the 1893 World Parliament of Religions, and how this history shapes our modern understanding of Church and State, head on over to the Latter-day Saint history blog, From the Desk, to read the full interview, “How Did the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Challenge the Protestant Establishment?“