It’s a message you’re likely to hear every Fourth of July, and many times throughout the year as well: The Restored Church could only have been restored in America, the land of religious liberty. The Founders were inspired to create a land of freedom and liberty, where freedom of conscience would be respected, where freedom of religion is enshrined in the Bill of Rights. Only in such a land could Joseph Smith have brought forth the restored gospel. <\/p>\n
It’s all false, of course.<\/p>\n
The religious liberty promised by the Constitution proved illusory. The freedom of conscience promised by America did not extend to Mormons at all. The Supreme Court went so far as to affirm — in a case brought by Mormons — that the First Amendment gave church members no protection at all in their exercise of beliefs. The Congress of this enlightened nation passed legislation dissolving the restored church and seizing its property. And then American soldiers marched on the Mormons. <\/p>\n
It strains reason to suggest that only in America, with its promise of freedom to worship, could the church have been restored . . . and then seen its members killed, robbed, mobbed, raped, pillaged — often with the aid of government leaders — and eventually driven all the way out of the country. That’s not the sort of freedom that a fragile young religion might use to grow. Truth is, America ignored stated principles of religious liberty and gave the church a barbaric reception — one that any nation on earth could have matched or bettered. <\/p>\n
One nation eventually did better the reception. When the church eventually found a safe haven, it was not in America at all. It was in the unsettled territory of northern Mexico. Only there — without the aegis of an ineffective promise of religious freedom, but with the much more effective benefit of a desert barricade — did the church flourish. (And once that land reverted to American control, problems began anew).<\/p>\n
There are doubtless reasons why God chose to restore the church where He did. They may include the vast expanse of land and resources available to the nation. But the now-popular idea that the church could “only be restored in a land of religious freedom like America” seems completely contradictory to the facts. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s a message you’re likely to hear every Fourth of July, and many times throughout the year as well: The Restored Church could only have been restored in America, the land of religious liberty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2568\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}