{"id":2570,"date":"2005-09-06T18:15:34","date_gmt":"2005-09-06T22:15:34","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=2570"},"modified":"2005-09-06T18:22:03","modified_gmt":"2005-09-06T22:22:03","slug":"a-response-to-kaimi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2005\/09\/a-response-to-kaimi\/","title":{"rendered":"A Response to Kaimi"},"content":{"rendered":"

I like Kaimi, but I am afraid that he is just wrong. One of his recent posts<\/a> suggested that religious liberty in America had nothing to do with the Restoration because there wasn’t much religious liberty in America in the nineteenth century. He basically offers two arguments in favor of this claim. The first is that the Saints were subject to large-scale persecution by mobs and local governments. The second is that the de jure protection of the First Amendment didn’t provide the Mormons with any protection when congress moved against them over polygamy.<\/p>\n

Kaimi is right in that Mormons were harassed and persecuted by local governments and mobs in the period from 1830 to 1844. He is also right that the First Amendment didn’t provide much protection for the Mormons in the nineteenth century. However, it seems to me that his analysis rests on a set of mistakes that are — I think — uniquely typical of Mormon lawyers. I will start with the lawyer part first. Kaimi’s argument focuses in on the de jure protection of religious liberty as though the idea of religious freedom were co-extensive with the idea of judicial review and invalidation of laws targeting religious practices. The religious liberty that Mormonism benefited from was less a matter of law than of politics in the broadest sense. As to the Mormon part, Kaimi focuses on the often self-contained narrative of Mormon history without an adequate reference to the rest of the historical context.<\/p>\n

Let me trying offering an alternative story of Mormonism and American religious freedom. I begin with the founding period, but rather than focusing on the Bill of Rights, I think that we should first look at the presence of religious establishments. At the close of the 18th century, most states have established churches of one kind of another. The two quintessential examples are Massachusetts and Virginia. In Massachusetts the congregational churches received tax support and other government benefits (mainly in the form of grants of real property known as glebes, which were then used to generate revenue to support the churches.) The same was true of the Episcopalian church in Virginia. These were basically tolerant establishments on the English model, which is to say that non-conformists were subject to social and political ostracism, marginalization, and sporadic but not overwhelming legal harassment. All of this was thoroughly constitutional, as the Bill of Rights did not apply to the states at the time, and indeed the original intent of the establishment clause was probably to protect state establishments from federal interference. Still, it was a system in which established church’s largely defined religious life, and the idea of sectarian choice was a social oddity.<\/p>\n

Now fast forward to the Jacksonian period of the 1820s and 1830s. What you see is the political and demographic implosion of state establishments. Across the nation, pressure from the non-conformists, especially Baptists and Methodists but more generally evangelicals, causes the disestablishment of state churches. This is not done by an act of heroic constitutional interpretation by the federal courts, which is the implicit model that Kaimi invokes, but rather was done as a matter of popular politics. Indeed, disestablishment along with the extension of the franchise and various other populist measures was part of the core of the Jacksonian political project.<\/p>\n

Disestablishment in the Jacksonian period made American religious life unique chaotic. By uncoupling the church from the state and the corporate manifestation of the civil community, the American disestablishment movement created an environment in which sectarian identity both became less important as a mode of social cohesion and more important as an individual choice. It was an ideal environment for the creation of a new church that sought to gather adherents through a process of individual conversion by an act of sectarian identification. What is more, the collapse of the older established religious orders created, I think, a powerful anxiety about the civic status of the new sectarian movements. This in turn led to persecution which was, I think, ultimately good for the Restoration as a movement. It seems to me that what a new religion needs is an optimal level of external persecution. You don’t want so much external coercion that the new community is annihilated a la the Albejencians. On the other hand, persecution seems to be an important part of forging collective identity. This is certainly what happened with the Mormons. Yet this optimal level of persecution was made possible by the decentralization of legal authority over religion in the 19th-century America. The original, federalist version of the Bill of Rights meant that the governor of Missouri could persecute the Mormons, but that they could always flee across state borders.<\/p>\n

Of course, the civil war and the Mormons themselves altered the constitutional status of religion in America during the second half of the 19th century. A single national policy did emerge as the Bill of Rights was transformed from a procedural to a substantive constitutional norm. What this meant was that now the Mormons faced a level of persecution that was no longer optimal. The federal government really could grind the Latter-day Saints to dust, and after the burning of Atlanta and Sherman’s march to the sea, it had the bloody-minded will to do so. However, by that time Mormonism was established both as a demographic fact and as a communal identity to the extent that it could safely retreat from polygamy without simply subsiding in the general welter of Protestant America.<\/p>\n

In short, America provided just the right amount and right variety of religious liberty. It was not of the variety that post-Warren Court American lawyers are trained to look for, but it does seem to have been the particular variety necessary for the Restoration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I like Kaimi, but I am afraid that he is just wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"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-2570","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\/2570","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\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2570\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}