Liberal Democracy and Mormon Culture (Part II)
Required Democratic Alteration
Unfortunately, the Mormons were not tolerated in New York or the Midwest and they were forced to flee to what became known by 1850 as the Territory of Utah. The Mormons found themselves in conflict with the majority of Americans over their social and economic practices, with the most prominent conflict being polygamy.[xvi] The attempts of the Mormons to gain statehood is reflective of Tocqueville’s observation that religion, when in conflict with the state, will alter in order to accommodate itself with the will of the majority. A brief look at this controversy will be instructive to our understanding of the relationship between religion and democracy in the United States.
The U.S. Constitution determines the relationship between church and state with its principles of “free exercise” and “no establishment” clauses. The idea was that the nation would not be committed to any particular religion, as first applied to the national government and later the state governments via the Fourteenth Amendment. The Mormon encounter with the American legal system over the issue of polygamy started in 1852, when the Mormons announced that they were practicing plural marriages. Previously, in 1850, Utah was organized as a territory and thereby became subject to the authority of the U.S. Congress. With Republican ascendancy in national politics, polygamy and slavery were two practices that became targeted by the federal government for elimination. After the Civil War, with the matter of slavery resolved, polygamy became subject to national scrutiny.
In 1879, the Supreme Court ruled in Reynolds v. United States that the Morrill Act, which was an anti-bigamy statute passed in 1862, was constitutional. George Reynolds, who was a secretary to Brigham Young, argued that his practice of polygamy was an exercise of rights protected under the religious liberty guarantees of the First Amendment and was violated by the Morrill Act. The Court ruled against Reynolds, citing that the Morrill Act was within the legislative power of Congress, since it was “left free to reach actions which were in violation of social duties or subversive of good order. . . . To permit this would be to make the professed doctrine of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself. Government could exist only in name under such circumstances.”[xvii] Although there were other attempts to preserve the religious practice of polygamy, such as in Davis v. Beason (1890) and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints v. United States (1899), it faced continual defeat by the majority of the American citizenry. The will of the majority, as reflective in the Congress and the Supreme Court, had decided that the question of polygamy as a practice had to be eliminated.
With polygamy defeated, serial polygamy soon became familiar: a pattern of marriage, divorce, and subsequent remarriage. The difficulty of proving serial polygamy, as well as the lack of a national consensus on divorce, did not immediately result in a campaign against serial polygamy. However, Congress continued to pass enactments to the original anti-bigamy statutes, with the last one calling for the dis-incorporation of the Mormon Church by confiscating its property. This threat to the Church’s existence led to a formal declaration by William Woodruff, president of the Mormon Church on September 25, 1890, that officially abandoned polygamy:
“We are not teaching polygamy or plural marriage, nor permitting any person to enter into its practice. . . . Inasmuch as laws have been enacted by Congress forbidding plural marriages, which laws have been pronounced constitutional by the court of last resort, I hereby declare my intention to submit to those laws, and to use my influence with the members of the Church over which I preside to have them do likewise. . . . And I now publicly declare that my advice to the Latter-day Saints is to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land.”[xviii]
With this abandonment of polygamy, the Mormons were able to reduce their conflict with the state and achieve statehood as proclaimed by President Grover Cleveland on January 4, 1896.[xix] Utah’s Constitution protected religious freedom and rejected polygamy, stating that “[P]erfect toleration of religious sentiment shall be secured, and . . . no inhabitant of said State shall ever be molested in person or property on account of his or her mode of religious worship: Provided, That polygamous or plural marriage are forever prohibited.”[xx]
Whether the Mormon Church changed its position on polygamy because of divine revelation, political calculation, or both, is not the subject of inquiry here; rather, from a Tocquevillian perspective, we see that religion had to alter its behavior to conform to the will of the majority. When the Church was threatened with the federal government confiscating its property, it adapted itself to the political environment in order to survive. The practice of polygamy ran contrary to the social and religious practice of marriage of the majority of Americans; consequently, the practice of polygamy had to be abandoned in order for the Mormon Church to exist. Regardless of the truth or social scientific claims of polygamy, the fact that the will of the majority is not to be resisted by any religion—or any—group that wishes to exist in a liberal democratic society.
Conclusion
The conclusions we can reach about the relationship between democracy and religion is that the will of the majority is to be accommodated. Liberal democracy, with its principle of equality of condition, makes possible the authority of the will of the majority, which in turn can potentially threaten individual political rights and liberty. Religion can preclude these negative tendencies in democratic citizens, with its teachings on spiritual matters and social fraternity to transcend individualism and materialism; but it must accommodate itself to the will of the majority in order to exist.
The origins of Mormonism accommodate the will of the majority in pointing out the oppression of the poor by the rich, learned, and proud. It also showed that mainline churches were accomplices to this oppression; and that a new code of moral behavior was required for democratic society. Irrespective of the truth claims of its religion, Mormonism can be understood in this sense as supportive of Tocqueville’s account of liberal democracy: the principle of equality of condition and the will of the majority. However, when confronted by the federal government on the issue of polygamy, the Mormon Church was forced to adapt to the will of the majority. For most Mormons, the practice of polygamy is not an essential tenet to their faith and could be given up for the right to exist in the United States. But the power of the will of the majority in this case demonstrates the price that groups must pay in order to exist in a liberal democracy.
I hope that the use of Tocqueville’s insights into the nature of liberal democracy will point to a new direction in Mormon scholarship, transcending the debate between the two schools of thought on this subject. By focusing on the will of the majority and other such phenomena, like the role of civil society in liberal democracies, Tocqueville provides scholars a paradigm to understand Mormon culture and history without having to be involved in theological or religious truth claims and still provides us insight into the nature of Mormonism. It is my hope that this chapter can serve as an example for other projects on Mormonism in the future.
[xvi]. Brigham Young, “Exodus Announced, October 8, 1845,” in A Documentary History of Religion in America, Edward S. Gaustad, ed., (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1982–83), 1:359–60. For nineteenth-century Mormonism and anti-Mormonism, refer to Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality: The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Onedia Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).
[xvii]. Reynolds v. U.S. 98 U.S. 164, 166 (1878); also refer to Ray Jay Davis, “Plural Marriage and Religious Freedom: The Impact of Reynolds v. United States,” Arizona Law Review 15 (1973): 287, 291; and Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and the Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
[xviii]. Edwin Firmage and R. Collin Mangrum, Zion in the Courts: A Legal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1830–1900 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
[xix]. Refer to Chapter 7, “The Transformation from Theocracy to Democracy in Utah” by Wayne K. Hinton, in this book for more about Utah’s attempts at statehood.
[xx]. Utah Constitution, Article 1, section 4.
This excerpt is from Utah, Pluralism, and Democracy.