The rise of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints posed a significant challenge to the nineteenth-century Protestant establishment by rejecting traditional religious authority and claiming new revelation. While the “godless” Constitution aimed to prevent religious conflict, it inadvertently fueled a competitive marketplace where Protestant groups leveraged cultural power to define acceptable faith. Early Saints exposed the limits of the First Amendment as their communal ambitions and alternative family structures met intense federal coercion and societal violence, such as the Utah War or the anti-polygamy raid. In this interview, historian Matthew Avery Sutton explores how this struggle shaped American law.
Don’t miss new insights on topics such as the Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony, and What Did Thomas Jefferson Believe About Jesus and the Bible? Sign up to get them straight to your inbox.
Early Latter-day Saints and the Limits of the First Amendment
— The First Amendment’s disestablishment of religion inadvertently created a competitive “feeding frenzy” that allowed a dominant, unofficial Protestant establishment to emerge and define the legal and social boundaries of religious practice.
How Did the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Challenge the Protestant Establishment?
The rise of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints posed a serious, and perhaps the most serious, challenge to the nineteenth-century Protestant establishment in American history. Unlike Catholics or other dissenting Protestant groups, Latter-day Saints did not merely ask for toleration within a Protestant-dominated culture. They sought influence and control–they believed God had destined them to build his kingdom on earth. They rejected Protestant authority outright, claimed new revelation, new scripture, and new forms of religious authority. In facing substantial blowback and even violence, they exposed the limits of American religious freedom and revealed how deeply Protestant norms structured public life, law, and politics, even in a nation that claimed to champion religious freedom.
How did the First Amendment inadvertently open the door for the rise of an unofficial Protestant establishment?
One of the core arguments of the book is that the founders crafted a very secular—essentially godless—Constitution as a way to prevent the kinds of religious wars Europe had endured for centuries. They knew they could not build a consensus around who should rule the country among Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Episcopalians. Instead, they created the disestablishment and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment. Then they largely stepped aside.
To gain that power, they realized they had to offer Americans something they actually wanted.
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. They had to make Christianity as appealing, relevant, and attractive as possible. In doing so, they became entrepreneurs of faith, repackaging what they understood as the traditional gospel in new forms that fit modern trends and currents. They also became masters at using new technology and the latest, most effective communications techniques.
Over time, the largest, most influential groups concluded that collaboration would allow them to wield far greater influence. What we now think of as the mainstream churches, Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and a few others, began creating ecumenical organizations. Through those institutions, they worked to shape American law, politics, foreign policy, education, and culture. Rather than defanging religion, the First Amendment inadvertently cleared the way for Christianity to gain more power and influence in the United States than it held in much of the rest of the world at the time.
In what ways did the “free exercise” clause prove almost meaningless to groups on the margins of American religious power, like the early Latter-day Saints?
For groups like the Latter-day Saints, free exercise existed mostly in theory. Protestants defined acceptable religion in ways that excluded new movements claiming continuing revelation, communal authority, or alternative family structures. Mobs, state governments, and eventually federal authorities repeatedly violated Latter-day Saint religious rights with little consequence (just as they did to other dissenting groups). Courts and politicians treated Latter-day Saint practices as threats to public order rather than protected religious expression. The Saints’ persecution revealed that free exercise applied most reliably to religions that conformed to Protestant assumptions about belief, authority, and morality. The unofficial Protestant establishment was able to determine the boundaries of orthodoxy and heterodoxy.
Why did Joseph Smith run for president in 1844, and what did his campaign reveal about the Protestant establishment’s grip on American culture?
Joseph Smith’s decision to run for president was deeply American, and it highlights one of the book’s central themes. With the disestablishment clause in place, church leaders struggled to find new ways to expand their influence, reach, and audience. Politics became one of the most effective avenues for doing so. For marginal groups like the Latter-day Saints, gaining political power was especially important as a way to try to make the promises of the First Amendment real for themselves.
Smith’s run for the presidency illustrates a second major theme that connects directly to the book’s title, Chosen Land. Many Americans came to believe that their nation was the new Israel—a new kingdom being prepared for the last days. While many groups held various versions of this belief, few embraced it as fully or enacted it as aggressively as the Latter-day Saints. If the Saints believed that they were building the Kingdom of God on earth, then the Saints must govern that kingdom, organize it, and manage it. Smith’s presidential bid reflects that ambition, one shared by many other religious leaders of the era.
Brigham Young, the State of Deseret, and the Utah War
— Brigham Young’s successful establishment of an autonomous religious kingdom in the West triggered a perfect storm of federal and Protestant opposition, culminating in the Utah War as the government sought to enforce national moral norms
How did Brigham Young’s vision for the State of Deseret conflict with federal ambitions?
The problem was not so much Young’s plans. Many Christian groups attempted to build utopian communities at various points in American history. The problem was that Young actually began to succeed. His territorial power grew, the Latter-day Saint population increased, and some of their more controversial religious ideas and practices attracted increasing attention from the US government and from religious competitors.
The problem was that Young actually began to succeed.
This convergence created a kind of perfect storm that tested the limits of both the free exercise and disestablishment clauses. Once again, the Latter-day Saints became a revealing case study, exposing what Americans truly believed rather than just what they claimed to believe about religious freedom and the extent to which people should be allowed to practice religion in the United States.
How did the 1856 Republican denunciation of the “twin relics of barbarism” lead to the Utah War?
By pairing polygamy with slavery, Republicans and their Protestant establishment allies framed the church as a moral threat equivalent to the nation’s greatest evil. This language drew directly from Protestant moral reform traditions. 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.
How does the Mountain Meadows Massacre fit into this broader context?
I debated for a long time whether to include this episode in the book. I knew the story well, having written a lengthy review of several books on the massacre more than a decade ago. I initially included it, then cut it as the manuscript grew too long, and then added it back (in a more succinct version) after an editor urged me to reconsider. In the end, I decided it mattered too much to leave out.
The episode is important because it exposes something essential about religion in the United States: religion is never only about ideas or individual choices. It also carries real stakes, and at times those stakes produce violence. The Mountain Meadows Massacre unfolded in an atmosphere of siege, fear, and demonization. Sustained persecution, military threats, and religious isolation radicalized some Latter-day Saint communities and narrowed the range of imaginable responses to perceived danger.
The massacre was not inevitable, but it reveals how religious conflict, intensified by Protestant hostility and federal aggression, could spiral into catastrophe. The episode, therefore, serves not only as a tragic event in its own right but as a window into how Americans tested, strained, and ultimately redefined the limits of religious freedom.
Along these lines, I also devote significant attention in the book to the violence inflicted on Indigenous peoples by missionaries and federal agents, as well as to the Jonestown tragedy and the attack on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. These episodes force us to confront the nature of religion and of Christianity in the United States in ways that can be deeply uncomfortable.
Federal Reconstruction and Latter-day Saint Plural Marriage
— The federal government sought to subdue the West by enforcing Protestant moral norms through legal campaigns, such as the one against plural marriage, leading to the landmark Reynolds v. United States decision that distinguished between protected religious beliefs and prohibited practices.
How did Christian activists shape Reconstruction—and target the Latter-day Saints?
In the book, I try to build on recent trends across several fields and on the latest scholarship in US history. One of the key arguments historians have been making for some time is that the Civil War era should not be understood simply as a conflict between North and South. It was also an effort by the federal government to subdue the West. It was a fundamentally triangular struggle. Much of what unfolded in the West centered on Indigenous nations and federal efforts to suppress them.
The Saints, however, also emerged as a major obstacle to the federal government as it sought to align new territories with the nation’s central ideals and values, at least as defined in eastern centers of power. When Brigham Young led the Latter-day Saints to the Salt Lake Basin, he did so with the intention of leaving the United States altogether. Yet the outcome of the Mexican War shifted the nation’s borders across the Latter-day Saint kingdom without the Saints moving an inch. Once again, they found themselves inside the United States. And, once again, they were forced to conform.
What were the constitutional arguments in Reynolds v. United States (1879)?
In Reynolds, the Supreme Court drew a sharp distinction between belief and practice. While beliefs were protected, religious practices deemed socially harmful were not. This framework allowed the Court to uphold anti-polygamy laws while claiming to defend religious freedom. The decision entrenched Protestant moral assumptions into constitutional law by defining acceptable religion as private belief divorced from embodied practice (if your practices were “deviant”).
What it meant to practice religious freedom depended largely on whether one belonged to the mainstream.
This case matters to the book because it once again shows how an unofficial Protestant establishment shaped American law. What it meant to practice religious freedom depended largely on whether one belonged to the mainstream, whether one occupied positions of power as judges, governors, legislators, or attorneys. Those outside that world found their ability to practice their faith as they believed God required significantly constrained.
A related argument I make is that our familiar idea of a strict separation between church and state does not really exist in American law until 1947, with the Supreme Court’s decision in Everson v. Board of Education. It was then that the justices invoked Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, in which he described the First Amendment as erecting a “high wall” between church and state. Those were Jefferson’s words, not the language of the Constitution itself, and not the framework the founders embedded in the First Amendment. That interpretation largely prevailed from 1947 through the late twentieth century. Still, with the rise of the Roberts Court, we may now be moving back toward nineteenth-century understandings of what religious freedom entails.
How did Latter-day Saint women defend plural marriage?
Mormon women challenged Protestant narratives by publicly defending plural marriage as voluntary, spiritual, and empowering. They wrote essays, gave speeches, and petitioned Congress, insisting that Protestant critics misunderstood both Latter-day Saint theology and women’s agency. Their activism disrupted dominant gender norms and exposed how mainstream Protestant ideals shaped definitions of womanhood and freedom.
Why did Wilford Woodruff issue the 1890 Manifesto?
The 1890 Manifesto seemed to result from relentless federal pressure: church property seizures, arrests, disfranchisement, and the threat of institutional collapse. Ending plural marriage was a strategic accommodation to preserve the church itself. The episode demonstrated that religious freedom yielded to Protestant-defined national norms when a group pushed too far beyond them.
Excluding Latter-day Saints from the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions
— Liberal Protestant organizers excluded the Saints and Indigenous peoples from a global religious forum to maintain a hierarchy of “acceptable” faiths and protect their narrative of Christian progress.
What was the World’s Parliament of Religions?
A group of mainstream American religious leaders organized the Parliament of Religions in 1893 in conjunction with the World’s Fair in Chicago. This was an era of massive immigration to the United States, and growing globalization made possible by steamships and railroads, which brought an increasing number of religious traditions into contact with one another.
The organizers, predominantly liberal White American Protestants, believed that convening leaders from the world’s religions would foster greater mutual understanding. But for these Protestants, the project was also about shaping and influencing the wider world. The more they understood Hinduism, Buddhism, or Islam, they believed, the better positioned they would be to guide change and potentially to draw adherents of those traditions toward Christian ideas, norms, and practices.
Why were Latter-day Saints and Native Americans excluded?
Both groups challenged Protestant narratives of progress. Latter-day Saints represented an ongoing, successful alternative Christian tradition rooted in American soil. Native religions challenged the moral legitimacy of Christian conquest. Excluding them revealed that Protestant pluralism was conditional and hierarchical, not genuinely inclusive.
The Legacy of the Protestant Establishment
— The secular Constitution ultimately strengthened Protestantism by allowing it to dominate American culture and law, creating a legacy where religious freedom remained conditional for those who challenged mainstream norms.
What does the Latter-day Saint experience reveal about religious freedom in the United States?
The history of the Latter-day Saints exposes the persistent gap between American ideals and lived reality when it comes to religious freedom. The United States did not simply separate church and state and then step back. Instead, the founders dismantled the formal religious establishment and allowed the most powerful Christian leaders to replace it with something more diffuse but no less powerful: cultural and political Protestant dominance. The Constitution created a secular legal framework, but it also unleashed a competitive religious marketplace in which Protestant norms, assumptions, and institutions quickly came to define what counted as legitimate religion.
Their constitutional rights depended less on abstract principles than on whether judges, legislators, governors, and federal officials recognized their religion as acceptable.
The Latter-day Saint experience makes this dynamic visible. In theory, the First Amendment promised free exercise for all. In practice, religious freedom functioned most fully for those whose beliefs, practices, and social organization fit within broadly Protestant expectations. Groups that diverged too sharply from those norms, and especially groups that combined theology with communal economics, political ambition, or alternative family structures, encountered intense resistance. The Saints repeatedly discovered that their constitutional rights depended less on abstract principles than on whether judges, legislators, governors, and federal officials recognized their religion as acceptable.
This history helps explain one of the book’s central claims: the secular Constitution did not weaken mainstream Protestant Christianity in the United States. It strengthened it. By removing official establishment, the founders created a space in which Protestant Christianity could expand, adapt, and consolidate power through voluntary institutions, political mobilization, and cultural authority. Over time, this produced not a neutral public square but a deeply Christian one shaped by Protestant moral assumptions and enforced through law, policy, and social pressure.
The Saints ran headlong into the limits of this system. Their efforts to build autonomous religious communities, to exercise political power, and to live out their faith on their own terms exposed how conditional American religious freedom could be. Federal interventions, legal campaigns against Mormon practices, and popular hostility all revealed that disestablishment meant pluralism managed by a Protestant majority that retained the power to decide which religions posed a threat and which could be tolerated.
Seen from this perspective, the Latter-day Saint story is not an outlier but a central case study. It shows that American religious liberty has always been negotiated, contested, and unevenly applied. The same constitutional framework that promised freedom also enabled a dominant religious culture to define the boundaries of that freedom. The result was a nation that proclaimed secular governance while becoming, in practice, one of the most powerfully Christian societies in the modern world.
Finally—and this is the part of the story we have not really discussed here—the book also follows what happens in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. How did the Latter-day Saints move from being a marginal, persecuted community to having one of their own mount a serious presidential campaign in 2012, and how did they become central players today in the nation’s major political coalitions? That transformation is itself a fascinating chapter in American religious history: the story of how outsiders become insiders. But that may be a conversation best saved for the next interview!
Don’t Miss Our Latest Interviews!
Get new interviews and articles from leading scholars delivered straight to your inbox.
About the Scholar
Matthew Avery Sutton is the Claudius O. and Mary Johnson Distinguished Professor and chair of the Department of History at Washington State University. As an expert in the intersection of religion and American politics, his research focuses on how religious movements and apocalyptic beliefs have shaped U.S. foreign policy and cultural identity. He is the author of several acclaimed works, including American Apocalypse and his latest book, Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity, which provides the historical framework for this discussion. Sutton’s scholarship has been supported by prestigious fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and his commentary frequently appears in major outlets like The New York Times. His extensive work on evangelicalism and religious power offers a critical perspective on the nineteenth-century friction between the Latter-day Saints and the Protestant establishment.
Further Reading
Explore more From the Desk articles about Latter-day Saints and the United States
- The Council of Fifty: A Constitution for the Kingdom of God
- How Did Taxes Shape Mormonism?
- What Is the White Horse Prophecy?
- Was Slavery Practiced in Utah Territory?
- What Was Wilford Woodruff’s Vision of the Founding Fathers?
Latter-day Saints and the Protestant Establishment
Read what top scholars and publishers say about Latter-day Saints and the Protestant Establishment:
- Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity (Basic Books)
- That Principle of Freedom … Belongs to All Mankind: The United States Constitution and Religious Freedom in the Latter-day Saint Tradition (Nathan B. Oman)
- Damned Rascals and the Constitution: The Paradox of Mormon Attitudes Towards Government (Times and Seasons)
- Epilogue to the Utah War: Impact and Legacy (Journal of Mormon History)
- The Legislative Antipolygamy Campaign (BYU Studies)
