So I have been thinking about this for a few days and remember reading in the History of the Church (7 volumes) where Joseph Smith says point blank that he is proud to be a "democrat" (sorry don't have the reference). My question is How did the church switch so drastically from it's liberal beginnings?

Here is some history, please feel free to fill in the gaps or clarify:
1) In 1829 Joseph Smith gets a revelation to send the bretheren to marry the Indians. He clearly had very open minded liberal ideas and was accepting of different races. But of course we know there was racist backlash from the boys and the revelation got stashed away.
2) When the church was started, members were consulted in decision making. (a democratic ideal) And when they voted, it was a real vote. Not a "sustaining vote" like today, where dissenters are not even acknowledged. Some very engaging accounts of inward fighting occurred in the Kirtland period where they can't get a majority on who to excommunicate. And Josephs hands are tied.
3) The 2nd counselor to Joe (John Bennett) ran the Planned Parenthood of his day along the Mississippi River. Apparently Smith must have been pro-choice? Bennett was said to also have been very gay. Very liberal once again.
4) There was an economic theme of communal living and giving up properties (almost like liberal hippies) and caring for the poor through demanding of high taxes. But as always seems to happen, a few leaders took advantage of the situation and did land speculation, fleecing the flock. The local Mormon governments were stuck with lots of unskilled poor immigrants to support while the more sophisticated savy held on to their assets (sounds kinda like S. California, or New York).

Next lets look at Brigham Young. Brigham's father had fought under George Washington and I think the whole Young family must have adopted the presidents views on servants. Here is what Washington said about his slaves: "the unfortunate condition of the persons whose labor in part I employed has been the only unavoidable subject of regret. To make the adults among them as easy and comfortable in their circumstances as their actual state of ignorance and improvidence would admit and to lay a foundation to prepare the rising generation for a destiny different from that in which they were born afforded some satisfaction to my mind...(Washington a life 492)" In other words the ends justify the means, and someone has to be the leader and guard the wealth.

Brigham seems to have adopted this conservative view and didn't trust Indians, Blacks, Immigrants (they always seemed to get the short end of the stick in pioneer Utah). He worked his servants 12 hours a day 6 days a week for very low wages and poor diets. And was sympathetic to slavery. He was unsupportive of abolitionists, and poked fun at the basic liberal movements in politics of that day.

As the 20th century came, Mormonism moved even further to the right.
1) Joseph Fielding Smith opposed the union organizations in the 1930's where labor was fighting against management for decent working conditions.
2) They opposed the Vietnam demonstrations during the 1960's.
3) They weren't involved or supportive of civil rights movements
4) They opposed era, and the lgbtq movements of the 1990s.

Kimballs views must have been shaped by the experience of counselling gays during the 1950's-60s. He must have worried that this small segment in the population (just a handfull of people in S.L.) would grow rapidly and spread to other communities. They were worried that gay rights would lead to transgender movements later and the creation of unisex bathrooms, drafting women to war, Coed sleeping arrangements.

Benson must have been shaped by his experience in Eisenhower republican government and the McCarthyism, he must have felt a lot like Walt Disney did when Disney struggled with his feelings of fear that their are enemies everywhere, that were trying to take his business away, so he got involved with J. Edgar Hoover and the extreme right.

Historian Michael Quinn suggests that whoever outlives everyone else gets the privilege of making the biggest political impact within the GAs. Is that the reason the church is ultra conservative now?

Neither "major" political party (democrat, republican) bears much if any resemblance to their 1800's counterparts.

When mormons were on the "leading edge" of change and being different, coming up with new things (new church, new doctrines, new 'marriage' rules, new united-order-type ways of living, etc.), they considered themselves "progressive." Embracing and working for change (even if the changes mostly sucked).

Once they got to Utah, got over the feds trying to arrest them for polygamy, and started making the church a business, they became "conservative" -- opposing change.

The switchover is an interesting study :)

For most of Smith's life, the Democrats were the main political party in the nation. They held the presidency every year of Smith's life until 1841, when the Whig William Henry Harrison became president. So for him to say he was a "democrat" probably didn't mean much.

The Dems were a very different political party then too. They favored a small central government, states rights, and agrarian interests (i.e., slavery). After the civil war, the Mormons continued to support Democrats because they generally favored states rights (which to Mormons, meant being able to practice polygamy). The Republicans were also the ones who freed the slaves, and many Utahns owned slaves (and those who didn't were still pretty racist). So they were kind of a swing state for a while, then during the Great Depression, Mormons supported the Democrats, largely because Utah was one of the poorest states in the nation then, and they received large amounts of federal funding from FDR. Utah was more or less a swing state that leaned Republican after that (due I would guess to the Cold War, though they did elect LBJ), until the civil rights and equal rights movements pushed Utah completely into being the Republican state it is now (since they also hated Black people and didn't want women to have equal rights).

Kolob is correct that the parties today do not resemble the parties of the early 19th century--the Republican Party of course did not even exist--so it doesn't make sense to use modern terminology to describe them.

But lets start with Smith and his alleged liberalism. It isn't accurate to describe him as racially progressive. He at one point said that the blacks should be sent back to Africa, at another that they should develop separately (apartheid, effectively). More to your point, a scripture telling Mormon men to take to wife the Lamanite women is not progressive for the simple reason that God apparently had no interest in the Lamanite men. The scripture treats those men just as the FLDS treats their "lost boys," an excess to be tossed aside as the leaders take all the women. The goal of such intermarriage was the systematic destruction of Native American culture and identity.

Second, there have been a lot of allegations about Bennett being a closet abortionist but I don't think there is conclusive evidence about that. He surely wasn't openly operating as such because abortion was scandalous in the Mormon world as well as the broader United States. I think it's important to distinguish between abortion as a woman's choice and abortion as a means used by men to hide their infidelities. If Bennett was an abortionist, he was the latter sort and it was in that capacity that Smith used him.

Third, totalitarians use the vote differently depending on their relation to power. Lenin and Stalin and Mao urged democracy and elections when they were out of power since those elections could be used to weaken the people who were dominant. Once the revolutionaries gained control, however, they either rejected elections altogether or they manipulated them to ensure their own victory. Joseph Smith was the same. Back when he was organizing his movement and fighting against more established churches, he was all for democracy. But as he gained influence his commitment to that ideal waned. He pursued precisely the path by which a rebel becomes a dictator.

Fourth, his communalism had multiple sources. There had always been such movements in European Christianity, and there were several in the fringe area where Smith lived and built his church. At some level he probably believed the system was a good one although he clearly insisted on maintaining control over it; and as shown by the Kirtland fiasco, he sometimes robbed it blind. So overall, I'd say that Smith was liberal when being such served his interests but by the time he became dominant within Mormonism he insisted on holding all the instruments of power in his own hands.

On the other point, the commitment to the parties, it's helpful to review the data. One of the reasons the Mormons were kicked out of some of their home areas was they voted as a block and sometimes switched on a dime. The Saints in Smith's day used the vote tactically and the various political parties all came to fear their capricious behavior.

Mormon commitment to the Democrats became more dependable and sincere during Brigham Young's time because the fledgling Republican Party was opposed to "those twin relics of barbarism," slavery and polygamy. The Democrats advocated States Rights because that ensured that the southerners voted for that party. The Mormons rode on the south's coattails, insisting on the sovereignty of the states because that insulated Utah from the rule of monogamy. Brigham Young was adamant about that: he hated Lincoln, damned him, and wanted the south to win the war. Had that happened and the specter of anti-polygamy legislation faded, the Mormons may well have felt that the Democrats had served their purpose and have reverted to an opportunistic approach to elections.

So no, I don't think Joseph Smith was a committed Democrat or a committed liberal. He was an opportunist whose behavior reflected his position in the power structure. Brigham Young took up the mantle when it symbolized absolute power and hence had no need to go through a liberal stage. The apt comparison is again to Lenin, whom revisionist historians inaccurately thought was something of a liberal, and Stalin, who had no need to act that way. You can't assume that people who claim to be liberal and progressive when they are weak are in fact that way. The real progressive is the one who, like George Washington, surrenders power when he could have kept it. Joseph Smith does not meet that criterion.

When Smith briefly ran for president before his death, he ran as an independent (as in not affiliated with a major party). He was for expanding the US territory to include Texas and Oregon. He was also in favor of granting the President powers to bypass governors to mobilize the military to squash mob actions.

Here's his election pamphlet from early 1844. His candidacy ended abruptly on June 27th of that year.

http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/NCMP1820-1846/id/2836

Already a general, Joseph Smith had also had himself anointed a king and a god through the temple rites, the second anointing, and the Quorum of Fifty.

There is no question where he was going with his quest for the presidency--and it was not in a Democratic or a democratic direction.

Well, I think I am finally making the connection here why the church ended up being such a dissapointing fraud. It is all starting to make sense to me now.

There's one thing about mormons and politics that i'm quite grateful for.

When I was young I always wondered why my parents didn't want to live in Utah. To me, it just seemed like the natural place for us to be. I would have thought that my over the top mormon parents would have given anything to live in Utah.


I finally got around to asking them why we didn't live in Utah. Their answer was all about money. My father was a blue-collar Union worker. Utah didn't like those kind. They didn't want to pay them a living wage with benefits. My parents had 6 kids. They needed every penny and every benefit they could get. That was only going to happen if my father stayed in a Union. He told me we could move to Utah, but my mother wasn't too fond of poverty. That was the end of that.

So, i'm grateful to Utah for not wanting to pay laborers a fair wage. It kept me in the PNW that I still love to this day. It kept me out of the Utah mormon life that I despise. It also kept me away from a slew of crazy mormon relatives. I dodged some real bullets because Utah isn't fond of paying people who need to go to work every day to support their families. YOu'd think it would be the other way around, but it isn't. Being a right to work state gives them the right to screw workers.

I agree with Ericka, that's one of the worst things about Utah is that we are "right to work" I've had many jobs here but there is always in the back of my mind the thought that I could be fired at any time. I presently work for a company that has no bargaining power for its workers at all, we are at their complete mercy. What's interesting is that this is the way the church wants it. Unions are against Mormon Doctrine.

These are all very informative posts, I hadn't really thought that the parties were that much different in the past. But now I'm seeing that it's true. The modern democratic party (what we see today) must have resulted more from the "New Deal" time period of FDR where so many new federal programs were established to take care of the poor during the 1930s.

And Mormon leaders of the past decided their party loyalties at the time that best suited their individual purposes (as Kolob and Lots Wife suggested).



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/14/2017 11:59AM by poopstone.

The New Deal was indeed huge in defining the democratic party. I would suggest, however, that there is not even continuity since then. Political parties are not designed to advocate a consistent set of principles or ideology: they are vehicles to achieve power, and when their principles diverge from the interests of their constituents, they change their principles. That may be cynical, but it explains why some parties survive and others go away.

There are many examples of this. It used to be that the Democrats included Southern Democrats, who were actually conservatives. Reagan peeled those people off and brought them into the GOP. That gave him power, but it also polarized the country by uniting the conservatives on one side and the liberals on the other. More recently, the Citizens United case legalized massive flows of money into the electoral system. The Democrats reacted to that by moving closer to Wall Street, effectively abandoning the working class that has now rebelled by endorsing Trump. So now the Dems are doing some soul-searching. Do they move to the left (Elizabeth Warren) to regain the support of that constituency or find some other framework to use against the GOP.

Ideologically, the GOP was once the party of fiscal rectitude and free trade. In the 1980s the Reagan administration opted for a massive increase in defense spending as well as big tax cuts. The result was more rapid GDP growth but also a huge expansion in the national debt. Since then the only period of fiscal restraint, ironically, was during the Clinton administration. The Trump administration has promised another burst in fiscal spending combined with tax cuts. In this sense the GOP may now be more fiscally irresponsible than the Democrats.

The parties have exchanged positions on trade, too. When the Dems were pro-labor, they were opposed to aggressive trade liberalization. Clinton, however, adopted a policy of free trade and implemented several such international agreements. Candidate Trump, by contrast, is not only rejecting further multilateral negotiations: he has nixed one major trade deal and has pledged to reverse others. The GOP is not entirely comfortable with this but is generally falling in line with the president. So on both trade and fiscal restraint the parties have not remained true to their principles.

We could multiply such examples. The point, though, is that parties change positions all the time. Those that do not, end up in the dustbin of history.

"The modern democratic party (what we see today) must have resulted more from the 'New Deal' time period of FDR where so many new federal programs were established to take care of the poor during the 1930s."

Should point out here that Utah voted *for* FDR, ALL FOUR TIMES he ran. The state also went Truman's way in 1948.

Since then, it's been just Johnson in '64 (even Utah couldn't stomach Goldwater) and Clinton in '92.

Joseph wasn't really a democrat.

Considering his life, I'd say he was an anarchist and a despot.

The rule of law flowed from him, and him alone. All the money flowed up to his personal coffers.

Aside from that, he was subject to no laws but his own. He was a pariah, NOT a prophet!

GAWD his awful self is Communist (see the chapter and verse: Acts chap. 2), or as Joseph called it "United Order"