Date of Award
Fall 2023
Degree Type
Open Access Dissertation
Degree Name
Religion, MA
Program
School of Arts and Humanities
Advisor/Supervisor/Committee Chair
Matthew Bowman
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Tammi Schneider
Terms of Use & License Information
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Rights Information
© 2023 Mitch Nelson
Keywords
19th century, antebellum, Constitution, Joseph Smith, Religious Freedom, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Subject Categories
American Studies | Religion
Abstract
As the founder of the most persecuted denomination of the nineteenth century in the United States, Joseph Smith desperately yearned for religious freedom. I argue that Joseph Smith understood religious freedom as a theological doctrine given by God to help individuals, communities, and nations discover how to balance order and diversity. Rather than being a product of democratic government, he viewed religious freedom as the necessary foundation for a just government and society. Therefore, maintaining religious freedom would preserve the governing system, not the other way around. For Joseph, religious freedom was incrementally discovered in a process of identity formation that developed over time. I claim that Joseph Smith saw a discrepancy in the actualization of religious freedom in society. He believed religious freedom was experienced as a religious reality, while government leaders and citizens interpreted it as a political right granted by law. Joseph saw the Constitution as the central agent that both created this gap and had the potential to resolve it. On one hand, the Constitution was divinely inspired and implied the equality of religious action. On the other hand, it fell short of guaranteeing the ideals it espoused by not providing an enforcement mechanism. Therefore, I will show in this thesis that Joseph’s understanding of the Constitution and religious freedom changed over time, leading to a shift in strategies to correct them. First, Joseph entirely depended on the Constitution as the arbiter of religious freedom. Then he established a model of the Constitution as a living document that fulfilled its purpose only as it developed and improved over time. Finally, Joseph reframed democracy within a theistic framework to unite all people in the same religio-political cause.
ISBN
9798381417746
Recommended Citation
Nelson, Mitch. (2023). The Restoration of Religious Freedom: Joseph Smith’s Evolving Understanding of the United States Constitution, 1830-1844. CGU Theses & Dissertations, 717. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/717.
