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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 September 2019
It is common for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be considered one of the most conservative religious groups in the United States. What is less well understood is as to when the relationship between Mormonism and American conservatism began. While some historians point to the social upheavals in the 1960s and 1970s as the glue that united Mormons and conservatives, the connection began decades earlier during the Great Depression. Leaders of the Mormon Church interpreted Roosevelt’s New Deal as the fulfillment of eschatological prophecy. Envisioning themselves saving America and the Constitution at the world’s end, Mormon authorities established their own welfare program to inspire Latter-day Saints and Americans in general to eschew the New Deal. Anti–New Dealers used the Mormon welfare plan to construct a conservative ideology. Accordingly, Mormons are essential elements in the formation of a political movement that revolutionized the United States.
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15. Some historians might question how a marginalized religious minority in the American West could drive national politics in any meaningful way. Yet, nineteenth-century Mormon polygamy drove a massive revision of the First Amendment and federal oversight into the personal, religious lives of Americans. Influence is not necessarily contingent on size or numbers of political elites. Small, often persecuted, religious groups outsize their influence because their position as outsiders make them more conspicuous, not less so. See, for example, the role of Jehovah’s Witnesses in pushing the Supreme Court to honor the rights of minority groups during World War II in Shawn Francis Peters Judging Jehovah’s Witnesses: Religious Persecution and the Dawn of the Rights Revolution (Lawrence, Kans., 2000).
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