Latter-day Saints have long defended religious liberty. However, some people may not realize that the Latter-day Saint defense of religious liberty has been expansive since its founding decades — stretching beyond the bounds of Christianity to include people of all faith — and no faith at all.
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In March 1839, as Joseph Smith and other Latter-day Saint leaders languished in Liberty Jail, notions of religious liberty were on their minds. They wanted their Missouri oppressors to know that “the Mormons as well as the Presbyterians and those of every other class and description have equal rights to partake of the fruit of the great tree of our national liberty.”
Later that same year, Joseph Smith and other Latter-day Saint leaders remained concerned over the lack of religious liberty that they had endured. They thus prepared a memorial to the United States Senate and House of Representatives in which they chronicled their recent expulsion from the state of Missouri under threat of a state sanctioned extermination order:
“Mormons numbering fifteen thousand souls have been driven from their homes in Missouri; property to the value of two millions of dollars has been taken from them or destroyed,” they wrote. “Some of their brethren have been murdered; some wounded and others beaten with stripes; the chastity of their wives and daughters inhumanly violated … For these wrongs, and sufferings, the Mormons, as American citizens, ask; is there no redress?”
It was a poignant question and one for which Latter-day Saint leaders pressed Congress for an answer: “The constitution, you are sworn to support, alike guarantees to every citizen, the humblest in society, the enjoyment of life, liberty and property. It promises to all, religious freedom; the right to all, of worshipping Almighty God, beneath their own vine and fig tree, according to the dictates of their own consciences.”
Even though such petitions were not successful, Joseph Smith refused to abandon the key principles of religious liberty on which they were built. It is no coincidence then, as Latter-day Saints established their own community in Nauvoo, they put those principles into practice.
In March 1841, Latter-day Saints passed their own law on religious liberty, and it was expansive. It even included Muslims in its list of protected religious denominations: “Be it ordained by the City Council of the City of Nauvoo, That the Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Latter-Day Saints, Quakers, Episcopalians Universalists Unitarians, Mahommedans, and all other religious sects and denominations whatever, shall have free toleration and equal Privileges in this City.”
“All other sects and denominations whatever” is an expansive vision of religious liberty. The inclusion of Muslims in the specified list makes it clear that Latter-day Saints were thinking beyond the bounds of Christianity when they wrote it.
Latter-day Saints did not stop there. When Joseph Smith established a Council of Fifty, a political and temporal governing body, he did so grounded in principles of religious liberty and made sure the council included members of other faiths.
On April 11, 1844, he taught the Council that they should “act upon the broad and liberal principal that all men have equal rights, and ought to be respected, and that every man has a privilege in this organization of choosing for himself voluntarily his God, and what he pleases for his religion.”
For Joseph Smith, it was not enough to merely tolerate people of other faiths or of no faith. Religious bigotry had no place in his worldview. “God cannot save or damn a man only on the principle that every man acts, chooses and worships for himself; hence the importance of thrusting from us every spirit of bigotry and intolerance towards a man’s religious sentiments, that spirit which has drenched the earth with blood.”
Smith most succinctly enshrined his ideas about religious liberty into what became an “Article of Faith” among the Latter-day Saints. It endures to the present: “We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.”
“How, where, or what they may” again stretches religious liberty beyond Christianity to include all faiths and no faith at all. Certainly, one lesson from Latter-day Saint history is that it offers no room for Christian nationalism. In defending religious liberty for one group, be it Muslims, Jews, Hindus or “all other sects and denominations whatever,” Latter-day Saints are defending religious liberty for all.
As Latter-day Saints around the globe join in a fast for religious liberty, the current leader of the faith, President Dallin H. Oaks, has been again thinking expansively. As he taught in 2022: “We seek to help all of (God’s) children — not just our own members — enjoy the precious freedom to choose.”
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