Consider it official: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has exited the culture war, repudiated Christian nationalism, and embraced a wiser alternative: Christian constitutionalism.
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In a speech on Sept. 16, Dallin H. Oaks, the president of the church, placed the church squarely at odds with the trend among other conservative Christians toward partisanship and cultural confrontation. Instead, he said, Christians, and Americans, should pursue conciliation.
While his message was not unfamiliar within the church, President Oaks sought to bring it to a national audience in terms secular Americans can relate to. At a time when liberal democracy is embattled, he took a stand in its support.
Those are pretty bold claims for a speech which, on its own terms, did not break a lot of new ground. The speech’s context is what makes it so noteworthy.
Ever since the 1970s and 1980s, white, conservative Christians — “white evangelicals” is the usual shorthand — have increasingly aligned with the Republican Party.
In 1980, candidate Ronald Reagan told a gathering of conservative evangelical pastors, “I know that you can’t endorse me, but I want you to know that I endorse you.” On issues like abortion, homosexuality, and prayer in schools, white conservative Christians allied with Republicans.
Gradually, white evangelicals’ outlook became dominated by fear. They feared demographic decline, cultural marginalization, shrinking status and influence.
In recent decades, the number of Americans identifying as Christians has dwindled; the number of so-called “nones,” who profess no religious attachment, exploded. On social issues like homosexuality, pornography, abortion, and sexual ethics, the public rejected evangelicals’ message. Fearing that left-wing secularism would engulf them, white evangelicals eventually seized upon the very un-Christian Donald Trump and his MAGA movement as their protector.
In parallel, they also lit upon a bundle of ideas that seemed to justify a take-no-prisoners view of politics. Christian nationalism has no specific meaning, but its recurrent theme is that the country cannot be good unless it is Christian, and so Christians should dominate in running it.
Radical theologies with names like the Seven Mountains Mandate and the New Apostolic Reformation rose to prominence. At the same time, intellectuals loosely known as post-liberal and integralist — whose adherents include Vice President JD Vance — argued that the classical-liberal philosophy of the American founders is self-destructively individualistic and amoral. Instead, they argue, the country should be governed on Christian principles.
For a while, Latter-day Saints seemed to be on the same path. In 2008, as if following the culture-war playbook, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints campaigned at the request of leaders to amend California’s state constitution to define marriage as only between a man and a woman. The campaign succeeded, but the intense anger and controversy it caused seemed to spark a rethink: was this really the role the church wanted to play?
In 2009, the church raised eyebrows by endorsing a Salt Lake City ordinance forbidding discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. At the same time, it entered into quiet conversations with LGBT activists including Equality Utah, the state’s leading LGBT advocacy group.
In 2015, those talks bore fruit when Equality Utah, the church, and conservative legislative leaders passed SB296, a law extending anti-discrimination protections to LGBT people while also providing carefully tailored exemptions for religious groups.
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For LGBT people whose pleas for protection from discrimination had fallen on deaf ears in other conservative states, SB296 seemed astounding. Just as strikingly, in 2022 the church helped pass a similarly structured bill in Congress that gave federal legal recognition to same-sex marriages while providing religious exemptions.
It’s important to understand that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints firmly opposes same-sex marriage and regards homosexual conduct as a sin. Other conservative Christian denominations would sooner eat shattered glass than help establish same-sex marriage in federal law.
Why take an approach so at odds with conservative Christian politics? In a speech at the University of Virginia in 2021, and again in Rome in 2022, President Oaks — who was then first counselor in the church’s First Presidency — gave a rationale: Christians should seek to moderate and unify, not polarize and divide. Without sacrificing their principles, they should use “patience, negotiation, and mutual accommodation” to find ways for Americans of diverse views to share the country. By the time President Oaks ascended to the church’s presidency, his predecessor, Russell M. Nelson, had tasked the church with civic “peacemaking,” a term that is almost canonical.
With all that as background, what was significant about President Oaks’s National Cathedral speech?
First, in choosing National Cathedral as his venue, he sought a national audience. Although the speech contained references to the Bible, he stressed his background as a jurist and constitutional scholar and cast his argument in mostly secular terms. Subtly but significantly, he made the whole country the church’s mission field. In doing so, he sought to speak not just to the Latter-day Saint faithful but as a national ecclesiastical leader.
Even more significant was the structure of his message.
President Oaks emphasized three elements. First, “We should be especially careful not to seek total dominance for all our own positions,” he said. Second: “Where there is genuine conflict on the effect of constitutional rights, contesting positions need to be balanced legally and negotiated politically in a way that upholds all essential rights to the greatest extent possible. … The goals of both sides are best served by resolving differences through mutual respect, shared understanding, and good faith negotiations.” Third, the Constitution “compels a divided people to build coalitions that allow them to act together for the common good.”
This highlights three principles: nondomination, negotiation, coalition. President Oaks treats them not just as politically desirable but as morally virtuous. And they are exactly the principles that underlie the order conceived by James Madison, the principle designer of the Constitution.
Knowing full well that ambitious people and factions will try to dominate the government and disenfranchise their opponents, Madison divided power so that constant negotiations are required in order to get anything done. In doing so, he set up a dynamic process in which divergent parties, ideologies, regions, and interests are forced to come together around the table, find creative solutions to problems, and act together even if they don’t think alike.
Strikingly, in his speech, President Oaks specifically cited the 2015 Utah compromise as a model, and he praised Equality Utah and its then leader, Troy Williams, for their role. It was as strong a statement as he could make that when he endorses negotiation and coalitional politics even when the work is hard and the differences are large, he really means it.
In all those respects, the National Cathedral speech was important, perhaps even seminal. And in one other respect, too. Strange as it may seem, the nonagenarian leader of a conservative church made a profoundly countercultural speech. He repudiated Christian nationalism as un-Christian. He rejected culture-war politics. He embraced cross-partisan politics and the hard work of negotiating solutions. He threw his church’s support behind Madisonian constitutionalism at a moment when it is embattled.
As a Jew and an atheist, I can’t speak to whether the Holy Spirit was present at the cathedral, but the spirit of the Constitution was there.
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