Mormonism has been secularizing since 1833. (For those keeping score at home, that’s three years after Mormonism’s institutional birth.) Politics—or more specifically, Mormons’ engagement with and capitulation to the secular nation-state—is the primary culprit.

“Secularization” is a loaded term, carrying for many the notion of anti-religion. But by saying that Mormonism has secularized I’m not suggesting that Mormonism is secular, in the sense of not being oriented toward the sacred. And I’m certainly not making an argument about whether the LDS Church is “true”—a theological claim based in large part on subjective personal experience and belief. Rather, I’m invoking an academic meaning of secularization as, in sociologist José Casanova’s words, “a process of functional differentiation and emancipation of the secular spheres—primarily the state, the economy, and science—from the religious sphere and the concomitant differentiation and specialization of religion within its own newly found religious sphere” (Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World [1994], 19).

The world elucidated in Joseph Smith’s early revelations does not contain differentiated spheres in which politics, economics, and science are emancipated from religion. Early Mormonism was a totalizing religious system—I like the term “sacred cosmos”—in which there was no clear distinction between the religious and the secular, the sacred and profane. In a revelation just a few months after the organization of the church in 1830, Smith recorded God as pronouncing, “all things unto me are spiritual, and not at any time have I given unto you a law which was temporal . . . for my commandments are spiritual; they are not natural nor temporal” (Doctrine & Covenants 29:34). Smith and the early Mormons clearly interpreted this to mean that all things fell under the scope of God’s authority. This understanding undergirded their remarkable experiment in not just religion-making but world-making as well: the Latter-day Saints’ Zion was a all-encompassing political, economic, social, and spiritual kingdom. [Read more...]