POLITICAL IDEAS

With respect to political ideas, Joseph Smith was enthusiastic about his country. His dictation is consistent with his own view of America being the promised land where gentiles would prosper. Joseph lived in the second generation after the Declaration of Independence, which affirmed that all men are equal. His two grandfathers, Revolutionary War veterans, helped the colonists overthrow a monarchy. The Constitution drafted in 1787 provided for elections, checks and balances, and impeachment. The Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of religion and the right to petition the government. These documents reflect ideas from great thinkers and writers of the eighteenth-century, later characterized as the Age of Enlightenment, from whom Thomas Jefferson and others of the country’s founders borrowed liberally. Yet their ideas are also found in the Book of Mormon. Historian Richard Bushman wrote that “Joseph Smith must have absorbed the ordinary political sentiments of his time. The air was thick with politics.” Bushman described the annual July 4 celebrations and especially the jubilee anniversary of July 4 1826, which was not only the auspicious day on which the country celebrated fifty years to the day since the Declaration of Independence was signed but also the day on which John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died. This produced “a new round of patriotic rhetoric,” all thoroughly reflected in Palmyra’s weekly Wayne Sentinel. When Joseph Smith began dictating the Book of Mormon the next year, he “could not easily have avoided a rudimentary education in the principles of American government,” Bushman explained.

Many of the political ideas current in America at the time are paralleled in the account of King Mosiah’s final days. After 500 years under a monarchy, the Nephites decided to discontinue their kingship at the urging of King Mosiah in favor of judges chosen by the people. The fact that there are judges rather than a legislature is an interesting twist, but this could derive from a misunderstanding of the Book of Judges in the Bible. The biblical judges were military dictators who “judged” the nation and brought it to repentance, or who judged an enemy as worthy of destruction. These strongmen who were called judges were not royals like the later Solomon and David. But taken in a broad sense, we can see the order of political evolution in the Bible as a reversal of what we find in the Book of Mormon, in that the Israelites establish a kingdom to replace their “judges,” while the Nephites end their monarchy in favor of elected leaders, similar to their colonial American cousins.

Hugh Nibley detected in the “eagerness and ease” with which the Book of Mormon people adopt representative government a familiarity with Egypt. In so doing, he minimized the length of time (500 years) the Book of Mormon says it took for the Nephites to get around to adopting a new system of government and overstated the kind of democracy that existed in ancient Egypt. In Egypt, the priests and provincial rulers endorsed a leader they were beholden to. Nor are the Nephites portrayed as being eager to change. Without referring to Egypt or its influence, Mosiah has to both convince and command the people. Even more remarkably, Mosiah countenances aspects of a government that could not have come from Egypt, including elected leaders, the rule of law, and majority rule: a naïve view of America’s system (“It is not common that the voice of the people desireth anything contrary to that which is right; but it is common for the lesser part of the people to desire that which is not right; therefore this hall ye observe and make it your law—to do your business by the voice of the people,” Mosiah 29:26). Former BYU history professor D. Michael Quinn quotes the more sophisticated view expressed by both James Madison (“In republics, the great danger is that the majority may not sufficiently respects the rights of the minority”) and John Adams (“the desires of the majority of the people are often for injustice and inhumanity against the minority”), while Alexis de Tocqueville later called “the tyranny of the majority.”

Characterized as “innovative” in a FARMS Update, the impeachment process for errant judges allowed a high judge to discipline lower judges and a panel of lower judges to reign in higher judges. Still, in the American system, slightly camouflaged, where man are possessed of rights: “And now I desire that this inequality should be no more in this land, especially among this my people; but I desire that this land be a land of liberty, and every man may enjoy his rights and privileges alike” (29:32).

Mosiah establishes religious freedom for believers and decrees that unbelievers may not “persecute any of those who belonged to the church of God.” With equal enthusiasm, he proclaims “equality among all men” (27:2-3). In Alma there are even broader expressions of religious freedom: “The law could have no power on any man for his belief”; “There was no law against a man’s belief” (Alma 1:17; 30:7).

People were allowed to petition the government for change (51:2-7). Monarchists approach the chief judge, whose name is Pahoran, on “a few particular points of the law,” in an attempt “to overthrow the free government and to establish a king over the land.” They are angered at Pahoran’s disapproval and become “kingdom” to challenge the “freeman” who defend Pahoran, who want “to maintain their rights and the privileges of their religion by a free government.” Their contention is “settled by the voice of the people . . . in favor of the freeman.” This division is reminiscent of the split in colonial America between loyalists and patriots, who were called “kingmen” and “freemen” “during and after the American revolution.” In disagreement, a BYU history professor wrote that what this “really shows is that Joseph translated the Book of Mormon into nineteenth-century English,” that he “could just as easily” have used “’democrats’ and ‘monarchists,’” although he didn’t.

Several LDS scholars have challenged critics for contending that Joseph Smith copied the American system of government, and have gone out of their way to find differences between it and the Nephite government. For example, the chief judge behaves more like a king then a president. But no one has said anyone was trying to replicate the American model. If anything, the point was to appear to be a biblical, even if the author imported ideas from the American experiment.