Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe they have an important role to play in preserving the U.S. Constitution. This belief stretches back to the early days of the church. But if modern members are serious about defending America’s founding document, we must reject Donald Trump.
In an 1833 revelation recorded in Kirtland, Ohio, God, as reported by church founder Joseph Smith, notes his involvement in the crafting of the Constitution. He states that he helped to “establish” the Constitution via the “hands of wise men whom [he] raised up unto this very purpose.”
Barely 20 years later, at a Fourth of July celebration in the Salt Lake Tabernacle, Brigham Young told his audience that the Constitution would avoid destruction because “it will be held inviolate by this people.”
Smith’s 1833 revelation, then, asserted that the Constitution was divinely inspired, while Young’s 1854 speech held that the inspired document required protection. More recently, Dallin H. Oaks, a counselor in the governing First Presidency, gave a General Conference address, “Defending our Divinely Inspired Constitution,” that tied these two threads together.
Until recently, I found this emphasis on the sanctity and fragility of the Constitution a bit strange. I felt no need to proclaim its divine origin, and talk of the document “hanging by a thread” struck me as unnecessarily apocalyptic. But now, allusions to the Constitution’s fragility and divine provenance do not seem so silly. Instead, they seem precisely prophetic.
Donald Trump’s seditious behavior in the wake of the 2020 presidential election clearly demonstrates that electing him to a second term would put the Constitution in grave danger.
After his loss to Joe Biden in November 2020, Trump falsely claimed that widespread voter fraud had cost him the election. According to a database of his comments compiled by The Washington Post, Trump made more than 800 inaccurate claims about the election between Election Day and the end of his presidency. Reviews and recounts in battleground states, many of them initiated and overseen by members of the Republican Party, failed to reveal major inaccuracies in the initial tallies.
In addition to repeatedly claiming that the election was stolen, then-President Trump pressured election officials to refuse to certify Biden’s clear victory. In Georgia, Trump called Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and requested that he “find” nearly 12,000 votes in order to tilt the count in Trump’s favor. Trump and his co-conspirators are now under indictment for this and other efforts to overturn the election results in Georgia.
Most infamously, Trump’s efforts to undermine and overturn the results of a free and fair election culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol, an attempted coup for which the report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack holds him primarily responsible. Trump did not storm the Capitol himself, but he summoned the rioters to Washington, told them to march on the Capitol, incited further violence on social media and, for hours, refused to tell those rioters to stand down.
Delivered just three months after the Jan. 6 attack, President Oaks’ remarks are a direct rebuke of any and all efforts to subvert the Constitution, including the recent push to overturn the election. The Constitution, he says, “provides structures and limits for the exercise of government powers.”
Trump violently disregarded those structures and limits and continues to speak out against rules-based governance.
Oaks goes on to say that the Constitution identifies citizens as the source of governmental power and clarifies that this “does not mean that mobs or other groups of people can intervene to intimidate or force government action.” On Jan. 6, Trump whipped a crowd of his supporters into a frenzy and then sent them from the White House to the Capitol to “force government action.”
Although the church is unlikely to come out against Trump officially, the First Presidency’s recent warning that “voting based on ‘tradition’ without careful study of candidates … is a threat to democracy” signals their disapproval of supporting Trump simply because he may become the Republican nominee. In keeping with this guidance, Latter-day Saints who are serious about their commitment to defend the Constitution must unceasingly oppose Trump from now through November.
This opposition is not rooted in political preference. Rather, it constitutes a refusal to return the Oval Office to a man who has repeatedly violated the document he swore to uphold.
As defenders of the Constitution, it is the responsibility of all members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, regardless of political preference, to do all that they can to prevent him from winning this November’s election.
Our theology and our history have prepared us for such a time as this.
Zach Stevenson
Zach Stevenson is a senior at Brigham Young University and a senior editor at the Utah Monthly.
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