To Mormons, the Constitution’s Birthday Is Divinely Significant

The Constitution, while important to all American churches and temples because of its religious freedom guarantees in the First Amendment, is an object of near reverence for the Mormon Church. One of its own Scriptures says that it was God-inspired.

As a result, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been busily involved in bicentennial celebrations this week.

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir performed as part of a two-hour television network special Thursday from Convention Hall in Philadelphia. In Salt Lake City, the Mormon Symphony and Chorus highlighted the State of Utah celebration Thursday at the Salt Lake Tabernacle. Church-sponsored bicentennial exhibits are also showing at three Salt Lake City locations and a one-hour program on the Constitution was to be sent over the church’s satellite network Friday night to its stakes, or dioceses.

The Mormon book of Doctrine and Covenants says that Jesus Christ declared that no man should be in bondage to another and for that reason established the Constitution “by the hands of the wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose.”

The Mormon-published Church News recently commented, “That Deity would declare support of--even responsibility for--a secular, political document seems strange to some, particularly those who would try to make religion a thing apart, divorced from other aspects of life.”

The paper also said that Mormon President Wilford Woodruff told church authorities in 1877 that the spirits of George Washington and other Founding Fathers “demanded” that he perform the Mormon temple rites of baptism by proxy for them, which he said he did. The church, which believes it “restored” Christianity’s true church with its founding in 1830, offers baptism to the deceased who had no chance to belong to the Mormon Church.