In American Latter-day Saint circles there is much idolatry over the issue of the U.S. Constitution. Most of it has to do with a particularly willful misunderstanding of most statements on the Constitution found in the scriptures, the purpose of government, the rights of the people in the face of oppressive government laws, and the supremacy of God’s law to man’s in all cases. American Latter-day Saints also tend to idolize the American Founding Fathers. Much is made of the Lord’s statement, “by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose,” that is for writing the Constitution. (see D&C 101:80) It is without a doubt that they were intelligent men. The writings of Thomas Jefferson are still worth studying even today. But that doesn’t justify us in not creating something better now than they could envision then, that doesn’t justify us calcifying out social, spiritual, political, and economic development because they could not imagine the next step in liberty and individual freedom. It does not justify us in idolizing the Constitution (or your respective national charter), ignoring the many ways it has been wrong, corrupt, and evil form the very start, and choosing it over that which is better now.
Indeed, D&C 101 as a whole is incredibly ambivalent on the entire issue of the U.S. Constitution. In D&C 101:77 the Lord says that the Constitution is something, “I have suffered to be established.” Suffering something to take place means it is something you allow and endure, something that hurts you but which you allow to occur anyway. That the U.S. Constitution is something the Lord had to suffer to happen, which may even have pained Him to do so, is hardly a ringing endorsement for said Constitution. The language here reminds me a great deal of 1 Samuel 8, wherein the Lord suffers Israel to have a king as they demand even though it goes against what He would have had for them. There too did the Lord raise up “wise men unto the very purpose” of being kings of Israel. Saul went mad with power and David became an adulterer and murderer. Turns out that just because you may be the wisest available to the Lord, even the best of your generation, does not mean that you are good, righteous, worthy of emulation, or truly wise at all as true wisdom is to follow and submit to the commands of God.
That many Latter-day Saints may feel as President George A. Smith did (see Pg. 182) when he said that he believed “the Constitution of the United States of America is just as much from my Heavenly Father as the Ten Commandments,” is well established. What is equally important but almost always ignored is that the Ten Commandments were part of the Law of Moses, a lesser law given to the Children of Israel because they were incapable of following the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Such is true of the wisdom of the American Founding Fathers and the lesser law of the U.S. Constitution. We have the U.S. Constitution because society was unwilling to follow better worldly laws and even more unwilling to follow the Laws of God. But that is no excuse for the Latter-day Saints as we have God’s laws and have covenanted with Him to follow Him above all.
A good example of the foolishness and inferiority of the Constitution can be seen in reference to D&C 101: 78-79. Therein the Lord says that it is His will that every man should be free to act in his moral agency, that is free to live life according to the dictates of his own conscience and therefore be accountable for his actions. And because of this it is “not right that any man should be in bondage one to another.” (Verse 79) In other words, slavery is a sin before God. Therefore, any document that sanctions slavery is violating the commandments of God and breaking God’s commandments is a very unwise, foolish thing to do. And what does the U.S. Constitution say about slavery? According to Dr. David Waldstreicher, Distinguished Professor of History at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the U.S. Constitution did not simply protect slavery. Such an argument is far too simplistic. Dr. Waldstreicher argues, using not only the Constitution itself but also The Federalist Papers and the writings of prominent Founders such as James Madison, that the Constitution “hardwired it [slavery] into the branches, the very workings, of the federal government.”
The Constitution nationalized slavery, forcing its funding and protection onto even those who opposed it and making it a federal crime not only to help slaves escape being robbed, raped, tortured, and murdered but also made it illegal to truly end slavery anywhere as the Constitution used the national power of the government to ensure it could be practiced everywhere (an issue important in LDS and Utah history as well.) The Constitution didn’t just permit slavery. It actively promoted it, protected it, funded it, and expanded it. It punished those who sought to keep God’s commandments to end slavery with fines and imprisonment. It violated the commandments of Jesus Christ in one of the most oppressive and bloodthirsty ways possible. It continues to do so today as it sanctions state violence, theft, and violation of individual human liberty. Inferior and foolish are among the most civil ways one could and should denounce such a document.
In fact, there have been people whose vision and understanding of the U.S. Constitution and the American Founding Fathers has been clearer than those around them and whose dedication to the Higher Law of the Gospel of Jesus Christ have led them to make more powerful denunciations of the document and system itself. William Lloyd Garrison was just such a man. Garrison was the beating hard and thunderous voice of the abolitionist movement. While men and women around him equivocated and compromised with the evils of slavery and its political supporters, Garrison was a granite mountain of truth, immoveable, impassable and implacable in his dedication to the immediate liberty of all slaves and their immediate enfranchisement as equal citizens. As. historian Dr. Ronald Osborn has said, “Garrison did more to force the issue of slavery into public debate and to galvanize the nation around the slavery issue than any other individual.” (Pg. 66)
Garrison’s newspaper, and our inspiration, The Liberator, exposed the corruption and lies of the political system and called upon people to reject all justifications for slavery and to truly become disciples of Jesus Christ by immediately ending such a horrid and wicked practice. It was Garrison who branded the U.S. Constitution “the source and parent of all the other atrocities – a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell,” for the way in which it condemned millions of men, women, and children, to the brutality, rape, robbery, torture, humiliation, and dehumanization of slavery with no recourse for salvation and which beat, caged, robbed, and killed any of those who tried to live the Gospel of Jesus Christ and help their brothers and sisters escape slavery. He was also one of the earliest practitioners of Christian voluntaryism, nonviolence, and civil disobedience as he too understood the truth that God and His Law was and is supreme to all the laws, traditions, and edicts of men.
Below is a quotation from an article Garrison wrote in 1832 titled The Great Crisis which is well worth reading for the power of its truthful denouncement of those who would perpetuate evil for political and national causes. One may ask how this is relevant when slavery has been illegal for so long here today. The explanation is simple. Everything Garrison says about slavery applies to the State today. The governments of the world rob people of their labor and the worth that they produce by extorting money from them in the name of taxation. The governments of the world will destroy your life and/or murder you if you refuse to obey its unjust laws. Sexual molestation and rape are common in police arrests across the world. What else would you call someone else using violence to run their hands over every part of your body, stripping you naked in order to search you, forcing their fingers inside your mouth, anus, and vagina as part of cavity search other than sexual harassment, molestation, sexual assault, and rape? The police murder people in the streets for even the most minor of offenses or no violation of the law at all. You cannot leave the tax farm, the country, without the State’s permission and if you try it will imprison you or kill you. The violence and brutality of the State is as prevalent and evil as ever, if not more so. It victimizes ever person in the world in every country on the planet. And until its tyranny is overthrown our work will only ever be half done and therefore must continue onward.
So as you read below replace all the references to slavery with the State or the government. And don’t let the mental conditioning you’ve been exposed to all your life that has trained you to look at your national charter – whether it be the U.S. Constitution or any other – as if it were some noble, inspired, text laid out to ensure your rights and liberties, to establish justice, or unite humanity. Instead regard it as it truly is, a document meant to justify the ability of a small group of politically connected elites to profit from the robbery, abuse, and oppression of the public under the color of the law and grant a false sense of legitimacy to the Great Fiction of the State as it legalizes its plundering of the public.
As Garrison argues, no such charter can bind anyone in his day or ours to them by the words of another and such compacts as which authorize the committing of sin, oppression, and evil are of no authority or force to begin with and should be disobeyed. Instead of obeying evil, we, as Saints who have covenanted through baptism and in the Temple to give everything we have and are to the building of the literal Zion upon the Earth, must leave off these worldly ideas and worldly wickednesses to dedicate our all to the service of God and for building His Kingdom, the only place that is truly a place of liberty, equality, prosperity, and blessedness for all those therein. In the excerpts from The Great Crisis below I have altered the text slightly by introducing paragraphs to make it more readable (Garrison was working with limited space on his news sheets and as a result his spacing is not very good by present standards) and adding illustrative pictures. Otherwise, the entire text, including all emphasis, is original. The excerpt below picks up right after a long section where Garrison has rehearsed the arguments of those who don’t want to immediately end slavery because it was more convenient to continue in sin and because ending slavery might tear the country apart – in other words the same justifications that people use today for supporting the government, the State, despite its manifold evils.
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Could we make such a plea at the bar of God? Would not his blazing eye strike terror into our guilty souls, and his retributive thunders sink them to perdition? If this plea will not avail aught in the day of judgment, it is good for nothing here. Now, then, let those beware who would make us believe it a valid one, or who are thus trying to deceive themselves. God is not mocked—and he may cut them down with the plea on their lips, and summon them before him. It is highly probable that many who read these lines will never live to see another year—perhaps we may all be in our graves ere another week: if, then, we ever intend to plead for the bleeding, dying slaves, we must plead now, and pray now, and labor now, and humble ourselves before God now, for our past indifference and slothfulness.
There is much declamation about the sacredness of the compact which was formed between the free and slave states, on the adoption of the Constitution. A sacred compact, forsooth! We pronounce it the most bloody and heaven-daring arrangement ever made by men for the continuance and protection of a system of the most atrocious villany ever exhibited on earth. Yes—we recognize the compact, but with feelings of shame and indignation, and it will be held in everlasting infamy by the friends of justice and humanity throughout the world. It was a compact formed at the sacrifice of the bodies and souls of millions of our race, for the sake of achieving a political object—an unblushing and monstrous coalition to do evil that good might come. Such a compact was, in the nature of things and according to the law of God, null and void from the beginning. No body of men ever had the right to guarantee the holding of human beings in bondage.
Left: Derek Pantaleo and three other cops murder Eric Garner as he begs for his life.
Then and now the “sacred” Constitution allows those in power to murder the common people with little to no punishment. Panatelo, the murderer of Eric Garner, merely lost his job and the Thirteenth Amendment still protects prison slave labor.
Who or what were the framers of our government, that they should dare confirm and authorise such high-handed villainy—such flagrant robbery of the inalienable rights of man—such a glaring violation of all the precepts and injunctions of the gospel—such a savage war upon a sixth part of our whole population?—They were men, like ourselves—as fallible, as sinful, as weak, as ourselves. By the infamous bargain which they made between themselves, they virtually dethroned the Most High God, and trampled beneath their feet their own solemn and heaven-attested Declaration, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights—among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They had no lawful power to bind themselves, or their posterity, for one hour—for one moment—by such an unholy alliance. It was not valid then—it is not valid now. Still they persisted in maintaining it—and still do their successors, the people of Massachusetts, of New-England, and of the twelve free States, persist in maintaining it. A sacred compact! A sacred compact! What, then, is wicked and ignominious?
This, then, is the relation in which we of New-England stand to the holders of slaves at the south, and this is virtually our language toward them—
Go on, most worthy associates, from day to day, from month to month, from year to year, from generation to generation, plundering two millions of human beings of their liberty and the fruits of their toil—driving them into the fields like cattle—starving and lacerating their bodies—selling the husband from his wife, the wife from her husband, and children from their parents—spilling their blood—withholding the bible from their hands and all knowledge from their minds—and kidnapping annually sixty thousand infants, the offspring of pollution and shame! Go on, in these practices—we do not wish nor mean to interfere, for the rescue of your victims, even by expostulation or warning—we like your company too well to offend you by denouncing your conduct—although we know that by every principle of law which does not utterly disgrace us by assimilating us to pirates, that they have as good and true a right to the equal protection of the law as we have; and although we ourselves stand prepared to die, rather than submit even to a fragment of the intolerable load of oppression to which we are subjecting them—yet, never mind—let that be—they have grown old in suffering and we iniquity—and we have nothing to do now but to speak peace, peace, to one another in our sins.
We are too wicked ever to love them as God commands us to do—we are so resolute in our wickedness as not even to desire to do so—and we are so proud in our iniquity that we will hate and revile whoever disturbs us in it. We want, like the devils of old, to be let alone in our sin. We are unalterably determined, and neither God nor man shall move us from this resolution, that our colored fellow subjects never shall be free or happy in their native land. Go on, from bad to worse—add link to link to the chains upon the bodies of your victims—add constantly to the intolerable burdens under which they groan—and if, goaded to desperation by your cruelties; they should rise to assert their rights and redress their wrongs, fear nothing—we are pledged, by a sacred compact, to shoot them like dogs and rescue you from their vengeance! Go on—we never will forsake you, for their is honor among thieves—our swords are ready to leap from their scabbards, and our muskets to pour forth deadly vollies, as soon as you are in danger. We pledge you our physical strength, by the sacredness of the national compact—a compact by which we have enabled you already to plunder, persecute, and destroy two millions of slaves, who now lie beneath the sod; and by which we now give you the same piratical license to prey upon a much larger number of victims and all their posterity. Go on—and by this sacred instrument, the Constitution of the United States, dripping as it is with human blood, we solemnly pledge you our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor, that we will stand by you to the last.
People of New-England, and of the free States! is it true that slavery is no concern of yours? Have you no right even to protest against it, or to seek its removal? Are you not the main pillars of its support? How long do you mean to be answerable to God and the world, for spilling the blood of the poor innocents? Be not afraid to look the monster Slavery boldly in the face. He is your implacable foe—the vampyre who is sucking your life-blood—the ravager of a large portion of your country, and the enemy of God and man. Never hope to be a united, or happy, or prosperous people while he exists. He has an appetite like the grave—a spirit as malignant as that of the bottomless pit—and an influence as dreadful a the corruption of death. Awake to your danger! the struggle is a mighty one—it cannot be avoided—it should not be, if it could.
It is said that if you agitate this question, you will divide the Union. Believe it not; but should disunion follow, the fault will not be yours. You must perform your duty, faithfully, fearlessly and promptly, and leave the consequences to God: that duty clearly is, to cease from giving countenance and protection to southern kidnappers. Let them separate, if they can muster courage enough—and the liberation of their slaves is certain. Be assured that slavery will very speedily destroy this Union, if it be left alone; but even if the Union can be preserved by treading upon the necks, spilling the blood, and destroying the souls of millions of your race, we say it is not worth a price like this, and that it is in the highest degree criminal for you to continue the present compact. Let the pillars thereof fall—let the superstructure crumble into dust—if it must be upheld by robbery and oppression.
We must not idolize the nation, the country, or the government. Its only means of survival are extortion, theft, violence, and the violation of the rights of individuals. It is a tool of barbarism and we do much evil by continuing to prop it up. Instead we must, as Garrison said, let the pillars justifying it fall and lets its foundations of manipulation and lies crumble into dust. Let us, like Samson of old, tear down the Temple of the State and wreck its idols so that we, like Enoch and Nephi, may build something better in its place – the Kingdom of Our God and His Christ, even Zion.