It is not uncommon today to hear people describe themselves as “liberal” Mormons or “conservative” Mormons and to hear those who belong in one group to rail against the other, complaining how “ignorant” they are and how they don’t understand the Gospel. These complaints often extend into justifications for belonging to whatever partisan political group the writer(s) belong to and rationalizations for why the complainer’s political preference is better, usually implying or out right claiming it is more Christ-like to be one group or the other. While I’ve written about how these attitudes lead us into serious errors before, this Lost LDS Classic explains it far better than I have. Published in the April 8, 1854 edition (pg. 217) of The Latter-day Saints Millennial Star, the official publication of the church in the British Isles, the article Party Spirit gets to the heart of how and why political divisions – into everything from parties to nations – cripples the work of the Restored Gospel and is counter to the teachings of Jesus Christ.
The article explains that the work of the Restored Gospel is to unite all men under the banner of Jesus Christ to be ruled by Him as part of the Kingdom of God. Partisan politics is directly contrary to this as it divides members of the church against one another by setting them at odds with each other, thereby turning allies into enemies and engendering hatred and distrust where there should be unity and love. We begin to confuse our political beliefs for the Gospel and are thereby led astray into apostasy. For all that people seem to like to remind each other that they can find aspects of the Gospel in all political parties, they forget that all of them also violates the Gospel of Jesus Christ in horrific ways. The article then describes how nationalism does the same dividing of the Universal Church, just at a larger level. There are no such things as American Saints, French Saints, British Saints, German Saints, etc. There are only Latter-day Saints. And the more we allow national and cultural boundaries to define and separate us, the more we more we adulterate the Culture of Christ with the Cultures of Babylon and the more deranged we become.
All of the world’s political and national divisions the article correctly labels “Gentilism” as these are all the ways the princes of the Gentiles operate (Matt. 20:25-28) because that is how people in power divide up and control the masses. In contrast, “Mormonism” is about building Zion, a society of universal brotherhood where all people are of one heart and one mind united in righteousness (Moses 7:18), that is obedience to Jesus Christ. Zion is the nation of God, the literal Kingdom of God upon the Earth. National feeling, nationalism, and party spirit, loyalty to political parties, are part of Satan’s kingdom, not the Kingdom of God and the more quickly we abandon them the more quickly and truly we will be come Saints of the Most High God and accomplish our work of preparing the world for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
Note: The original article can be found here.