How Mormons View America's Founding:

There is an interesting conversation occurring here on this thread. Someone makes an interesting point: since Mormons view America's founding as divinely inspired, Mitt Romney, as a Mormon, may do a better job defending the US Constitution since he'll view it as a divinely inspired document.

I think the key Founders -- Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, et al. -- did believe God intervened on their behalf in the Revolution and subsequently in constructing the Constitution (though the Declaration is far more theistic than the Constitution).

However, the ideas contained in the Founding documents -- the Declaration, Constitution, and Federalist Papers -- are hardly biblical. Indeed, some notable scholars have made the case that some key Founding ideas actually conflict with the Bible; for instance, Romans 13 seems to categorically forbid revolt, arguably making America's war for independence a sin according to the Bible.

George Washington believed God was pro-political liberty. That's well and good; the problem is, the Bible doesn't teach this. The Bible never mentions political liberty; every time it uses the word "liberty," it refers to spiritual not political liberty.

The Mormon religion, and the book of Mormon, on the other hand, do indeed make Founding-era republican ideals part and parcel of their religion. But that's not because there is anything magically or divinely true about the Mormon religion; rather, because when Joseph Smith et al. created the religion, they incorporated some of the Founders' republican ideals, enlightenment teachings, and eccentric theological beliefs into their religion. For instance, Ben Franklin flirted with the proto-Mormon belief that some larger God created the cosmos, and each solar system had its own lesser God -- a more "knowable" God -- which he would worship.

I don't think that Mormonism is entirely consistent with the theology of the key Founders (for instance, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin thought the Bible to be only partially inspired and that man's reason supersedes biblical revelation as the final arbiter of truth -- do Mormon's believe this?); but Mormon theology is closer to what the Founders believed than is orthodox Trinitarian Christianity.

The Book of Mormon is, by its very nature, extra-biblical, and that's where Founding era republican ideals are officially incorporated into Mormon theology. What Mormons officially did parallels what some Christians and Unitarians who called themselves Christians did during the Founding era: They incorporated extra-biblical republican principles into their "Christian" theology to make God over in a way more in accord with liberal democratic ideals. Whenever you see buzzwords like "state of nature" in Founding era sermons, or if any of those sermons argued God was on the side of the Americans in the Revolutionary war, God grants unalienable natural rights, God is pro-political liberty, you can be sure this is what was going on.