Mormonism & America's Civil Religion:

In this passage J K.A. Smith highlights a tension between orthodox Christianity and America's Civil Religion:

Some of us Christians have a hard time reconciling the Almighty, all-powerful, law-giving God of liberty with the crucified suffering servant born in a barn and executed at the hands of the elite. Some of us are trying to figure out what it means to be a people who follow one who relinquished his rights rather than asserted them, who considered submission a higher value than freedom. We serve a God-man who wasn’t concerned with “preserving leadership” and the hegemony of the empire’s gospel of freedom, but rather was crushed by its machinations for proclaiming and embodying another gospel.

As I've noted many times before it's precisely because of Mormonism's unorthodox nature (and because of when and where it was founded) that such better "fits" with America's Founding political theology than does orthodox Christianity.