Some billboards give a link to this blog: 

LDS CHURCH COULD SAVE OUR NATION

See URL SaveConstitution.org (this address)

The remaining big question then is whether the LDS Church WILL take action to save our nation.

The LDS Church today clearly has the moral and spiritual information, the incentive, and the financial and personnel resources to take very effective action on many levels to save our nation from its current precipitous decline into tyranny. Many of its members are enthusiastic patriots and would applaud the Church getting involved in our social processes and even our political processes. There are a host of things the church can do which would greatly improve our society, mostly through valid charitable activities, which would not put the church into the category of becoming an explicitly political organization, although, as a religious organization claiming authority to operate from the U.S. Constitution, there is no good reason why the church should shrink from taking actions that could have a powerful political effect on the country. 

Under US president Lyndon B. Johnson, and at his direction, the IRS did pass a regulation which said that churches, 501(c)(3) organizations, were required to be nonpolitical. However, the creation of that regulation was itself an unconstitutional use of government power, and that IRS regulation should be withdrawn. As far as I know, there has never been a prosecution under that regulation, for the very reason that it would almost certainly be declared unconstitutional if someone were to contest it in the courts. In the meantime, small churches, which do not have the resources to challenge the federal government in court, are intimidated, as was the original intent and effect of this unconstitutional regulation. The LDS Church certainly has the resources to challenge that unconstitutional regulation if it chose to do so, greatly benefiting itself and all other US churches.

The first two presidents of the church, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, were avid patriots and went to great lengths to secure freedom for the church membership. More recently, the LDS church was involved in the 2008 battle in California to support Proposition 8 to prevent same-sex marriage, which was originally successful but later overturned.

Since that time, it appears that the Church has been more politically passive, but there is no obvious constitutional reason for that. Perhaps the Church's policies are merely a recognition that we have a wide range of political views within the membership of the church at this point in time, which makes it difficult to act on the preferences of any one group, such as the patriots. But choosing to be completely passive seems quite unnecessary.

There is also the issue that the LDS church seems to want to stay out of all political questions in the United States, where it could do so legally and effectively, in order to curry favor with the more oppressive governments in perhaps 200 other countries in the world. One has to wonder whether it makes good policy sense to muzzle and ignore the freedom-loving church members in the United States, where their actions would all be legal, just to pacify governments elsewhere so that the church will not be rejected by governments there, even though there is little chance that the church could have significant numbers in those countries anyway. 

Since the pure gospel itself is a great champion of freedom and has been the basis for creating the unusual levels of freedom in Western Civilization, it seems irresponsible to do nothing to further the cause of freedom in the United States and in the Western world, simply because doing so might make the Church itself, along with Christianity in general, less welcome in the marginally Christian countries of the world. That is backwards and seems to be letting the "tail wag the dog." The long-term gains for Christianity and the gospel should be much larger if the church is part of supporting the spread of freedom throughout the world through nonviolent, mostly charitable means. Indeed, if the church does not vigorously maintain freedom wherever it can, the church puts itself in great danger of eventual extinction under pressure from the forces of evil.

It should be obvious to any student of history that one of the first institutions to be destroyed when tyrants of any kind take over a nation is that nation's Christian religion. We had Stalin blowing up hundreds of Russian Orthodox churches in Russia, at least until Russia was attacked by Germany, and an appeal needed to be made to the patriotism and religious fervor of the ordinary Russian citizens to help win that war.

Although many of our current leaders seem to care nothing about the possibility that China might gain great power over the United States, there are other leaders who would very much like the United States to continue to be free and prosperous, and to those leaders, it is clear that Christianity and its associated freedom must remain strong in the United States as the only way to resist destructive Chinese advances.

MormonPatriotism@gmail.com is available to make comments or ask questions. Users can also write comments on this blog.