Nathan B. Oman, William & Mary Law School, has posted "All Other Religious Sects Shall Have Free Toleration": Recovering the Early Mormon Conception of Religious Freedom, which is forthcoming in the Journal of Mormon History:
On March 1, 1841, the City Council of the Mormon city of Nauvoo, Illinois adopted “An Ordinance in Relation to Religious Societies,” declaring that “all other religious sects, and denominations, whatever, shall have free toleration, and equal privileges.” The ordinance is frequently cited by Latter-day Saints to illustrate their long-standing commitment to religious freedom and toleration. Despite these uses, however, there has been little effort to understand the Ordinance within its historical context. When we examine the history and use of the Ordinance in the 1840s, a more complex picture emerges. The Ordinance in Relation to Religious Societies represented a particular conception of religious freedom forged out of the Latter-day Saint persecutions of the 1830s and an antebellum American legal system struggling to make sense of religious freedom in a new world defined by disestablishment. This article seeks to recover that conception of religious freedom and its place in early Latter-day Saint history. It also reveals how an idea – religious freedom – associated with contemporary liberalism operated in an earlier legal regime where liberal conceptions of individuals rights had not wholly triumphed and freedom was understood primarily as a product of a well-ordered society. The approach embodied in the Ordinance thus reveals a conception of religious freedom perched awkwardly between a pre-disestablishment legal regime based on the confident assertion of government’s right to regulate and support religion, and the emerging liberal order in the United States that would eventually come to focus on the individual assertion of rights against the government vindicated through the courts. Aside from its interest to students of Mormon history, studying the Ordinance in Relation to Religious Societies provides a window into an important but under-studied period in the legal history of religious freedom in the United States.
Credit: BYU
--Dan Ernst
