On July 5, 2026, the day after the country marks 250 years since the Declaration, Latter-day Saints across the United States have been asked to fast. The First Presidency set the terms: go without food, and pray that religious liberty be protected and carried further into the world. The church chose the theme itself. Few American institutions have a harder history with the freedom it named.
The church did not exist at the founding. Joseph Smith organized it in 1830, two generations after 1776. What it inherited was not a place in the Revolution but a belief about it. A revelation Smith dictated in 1833, now Doctrine and Covenants 101, holds that God established the Constitution "by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose." The Saints read the country as chosen. For sixty years, the country did not return the sentiment.
Missouri
On October 27, 1838, near the close of the Mormon War in Missouri, Governor Lilburn Boggs wrote to a militia general. The order, now held in the Missouri State Archives, accused the Saints of "open and avowed defiance of the laws" and of making war on the people of the state. Then it gave the instruction history remembers. "The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace."
Three days later, about two hundred and forty men rode into a small settlement on Shoal Creek called Haun's Mill. The men there ran for the blacksmith shop, and the attackers pushed their rifles through the gaps between the logs and fired into the room. Joseph Young, who reached the scene and helped bury the dead, left a sworn account of the attack. Seventeen were killed, among them children and old men, and the survivors, with no time to dig proper graves, put their dead down an unfinished well. Amanda Smith, who lost her husband and a son there and whose other boy was shot through the hip, recorded that the militia told the Saints to deny their faith or die, and that one of them, finishing off the wounded, used the phrase that fixed the day in Mormon memory. Nits make lice.
The killers were a local vigilante company. Historians note that they had been moving against the settlement on their own and may never have read the governor's words. It did not change the outcome. Roughly ten thousand Saints were driven out of Missouri over the following months. When the church carried the grievance to Washington, it was told the matter belonged to the state, and the federal government did nothing. Boggs's order stayed on the books for 138 years. Governor Christopher Bond rescinded it in 1976, writing that it had "clearly contravened the rights to life, liberty, property and religious freedom."
The Court
The Saints reached the Great Basin and kept practicing plural marriage, which Congress had criminalized in the territories in 1862. In the late 1870s, the church set out to test the ban by choosing its own man to be arrested. George Reynolds, a secretary in the church offices, handed prosecutors the evidence of his second marriage and let the case be built on him.
He lost. In Reynolds v. United States, decided in 1879, the Supreme Court ruled against him without dissent, the first time it interpreted the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Chief Justice Morrison Waite split religion into belief and conduct and set a wall between them. "Laws are made for the government of actions," he wrote, "and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices." To allow a religious exemption from the criminal law, Waite reasoned, would "make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself." Reynolds served his sentence in the territorial penitentiary. The belief-conduct line he was convicted under shaped religious-liberty law for most of a century, and courts cite it still.
The Congress
Congress was not finished. The earlier laws had jailed individuals. The Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 went after the institution itself. President Grover Cleveland refused to sign it, and it became law on March 3, 1887, without his signature.
It dissolved the church as a corporation and shut down the emigration fund that had paid the passage of converts to Utah. It took the vote from Utah women, who had held it since 1870. It required an oath against polygamy before a person could cast a ballot, sit on a jury, or hold office, and it forced plural wives to testify against their husbands. The reach went down to the level of a county ledger. In Tooele, a probate clerk closed out his divorce book with a note that the court had lost the power to grant divorces the day the act took effect.
Then the government took the real estate. On November 7, 1887, the court appointed a receiver, the United States Marshal Frank H. Dyer, and Dyer seized the church's property: Temple Block in the center of Salt Lake City, the Gardo House, the Historian's Office, the Tithing Office, and the ground around them. The Supreme Court upheld the seizure in 1890 in the case of Late Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints v. United States, ruling that Congress could dissolve the corporation and dispose of its property. What the church held now answered to a receiver, and what it had been in law no longer existed. There was nowhere left to appeal.
The Manifesto
That autumn, the church's president, Wilford Woodruff, wrote in his journal that he was acting "for the Temporal Salvation of the Church," because "the United States Government has taken a stand and passed Laws to destroy the Latter-day Saints." On September 25, 1890, he issued the statement that the church calls the Manifesto. It surrenders by name. "Inasmuch as laws have been enacted by Congress forbidding plural marriages, which laws have been pronounced constitutional by the court of last resort, I hereby declare my intention to submit to those laws." It closes with the line most often quoted from it. "My advice to the Latter-day Saints is to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land."
The wording left room. Woodruff wrote as one man giving advice, not as a prophet handing down a commandment, and some marriages continued in private until a firmer statement followed in 1904. Still, the document did what statehood demanded. Utah entered the Union in 1896 under a constitution that banned polygamy for good. The Manifesto entered the Doctrine and Covenants as Official Declaration 1, where it remains. The church's submission to an act of Congress is now one of its scriptures.
The Turn
The next century ran the other way. When the apostle Reed Smoot won a United States Senate seat in 1903, the Senate spent four years investigating whether a leader of this church could be a loyal American before it let him keep the seat. He kept it. In 1953 another apostle, Ezra Taft Benson, joined Dwight Eisenhower's cabinet as Secretary of Agriculture. The church that Congress had once dissolved became one of the country's steadier voices for religious freedom, and in 2015 it helped write the Utah law that paired anti-discrimination protections for gay and transgender residents with protections for religious objectors. The phrase that runs through its hardest decade, the law of the land, became a thing the Saints invoked rather than a thing done to them.
July
Last November the first trucks left a storehouse in Salt Lake City. The church is a partner in America250, the commission Congress created for the anniversary, and its contribution is 250 truckloads of food headed to food banks in every state. The first five went to Oregon, Michigan, Arkansas, Texas, and Missouri.
The Manifesto is still scripture. The fast is still set for July 5. Two of the first five trucks went to Missouri.
