The Case for Christian Nationalism

7. The Christian Prince | V. The Christian Prince (Part 4)

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The Case for Christian Nationalism

One day after the massacre at Haun’s mill, when peace terms were refused by Missourians, Joseph Smith and other Mormon and Danite leaders surrendered themselves to the militia to face trial. After the Mormons were disarmed, soldiers ransacked their homes; one resident later said that the Missourians would enter homes at night, wake Mormons up with cocked guns, saying they were searching for weapons, but would instead take whatever they pleased. Roving bands of armed brigands were seen “strolling up and down Caldwell county” plundering houses, driving off farm animals, and “leaving the poor Mormons in a starving and naked condition.” Soldiers reportedly shot farm animals for sport, jesting that they were “Mormons running away on all fours.” There were at least two credible eyewitness accounts of attempted rape. One month after the surrender, the Mormons in Far West were called to the town square and forced, one by one, to deed over their land to the state to pay back the expenses for the war. One Missourian was overheard saying, “Joe Smith could not make the Saints consecrate, but we can make them consecrate.”¹

State legal proceedings only looked into Mormon offenses, and “regardless of who was at fault or who broke the law, it was Mormon leaders who were jailed, and Mormons who were forced to abandon their homes.” There was never a single inquiry into Haun’s Mill, and a motion for an investigation into the full conflict by the state legislature was quashed. Though Governor Boggs admitted that there were wrongs committed by non-Mormons, he whitewashed them by saying “they must be attributed to the excited nature of the contest of the parties and not to any desire on the part of our constituted authorities to willfully or cruelly oppress them.” Mormons were still hounded throughout the state; Captain Bogart and his company continued “hunting the Danites” who participated in Crooked River.²

By January 1839, realizing that the legislature would not act to protect them, the Mormons prepared to leave. Most who still had property traded it for land in Illinois, where they had chosen to settle. Those who did not have equipment for the move were forced to sell their land to cover expenses, and were usually heavily taken advantage of. As LeSueur writes:

But those who needed cash and equipment accepted the low offers, and many Mormons reported trading their farms for a wagon and team of cattle. The expulsion of the Saints, Reed Peck wrote after their departure, opened “a field for speculators who now reap the advantages of labor done by the banished Mormons.”³

Nancy Hammer, whose husband was killed at Haun’s Mill, had only a blind horse and a small wagon to move her six children the one hundred miles to Illinois, in the cold of winter. Her son John later wrote:

Into this small wagon we placed our clothes, bedding, some corn meal and what scanty provisions we could muster, and started out into the cold and frost to travel on foot, to eat and sleep by the wayside with the canopy of heaven for a covering… When night approached we would hunt for a log or fallen tree and if lucky enough to find one we would build fires by the sides of it… Our family, as well as many others, were almost barefooted and some had to wrap their feet in cloths in order to keep them from freezing and protect them from the sharp points of the frozen ground. This, at best, was very imperfect protection and often the blood from our feet marked the frozen earth… There was scarcely a day while we were on the road that it did not either snow or rain. The nights and mornings were very cold.⁴

LeSueur notes, “Religious prejudice played an important role in shaping the participants’ perceptions and actions during the disturbances.” One belligerent’s daughter reminisced of how her father’s religious views drove his actions, saying, “Father believed the Bible, particularly where it said smite the Philistines, and he figured the Philistines was a misprint for the Mormons and he believed it was his religious duty to smite them… He was a great hand to practice what he preached so he helped exterminate quite a considerable few of them.”⁵

Joseph Smith escaped from prison (most believe the guard was bribed) and met with his followers in Nauvoo, Illinois. Five years later, he again found himself accused of treason and riot. While sitting in a cell in Carthage, Illinois, an anti-Mormon mob broke into the jail and shot him to death.⁶

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I have no faith that a Christian nationalist revolutionary movement or government would do any better than the Mormons and Missourians. We are the same, sinful people they were; as much as we like to see ourselves as rational beings, we are driven far more by emotion than reason. It beggars belief that some of the most belligerent people in “Christian” discourse, who dedicate their public personas to defining enemies, who unashamedly belittle and mock their ideological opponents, who advocate for preemptive violent revolution when they still live in a comfort and peace that the majority of the world envies, would suddenly gain a sense of decorum and restraint when tensions escalate.

A civilly enforced blasphemy law will implicitly label whole swaths of people the other. Would those who see themselves as literal “soldiers of Christ” be able to restrain themselves, and treat the other with respect, or will they do what everyone else in history has done when given institutional power and told that another group of human beings is the other, and become dedicated persecutors who commit horrendous atrocities? Recall that Wolfe wants to “unashamedly and confidently assert Christian supremacy over the land”, believes that non-Christians have made Christians suffer the “indignity of perpetual humiliation”, and wants the Christian Prince to “suppress the enemies of God”.⁷ Could he maintain the relative docility of the monster he would bring to life or will someone, years from now, again write of how “a misconceived devotion to God carried the conflict beyond the control of its participants”?

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The Case for Christian Nationalism

1. Stephen C. LeSueur, The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri, 1. paperback print., [Nachdr.] (Columbia, Mo: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1996), 169-173, 180-181, 183, 232.

2. Ibid., 195, 216, 228, 230, 231, 253.

3. Ibid., 239.

4. Ibid., 239-240.

5. Ibid., 246-247.

6. Ibid., 261-262.

7. Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2022), 217, 241, 323.