From Joseph Smith to Mike Lee: Two Centuries of Mormon Land Grabbers

Perhaps the only bright spot on President Donald Trump’s megabill was what it didn’t include. As initially written, the bill would have mandated the sell-off of at least 2 million acres of public lands across the 11 Western states. A storm of outrage knocked the proposal off the table, and the Republican senator who authored the terms of the sale and petitioned for their inclusion, Mike Lee of Utah, was forced to run and hide. The public wanted, naturally, to keep the land they owned from being stolen into the hands of wealthy elites and corporations.  

Since the establishment of the Forest Service in 1905 and the Bureau of Land Management in 1946, hundreds of millions of acres, some of it spoiled by industry but a lot of it wild, have been held by federal agencies in trust for the American people. These lands — a domain equivalent in size to more than two Californias — belong to every citizen in what has amounted to a great and honorable democratic endeavor of common ownership. They are places where people can hike, explore, camp in deserts and forests and mountain meadows, sit in stillness, meditate, swim in clean water, drink from clear springs, and meet, if one is lucky, mountain lions, bobcats, bears, packs of wolves and coyotes, and herds of elk, mule deer and big-horn sheep. These are places to get an ecological education.

While the national parks impose limitations on what you can and cannot do, the public lands of the Forest Service and BLM afford much greater liberty. Camping and hiking are often free of permit oversight. Show up, walk in the woods, find a campsite, no fee, no registration. On Forest Service and BLM land, you can shoot guns and fire arrows, hunt for meat, forage for mushrooms, trap animals, dig for native edibles. 

In the newly privatized space envisioned by Lee, such freedoms would be replaced by a lot of “No Trespassing” signs and threats of fines and prosecution, and move us toward the end of the democracy of the Western commons. Lee’s provision made an additional 250 million acres eligible for sale over an indeterminate time frame. 

Lee’s radical proposal sprang from a long history of enmity for the public lands system in the West. Go back to 1946 and it was livestock ranchers, exploiting the public domain for cheap forage for their cattle herds, who demanded more land for grazing so they could make greater profits by not having to pay the full cost of raising cows. Carrying the torch in the Senate then was Edward Robertson of Wyoming, one of the biggest ranchers in the state, whose legislation included a prospective sales model for states to adopt. Bernard DeVoto, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, described in Harper’s magazine the formula of the Robertson bill:

It would liquidate the public lands and end our sixty years of conservation of the national resources. And this single bill would achieve all the main objectives of the whole program of the Western despoilers at one step. … A few groups of Western interests, so small numerically as to constitute a minute fraction of the West, are hell-bent on destroying the West. 

“You had better watch this,” DeVoto warned, “now and from now on. … Your property is in danger of being alienated, your interests and those of your children are threatened.” 

The American people heard the warning, congressional mailbags ran to overflowing, and by the end of 1947 the secretary of agriculture, Clinton Anderson, concluded that DeVoto’s publicity campaign, by galvanizing enormous numbers of citizens against the stockgrowers, had “single-handedly” killed the land-sale program. 

DeVoto’s warning should be on our minds at all times now. Lee has been stung by the reaction of an enraged public, along with the adverse rulings of the Senate parliamentarian, who found that his proposal violated budget reconciliation rules. But have no doubt: He’s retrenching to find a different scheme to maneuver land sales into congressional legislation. The key to understanding his dedication to this cause lies in a strain of Mormon extremism found in the Intermountain West. Lee’s free-market radicalism is imbued with a peculiarly toxic strain of hatred toward the federal government that has long poisoned the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 

Officially sanctioned histories of Mormonism and its founder, Joseph Smith Jr., the prophet, describe a people persecuted and hunted. The Mormons were the Jews of the West, “children of Israel,” America’s chosen ones, homeless and violated. 

The unauthorized histories tell a markedly different story. 

Originally a resident of the state of New York, Smith had been hauled into court on numerous occasions, accused of confidence games and charged with fraud. In one 1826 New York proceeding, he was described as “a disorderly person and an impostor.” Later he would become known for his bedding of pubescent teenagers, which led to his institution of polygamy following the revelation from God — only to Smith did He speak — that all Mormon men, especially Smith, should have multiple wives. (Today he would be charged as a serial child molester.) When the Mormons headed west and settled in Missouri and Illinois in the 1830s and 1840s, growing numbers of the chosen ones took to heart the conniving model of their spiritual father and became known for land thefts, bank frauds and cattle rustling.  

Idealistic converts started to look askance at their adopted religion. Smith’s personal secretary concluded that Smith and his fellow church fathers were “confirmed Infidels, who have not the fear of God before their eyes. They lie by revelation, swindle by revelation, cheat and defraud by revelation.” Lying was considered a holy duty, a command of the scriptures, justified exactly in the way lying to protect rapist priests was justified in the papal hierarchy to protect the interests of the Catholic Church. An early official historian of Mormonism who later repudiated the Saints accused its leadership of “selfishness, seeking for riches, honor and dominion, tyrannizing over the people, and striving constantly after power and property.” What the Latter-day Saints really wanted, as with any cult, was the property and cash of converts along with their free labor.

When a mob in Illinois murdered Joseph Smith in 1844, Mormons turned to a new leader, Brigham Young. A smart and ambitious member of Smith’s inner circle, Young lacked the prophet’s charm and charisma, but had been a close study of his mentor’s command and control techniques while legitimizing and expanding the institution of polygamy. (Brigham’s gaggle of wives expanded to number in the dozens — Bring ’Em Young, they called him.) Ruling as “the only law-giver and law-maker on earth,” Young carried his people on their exodus into the sun-blasted wilderness of Utah, in the valley of the Great Salt Lake at the edge of the Wasatch Mountains, where Salt Lake City stands today. In 1847, his 3,000-strong flock began the building of Zion.  

On the day he arrived, the prophet directed the chosen ones to fashion a tabernacle in the desert made of slender trees hewn into poles, with willow branches for a roof. At this brush tabernacle, the site where the Salt Lake Temple would rise, he spoke reassuring words of vengeance, promising to “lead forth the armies of Israel to execute the judgments and justice on the persecuting Gentiles.” The Mormons, he declared, one day would be free of oppression in a “theo-democracy” that eventually would broaden to encompass all of present-day Utah and Nevada and parts of southern Idaho and southern Oregon. Young called this nation Deseret. Gold rush emigrants passing through Salt Lake City testified to the spread of Mormon sedition in Deseret. The Mormon leadership spoke “many hard things against the Government and people of the United States,” one traveler reported. “They prophesied that the total overthrow of the United States was at hand, and that the whole nation would soon be at the feet of the Mormons.” 

Failing to achieve total overthrow, the zealots of Utah became a territory of the hated United States. They terrorized federal officials such that no one wanted to represent the federal government in the land of the Saints. An adviser to President Franklin Pierce determined that civil law in the Utah Territory was “overshadowed and neutralized [by an] ecclesiastical organization, as despotic, dangerous and damnable as has ever been known to exist in any country.” The conclusion in a report to Congress was that “Mormonism as a system is oppressive, unjust, and unworthy of confidence.” “The officers of the Federal Government have been driven from the [Utah] Territory for no offense but an effort to do their sworn duty,” said President James Buchanan in 1857. Buchanan denounced what he called the “system of terrorism” the religious leadership imposed. He wanted to rein in the separatists and dispatched troops to Utah to put an end to the theocracy.

The result was the Utah War of 1857, which led to the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre. In September of that year, a territorial militia under Young’s direction slaughtered more than a hundred unarmed emigrants, mostly women and children, who were crossing the territory headed for California. The killings warned Americans of more bloodshed to come.  

Hostilities, however, were quickly resolved. In 1858, Buchanan pardoned Young and his cronies on the charges of treason issued the previous year, and added to it an ultimatum — take it or leave it to the U.S. Army to resolve — which Young begrudgingly accepted. But the seditious hatred of federal law and governance remained. Until 1927, all Latter-day Saints who joined the church in the official temple ceremony swore an oath against the United States “to avenge the blood of the prophets,” meaning Joseph Smith. This oath of vengeance demanded the convert “from this day henceforth and forever begin and carry out hostility against this nation.” 

“All this is still with us,” Will Bagley, the pugnacious Mormon apostate historian who died in 2021, once told me.  “Much of today’s rhetoric in the West about the evil federal government began in Utah.” It so happened this anti-fed rhetoric dovetailed precisely with the interests of logging, ranching, mining, oil and gas and other extractive interests, who embraced Mormon loathing of the regulatory state but had no need for the God part of the equation.  

In the 21^st century, the only other figure besides Lee to make the fate of public lands an issue of mass public interest was also Mormon. Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who in 2014 revolted against BLM regulation of his cattle herd, organized an armed rebellion to prevent federal agents from rounding up his cows on a stretch of public land called Gold Butte, 75 miles east of Las Vegas.  His defense of the right to graze Gold Butte turned into an uprising that became national news.  Bundy, like Lee a religious extremist, was now backed by a growing militia that had gathered on his ranch. The cows — grazing illegally on the federal domain, destroying habitat for other species, spreading desertification and biological depauperateness — were forgotten as the central issue. The only issue now was the battle between a lone heroic stockman and the vile federal government. In April 2014, as Bundy amassed his men and the national media feasted on the drama, the BLM backed down. The cows would remain.

I met with Bundy at his ranch one month after his victory over the BLM. He was taking a midday nap when I arrived, so I waited for him in the shaded garden outside his house, as his sons cooked on a barbecue and a grandson played a guitar.  When he emerged sleepily from the house, he was wearing a big white Stetson and high-heeled boots and a blue-check button-down shirt. Bundy said he had been misunderstood and he wanted to clarify what was happening on his ranch. He spoke of himself in the third person, which was at once charming and ridiculous. “Bundy is standing up for the Constitution,” he said. He proceeded to offer a totally discredited interpretation — a “proper interpretation,” he assured — of the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution, he said, indicates there can be no federal public land. The BLM is therefore an illegal entity, a fictional authority. So why heed its strictures? 

Worse still, under the Constitution it was clear that the national parks, national wildlife refuges and monuments, along with the national forests under the Forest Service — the entire federally managed commons, in fact — were also illegal, the inventions of a society that had lost touch with the founding document. He referred me to the particulars, patting his breast, where a pocket-size copy of the Constitution poked over his heart in his blue-check shirt. 

It was a totem object on the Bundy ranch, this pocket Constitution, a kind of fashion accessory and badge. Everyone wore it.

The pocket constitution beloved by the Bundy clan and their followers, it turns out, was not the original document.  It was a version annotated by a Mormon far-right intellectual and anti-communist agitator named W. Cleon Skousen, prominent member of the screwball John Birch Society and major influencer in Mormonism from the 1960s until his death in 2006. According to Skousen, the Constitution was created by God through ordained men, the Founding Fathers. The United States thus was the land of Abraham, the greatest land on earth, saved for religious liberty, for the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ in the latter days. Skousen’s annotated Constitution consisted of a kind of CliffsNotes for understanding how the Lord intervened in the crafting of its language. Skousen taught that religious authority should trump civil authority in times of trouble, which he defined as anything from government regulation of business to foreign invasion. 

As it happens, Lee also wears the Skousen constitution in his front pocket.  

Skousen was “perhaps the original apocalyptic MAGA Mormon,” wrote Addison Graham in the Salt Lake Tribune three years ago in a piece that presciently singled out Lee as “the modern MAGA Mormon.”  Skousen believed in the prophecy attributed to Smith that the Constitution one day would “hang by a thread” and that a Mormon hero would arise messiah-like to save it. Then all the United States would become part of the holy Mormon state of Deseret. The alternative was the annihilation of the American people in the end times. Graham described Lee as an avowed believer in exactly this story of the end times and characterized him as “the most visible, vocal proponent of [a] narrow, apocalyptic, Skousenistic worldview.”

In other words, the attempted land grab in early drafts of Trump’s megabill reflects the ideology of messianic religious lunatics. The sooner we recognize this reality, the sooner we will be able to take a reasonable stand against them. The message should be: You people are crazy, and we ain’t giving up our land.