Though Mormons have always revered the Constitution, throughout most of the nineteenth century they viewed the United States as corrupt and worthy of destruction. They blamed the United States federal and state governments for indifference in the face of the Missouri and Illinois persecutions, and for their failure to protect Joseph Smith from assassination by a lawless mob. An "oath of vengeance" was incorporated into the Mormon temple endowment ceremony, imploring God to "avenge the blood of the prophets on this nation."¹ The "Mountain Meadows massacre" took place in part because of rumors that the Fancher party counted in their number a Missouri man who had assassinated the prophet Joseph, and Arkansans who were involved in the recent killing of Mormon apostle Parley P. Pratt. Federal officials and troops in Utah after 1857 were viewed as hated foreign occupiers. Mormons desired statehood mainly because they saw it as the only means of gaining a measure of self-determination and freeing themselves from the tyranny of Federal territorial appointees.

In order to receive statehood, however, Mormons had to relinquish two of the things that had made them most distinctive: theocracy and polygamy. After Utah's achievement of statehood in 1896, Mormonism gradually began to move into the American mainstream. This has facilitated growing tolerance for and acceptance of Mormons in mainstream American culture, and has brought on an almost complete reversal of Mormonism's status in the United States from the nineteenth century. Nowadays, Mormons are generally considered as American as apple pie.

Though the 1890 Manifesto supposedly ended polygamy, it initially only returned polygamy to its pre-1852 status, sanctioned and practiced by the church hierarchy in secret. But in 1904, following the Reed Smoot Congressional hearings, church president Joseph F. Smith issued the "Second Manifesto," committing the church to full compliance with the law.² Since that time, the Mormon Church has vigorously cooperated with state and federal authorities in enforcing anti-polygamy laws, and has zealously excommunicated any Latter-day Saint guilty of entering into plural marriage.

After the 1890s, the church began to de-emphasize the "gathering" concept, which encouraged converts to emigrate to Utah. Since the 1960s, the church has actively encouraged Latter-day Saints to remain loyal and active citizens of the states and countries where they lived and build up local churches there. Over time, this has made Mormonism more heterogeneous, and is resulting in growing regional and national differences between Saints living in the Mormon culture region in the Rocky Mountains and Saints living elsewhere. It has also encouraged acceptance of pluralism and made a return to theocracy (at least for most Saints) impossible, since the majority of Mormons today live in areas where they are less than 2% of the population.

The Mormon hierarchy has been forced to evolve in response to the church's rapid growth from about four hundred thousand members in 1900 to a world-wide membership of over eleven million in 2000. Efforts to maintain uniformity in teaching and practice included the establishment of the Priesthood Correlation Committee in 1961 and a reorganization of the Quorum of the Seventy in the mid-1980s. Since the 1970s, the church has increasingly used excommunication as a means of maintaining ideological uniformity of its members, as when it excommunicated feminist activist Sonia Johnson in 1979, and excommunicated six loyal Mormon scholars in 1993 for their pro-feminist and modernist views.

Although formalized Mormon theocracy is gone, the Mormon Church continues to exert informal political power, and has intervened actively in the political process when it felt its interests were at stake. After World War II and through the 1960s, church leaders opposed the Civil Rights Movement and blocked efforts at integration in Utah. In the 1970s the church coordinated a nation-wide campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment. From the 1990s to the present, it has used the same tactics it used in the 1970s against the ERA to block state and local initiatives in support of gay rights and same-sex marriage, and to pass anti-gay "Defense of Marriage" laws.

A major embarassment to the modern-day church has been the persistence of fundamentalist Mormon sects that continue to practice polygamy. Ironically, while Mormonism splintered in 1844 due to the fact that large numbers of Saints found polygamy abhorrent, after 1904 substantial numbers of Saints were leaving (or being excommunicated) because of their commitment to polygamy. They believe that in rejecting polygamy, the Utah Church has apostatized and perverted the true meaning of Joseph's principal of "Eternal Marriage." Mormon fundamentalists are active in Arizona, New Mexico, Idaho, Southern Utah, Mexico and Canada, though they continue to recruit many to their number from the heart of the Mormon culture region in the Wasatch Valley. Observers of the fundamentalist Mormon phenomenon have suggested that one reason Mormon polygamists continue to recruit from the heart of LDS Mormondom is because of confusion caused by the church's mixed messages about polygamy: on the one hand officially disavowing (and punishing) the practice, and on the other hand, continuing to affirm a theoretical belief in and practice of "next-life" or "eternal" polygamy.

In May 2006, the LDS church went publicly on record in support of a federal constitutional amendment that would define marriage as a union of "one man and one woman." Oddly, however, and consistent with current Mormon practice, two current general authorities have married wives "for time and all eternity," with the understanding that in the next life they will be polygamously married. Many traditional Latter-day Saints believe that the practice of polygamy may some day be restored and will certainly exist in the next life. Some observers and critics of the church's position on marriage have decried the disingenuity of church leaders publicly supporting legislation defining marriage as a relationship of "one man and one woman," even as they privately hold on to a belief in polygamy. Some observers have suggested that one reason for many Mormons' vociferous opposition to gay marriage has been discomfort with their own past.