Explaining Mormons and Their Idiosyncratic View of Religious Liberty offers an interpretation of what some commentators see as an inconsistency in Mormon social policy. Rather than dreaming of imposing ideas on society as a whole, the LDS offer the wider polity a tradeoff: we will support established authority and recognize its right to enforce the law of the land, but we also ask for the right to live by our own rules and (within well-defined limits) impose those rules on our members. Compare and contrast this view with Luther’s Letter to the Secular Authorities and his work later in the 1530s among the princes and empire.
