As I write, the United States still has a Department of Education, a Social Security Administration, and a Food and Drug Administration. It still has a judiciary, too, although whether it will be allowed to keep on judiciary-ing seems to be a bit up in the air. Moreover, when I checked Realtor.com this morning, there was yet no indication that Greenland, Canada, or Gaza had been put up for sale.
Nonetheless, I urge the reader not to overlook my opening qualifier, “As I write.” All of the above may change by the time this article finds its way into your hands.
Be that as it may. I am, in fact, the bearer of good news. If you have been fretting over the fate of the United States and the Constitution, you need fret no more. This is thanks to the White Horse Prophecy, which Joseph Smith, founding prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aka the Mormon Church, may or may not have uttered around the same time he announced his candidacy for the U.S. presidency. (Spoiler: Not too many people voted for him. That’s why you won’t see his portrait in the Capitol.)
It was Smith’s immediate successor, Brigham Young, who conveyed to the world Smith’s ray of hope regarding the fate of the Constitution.
During a July 4, 1854, celebration in Salt Lake City, Young said:
“Will the Constitution be destroyed? No: it will be held inviolate by this people; and, as Joseph Smith said, ‘The time will come when the destiny of the nation will hang upon a single thread. At that critical juncture, this people [the Mormons] will step forth and save it from the threatened destruction.’ It will be so.” (Journal of Discourses, Volume 7, Discourse 2.)
There. Feel safer?
The alert reader may have noticed that Young said nothing about a horse, white or otherwise, and didn’t quote Smith referencing the Constitution by name.
Those tidbits can be traced back to a fellow by the name of Edwin Rushton, who, decades after Smith’s death, claimed to have heard the prophet say something or another about the Constitution’s hanging by a thread and something or another about a red, a black, and a white horse. Together, Young’s and Rushton’s remarks made for the perfect rumor recipe: take one dangling Constitution, add horses, sprinkle with valiant Mormons, and bake. Voilà! Out comes a faith-promoting rumor.
To this day, a good many Mormons hold that it will be none other than They who will someday save our republic. Not a few suspected they were seeing the prophecy’s fulfillment when George Romney and, later, his son Mitt, both Mormons, ran for the U.S. presidency. (More spoilers: George lost. So did Mitt.)
Mind you, not all Mormons are on board with the White Horse Prophecy. Even the Mormon Church’s official website disclaims it, sort of:
“The so-called ‘White Horse Prophecy’ is based on accounts that have not been substantiated by historical research and is not embraced as Church doctrine.”
A good deal less tactful was Joseph F. Smith, the Mormon prophet who succeeded the Mormon prophet who succeeded the Mormon prophet who succeeded the Mormon prophet who succeeded Young who, you’ll recall, succeeded the original prophet, Joseph (no “F.”) Smith. (Take all the time you need to sort that out.) In 1918, Joseph F. Smith said:
“The ridiculous story about the ‘red horse,’ and ‘the black horse,’ and ‘the white horse,’ and a lot of trash that has been circulated about and printed and sent around as a great revelation given by the Prophet Joseph Smith, is a matter that was gotten up, I understand, some ten years after the death of the Prophet Joseph Smith, by two of our brethren who put together some broken sentences from the Prophet that they may have heard from time to time, and formulated this so-called revelation out of it, and it was never spoken by the prophet in the manner in which they have put it forth. It is simply false; that is all there is to it.” (General Conference, October, 1918.)
There. That should settle it.
Except, in September of 1986, Mormon prophet Ezra Taft Benson stirred the whole thing up again at a Brigham Young University devotional, when he said:
“Joseph Smith predicted that the time would come when the Constitution would hang, as it were, by a thread, and at that time ‘this people will step forth and save it from the threatened destruction.’ It is my conviction that the elders of Israel, widely spread over the nation, will at that crucial time successfully rally the righteous of our country and provide the necessary balance of strength to save the institution of constitutional government.” (Ezra Taft Benson, Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson, Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1988, p 619.)
So let’s tally the score. Two prophets say the White Horse Prophecy is the real deal, one prophet says it’s ridiculous, and an official website neither confirms nor denies it. That’s the trouble with prophets. They never seem to agree on anything. But if you have ever read a holy book—any holy book—you already knew that.
Meanwhile, questions remain: What exactly does “hang by a thread” mean? How, exactly, are the Mormons going to come to the Constitution’s rescue? And why should it be the Mormons and not, say, the Evangelical Christians, who seem to know God’s will concerning everything in the U.S. down to who is and isn’t allowed to play on a women’s tiddlywinks team? Is the prophecy literal, e.g., some prankster will hoist the document by a single thread and a bunch of Mormons on horseback will secure it with more threads? Or stand under it with a net? Or is it figurative, e.g., someone will keep discarding it, and a bunch of Mormons will keep fishing it out of the trash?
I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Either way, it’s reassuring to know American Atheists can stop all that grassroots work toward preserving religious freedom and individual rights. The Mormons are on the case.