Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship
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Mormon Studies Review

Keywords

Ezra Taft Benson, church history, prophecy, America

Abstract

In 1976 Ezra Taft Benson, a long-standing member of the Quorum of
the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
delivered a fireside address at Brigham Young University in Utah. Benson,
born in Whitney, Idaho, and raised as a farmer in the heart of
Mormon country, represented the conservative wing of his religious
community. He had also spent much of his life working for the LDS
Church and traveling throughout the world, so he had a keen understanding
of the challenges of spreading his religious message in international
contexts. His talk that evening was unequivocal: America was
a promised land. Its founding had been divinely decreed and its history
abundantly blessed: “This Church and kingdom is on course in fulfilling
its prophetic destiny,” he explained.1 For Benson, who would eventually become president of the LDS Church, America represented far more than the point of origin of the Christian restoration: it also bespoke the singular role of the United States as an economic and political model, a country imbued with superior social and cultural values that would serve as an exemplar for the rest of the world. Benson’s vision, in other words, reflected the acme of the Mormon belief in American exceptionalism.

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