AH Challenge: The nation of Deseret (Utah) 1847 survives into the 21st century.

The Mormons moved into Utah beginning in 1847 and by 1896, Utah joins the union.

The challenge: Deseret nation... a theocracy that doesn't join the USA, and is still around in the 21st century.

Explain why USA would allow an independent nation to exist in the middle of its own nation?

Short of balkanization of the US, they wouldn't.

Doesn't Mormon theology teach that the best thing to happen to this world WAS the United States.

So wouldn't it be imperative to this theocracy to join it, and thus lose the theocracy...

No USA on the West Coast would do it. That could invite foreign backing.

California, Deseret, British Columbia, Mexico but no US. How that happened, I dunno.

Some British were advocates of competition with the United States to stop it overtaking them (Source: A.J.P Taylor's essays). Perhaps they try to restrain U.S expansion?

Some British people did advocate opposing American expansion, but really Britain wasn't interested in war with the US, and short of rewriting the few decades of the USA's existence, it'd be impossible for anyone to restrain the US expansion any other way.

dreadnought jenkins said:

Doesn't Mormon theology teach that the best thing to happen to this world WAS the United States.

So wouldn't it be imperative to this theocracy to join it, and thus lose the theocracy...

Click to expand...

Mormon theology has a certain tendency to preach what will work for Mormonism and the Mormon people. It is interesting how, when the US wouldn't allow Utah to become a state with polygamy, there was a convenient revelation that polygamy should be outlawed....

If the US wasn't in danger of swallowing Deseret, they might have a slightly different attitude.

(NB: personally I suspect those convenient 'divine messages' were politically based, but I don't tell God what He can do...)

Dathi THorfinnsson said:

Mormon theology has a certain tendency to preach what will work for Mormonism and the Mormon people.

If the US wasn't in danger of swallowing Deseret, they might have a slightly different attitude.

Click to expand...

Mormon teaching about the US was pretty schizophrenic in the early Utah period. It doesn't just track political fortunes.