When Cliven Bundy aired his opinions about “the Negro,” he was freelancing with long-hallowed, if now officially superseded, Mormon tradition. The Mormon faith, all the way until 1978, sanctified racism, and excluded from its orders Africans, whom the Lord allegedly cursed with dark skin for not siding with Him in the battle that ended with Satan being bounced down into hell. Ammon Bundy’s current undertaking also wreaks of Moroni-c benison and thus has a doctrinal basis: Brigham Young foresaw the day when the Mormons would have to step in and “save [the Constitution and the Republic] from utter destruction.” Ammon Bundy, in his Youtube video, calls the Constitution the “supreme law of the land” and purports to be doing just that. Mormons, you see, consider the Constitution holy.

Such father-and-son militancy is par for the Mormon course. Smith had, after all, announced that, “We will establish our religion by the sword … . I will be to this generation a second Mohammed.” Let’s skip over further doctrinal inanities, though, and just recognize the sedition of any statement that citizens of a republic based on secular law can disobey that law with divine justification. Seditious inklings do, in any case, inhere in Mormonism as Brigham Young preached it. They concur conveniently with a persecution complex (once justified: remember the Exodus) and a scriptural hands-off for those lusting after lucre. Joseph Smith himself pronounced that “Wherefore, verily I say unto you that all things unto me are spiritual, and not at any time have I given unto you a law which was temporal.” Personal wealth is a blessing signifying the Lord’s favor.

More: It’s the Mormons and the Kochs: The secret roots of white, male Bundy rage