Politics & Power Quote by Orson Pratt

Pratt isn’t offering a pious metaphor here; he’s drafting a constitution for the cosmos. By calling the “kingdom of God” an “order of government,” he yokes salvation to administration, faith to jurisdiction. The vocabulary is deliberately juridical: “order,” “authority,” “legal.” That last word is the hinge. Pratt isn’t just claiming God is supreme; he’s claiming competing regimes are not merely mistaken but illegitimate, essentially unauthorized startups operating without a license.

The intent is unmistakably boundary-setting. In an America obsessed with sovereignty, law, and the legitimacy of states, Pratt imports the era’s legal imagination into theology and then flips it. Earthly governments become provisional at best, counterfeit at worst, because the only law that truly counts is issued from a higher court. It’s a worldview that can comfort believers under pressure (your side is the only one that’s real) while also justifying extraordinary demands from religious leadership (obedience isn’t preference; it’s compliance with the only valid jurisdiction).

The context matters: Pratt was a key Latter-day Saint intellectual in a period when the church faced sustained hostility, displacement, and political conflict over communal power and, later, plural marriage. “Any part of the universe” expands a contested territorial claim into a totalizing one, a rhetorical move that turns a minority faith into an ultimate polity. Subtext: if God’s government is the only legal one, then the conflict isn’t church versus state; it’s lawful rule versus unlawful pretenders. That framing doesn’t invite coexistence. It insists on a final consolidation of authority, with divine sovereignty as the only recognized flag.