though personally I have nothing against modern day mormons except that I don’t agree with their mythical history yet do appreciate their social conservatism
this piece is pretty whitewashed
I think God inspired our founding fathers on many things, this included:
The religion-builders have so distorted and deformed the doctrines of Jesus, so muffled them in mysticisms, fancies and falsehoods, have caricatured them into forms so monstrous and inconceivable, as to shock reasonable thinkers... Happy in the prospect of a restoration of primitive Christianity, I must leave to younger athletes to encounter and lop off the false branches which have been engrafted into it by the mythologists of the middle and modern ages.
Thomas Jefferson (H.A. Washington, ed.,The writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 7, pp210, 257)