Jim Dalrymple II
BuzzFeed News Reporter

Mormonism has a long, complicated history of conflict with the federal government, and that history is deeply informing the actions of the militia members and ranchers who took over a government building Saturday.

God told Ammon Bundy to fight back against the government.

One day before Bundy became the public face of a group of ranchers and militia members who seized a government building in Harney County, Oregon, he posted a video to YouTube. The video explains why Bundy became involved in the Harney County protest, beginning with the time he felt an “overwhelming urge” to find out more about a pair of Oregon ranchers facing prison for burning land.

In response to his urge to learn more, Bundy studied through the night, then finally prayed about what to do. God answered.

“I began to understand how the Lord felt about Harney County and about this country, and I clearly understood that the Lord was not pleased with what was happening to the Hammonds,” Bundy says in the video, referring to the Oregon ranchers. “What was happening to them, if it was not corrected, would be a type and a shadow of what would happen to the rest of the people across this country.”

It’s a curious story, but also an extremely telling one; the Bundys and some of those involved in the Oregon standoff are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aka the Mormons, and their rhetoric is deeply colored by Mormon history.

SNIP