The Mormon presidential candidate's social vision is a far cry from the communitarian ethos of early Mormonism. Mitt Romney's campaign has been all about individualism – a Randian dream of unregulated markets and untrammelled self-interest. The theme of the Republican convention was a rebuff to President Obama's perfectly sensible comment that individual success always depends on common services and social foundations. "We built it," the sign over the podium read – and by "we" the Republicans meant "each one of us, all by himself".

Romney's message would not have resonated with his Mormon forebears. I live in Rochester, New York, only a few miles from the birthplace of Mormonism – the Hill Cumorah, where in 1827 Joseph Smith is said to have been given the golden tablets of the Book of Mormon, the sacred grove where he had a vision of God the father and of Jesus, and the house where he lived at the time.

It's a small house. Smith's parents had moved to the frontier of western New York State from Vermont, hoping for richer soil and better luck. They found the first but not a great deal of the second. Most of the early Mormons were people like that: struggling artisans and farmers, seekers and souls adrift in a world where chaos and isolation were hard to stave off. The religious manias and utopian communities of this region – the "Burnt-Over District", historians call it – testify to the rootlessness, disorientation, and even terror of life on the fringes of the United States in the 1830s.

Smith offered the Latter-day Saints something more than a new bible and the grand theme of the new world as the kingdom of God. He offered them a community. The Mormons first gathered in Kirtland, Ohio, where there was already a group of Christian communists, and after a failed attempt at settling in Missouri they struck out for Illinois. In a few years they had built a city of 12,000. After Smith was murdered in 1844 Brigham Young led them to a new promised land, the valley of the Great Salt Lake. And there he set about building an ideal society:

"I have looked upon the community of Latter-day Saints in vision and beheld them organised as one great family of heaven, each person performing his several duties in his line of industry, working for the good of the whole more than for individual aggrandisement; and in this I have beheld the most beautiful order that the mind of man can contemplate, and the grandest results for the upbuilding of the kingdom of God and the spread of righteousness upon the earth… Why can we not live in this world?"

Young and his brethren tried, and they achieved some real success. As Mormon historian Leonard Arrington wrote in his classic Great Basin Kingdom, the Saints established "co-operative arrangements for migration, colonisation, construction, agriculture, mining, manufacturing, merchandising – and, in fact, for every realm of economic activity." By the 1870s a "United Order" movement sought to turn Mormon communities into self-sufficient co-operatives with all production in common hands.

But little of this was to last. The expanding United States could hardly tolerate a Mormon state blocking the way to California. Mormon polygamy was viewed with outrage; Mormon resistance to the market was probably just as offensive. In the end, of course, the Saints had to give in. Polygamy was renounced and the church became merely a powerful religious institution. There was no longer a kingdom to build up. Social responsibility was now equated with serving the church and contributing to the support of co-religionists who had fallen on hard times. Many called it "the great capitulation," and after it, in Arrington's words, "Individualism, speculation, and inequality– once thought to be characteristics of Babylon – were woven into the fabric of Mormon life."

It is a familiar story and maybe even an inevitable one. But it is sad and ironic that Brigham Young and his followers embraced and tried to realise an inspiring picture of a community where each worked for the good of each other – and that the first Mormon to have a real shot at the White House and the party that nominated him have a vision that is opposed to Young's in every imaginable way.