Even 150 years ago, Mormons had quite the reputation for both fighting for ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_Battalion ) and fighting against ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_War ) the U.S. Army.
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Interestingly, I've found a lot of parallels between early Islam and early Mormonism. Both of their leaders had similar tendencies and both were evicted from their original location where they claimed their new Zion. Though Mohammed was more successful in retaking Mecca whilst the Mormons were forced out of Missouri (1).
In no specific order:
- Prophet's with dubious histories prior to their revelation - Both given new revelations from an angel - Both claim a that the Christians or Jews had corrupted the original gospels - Focus on political power early on - Polygamy prominent among early leaders - No alcohol - Strong focus on certain forms of "purity"
On the empire topic, one might consider Utah. It was originally desired for the name to be Deseret and one of the two primary competing news organizations locally is called Deseret News[0]. In practice it's not really an empire (for all of the obvious reasons) but it's also kinda hard to ignore the influence that the church has on most of the population.
[0] https://www.deseret.com/ I didn't know this was the domain until now. There you go, I guess.