Mitt
Romney's presidential candidacy has put the Mormon
issue back on the public agenda. The former
Massachusetts governor reminded voters on December
6 that America's constitution prohibits a
religious test, and asked to be judged
independently of his Mormon faith. But as Groucho
told Chico in A Night At the Opera, there
nonetheless is a Sanity Clause. Voters may reject
a candidate whose religious views are crazy, for
example, someone who thinks he talks to God. Does
Romney believe that he himself will become God, as
Mormon doctrine teaches?
Americans express
disquiet about Romney's religion; 27% of
respondents to the 2007 Pew Center poll held an
unfavorable view of Mormons, about the same as of
American Muslims (29%), against only 9% for Jews
and 14% for Catholics. These numbers suggest that
Americans are not as dumb as they look.
Just what is the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter Day Saints, commonly called the Mormons?
Joseph Smith Jr, the forger, treasure-hunter,
magician, polygamist and self-styled priest-king
of the American continent, invented an American
version of Europe's ethnically-founded idolatry.
Each European tribe that rebelled against
Christianity styled itself the Chosen People.
Smith concocted a tale in which Americans actually
were the Chosen People, and America was the
Promised Land of the ancient Hebrews and Jesus
Christ. In short, Smith took to the extremes of
fantasy and forgery an impulse towards national
self-worship that always lurks somewhere in
American Christianity.
Smith was the
Sorcerer's Apprentice of American religion. The
New England Puritans had set out to become a New
Chosen People in a New Promised Land, and instead
had become complacent and prosperous Unitarians.
In the then frontier provinces of northern New
York, where poor farmers came to try their luck
after leaving the thin soil of New England, the
notion of American Chosenness continued to
resonate. In Smith's purloined account, America
actually was the New Israel, the home of
emigrating Hebrew tribes, and the site of Jesus'
return to Earth.
American popular culture
makes a running joke of Smith's 1827 claim to have
discovered golden tablets containing the history
of an Israelite migration to North America
including a cameo appearance by Jesus Christ.
Thanks to the animated satire "South Park",
Americans know that Smith "translated" golden
tablets that no-one else could see by looking at
"seer stones" inside his hat. That is the power of
mass media; one half-hour cartoon can undo the
work of a million missionaries.
Belief in
the Book of Mormon is one of the strangest
collective delusions in history. The circumstances
of its forgery are transparent and exhaustively
documented. After supposedly finding golden
tablets composed by the aptly-named Angel Moroni,
Smith "translated" 16 pages of them using his
treasure-hunting stones. A friend showed the
manuscript to his suspicious wife, who hid or
destroyed it. Smith could not exactly reproduce
the "translation" which he had dictated
free-style, and stood in danger of exposure were
he to produce a different version. Instead he
received a new revelation to translate not those
golden tablets, but yet another set of tablets
that no one else could see.
Historians
have demonstrated that a sizable chunk of the
supposed Book of Mormon was copied from a
novel by a certain Reverend Solomon Spalding, who
concocted the notion of an ancient Hebrew
migration to North America as an entertainment.
Most of the remainder was lifted from a 1769
edition of the King James Bible, with printer's
errors intact. A history of the patriarch Abraham
that Smith later "translated" from ancient
Egyptian papyri was shown to be an ordinary
Egyptian funerary document. A useful summary of
the facts has been published online by Father
Brian Harrison of the Pontifical University of
Puerto Rico. [1] An exhaustive report is found in
the book Mormon America, by Richard and
Joan Ostling (Harper 2007).
From the
hard-luck farmers of upstate New York and assorted
frontier ragtag, Smith formed a synthetic nation
that worshipped itself with the same fervor that
the half-Christianized European barbarians devoted
to their own ethnicity. It was a remarkable
achievement, and it is hard to quarrel with
American professor Harold Bloom's praise of Smith
as "an extraordinary religious genius".
What distinguished the Latter Day Saints
from the quasi-pagans of European Christendom,
though, is a characteristically American frankness
that had no inhibitions about idolatry. Everyone
could become God, Smith preached in 1844:
I am going to tell you how God came
to be God. God himself was once as we are now,
and is an exalted Man ... If you were to see him
today, you would see him like a man in form -
like yourselves, in all the person, image and
very form as a man ... We have imagined and
supposed that God was God from all eternity. I
will refute that idea, and will take away and do
away with the vail, so that you may see ... The
mind or the intelligence which man possesses is
coequal with God himself.
Convinced of
his own divinity, Smith took his do-it-yourself
Chosen People on a parodic Exodus, to a new
settlement in Illinois. There he organized
military forces and in 1844 was proclaimed by the
church council "King, Priest and Ruler over Israel
on earth", explaining, "I am above the kingdoms of
this world, for I have no laws." It was also
revealed to him that he was entitled to multiple
wives. Smith's imperial ambitions provoked a
confrontation with local authorities and his
eventual murder. His disciple, Brigham Young,
continued the mock-Exodus to Utah, which remains
the Mormon center.
According to a recent
survey, 99% of the students at the church's
Brigham Young University believe that Smith was a
prophet, despite overwhelming and authoritative
evidence that he was a con man. To understand the
Mormons we must look below the surface of belief.
Why we believe something cannot be separated from
what we believe.
How do we distinguish
revealed religion from an idolatrous cult? The
first question to ask is, what is revealed?
Judaism and Christianity are founded on an event -
the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt, and the
spiritual Exodus, namely Christ's Resurrection.
Jews are persuaded of the love of the Creator God
because they left slavery in Egypt for redemption
in Canaan under circumstances that they understood
to be miraculous. We cannot prove they were
miraculous, but we know that they were improbable.
Nowhere else in all the myths of all the peoples
does a despised slave-people emerge to freedom,
and nowhere else is the national salvation of a
specific people understood as the intervention of
the God of all humankind, for the eventual
redemption of all of humankind. Christianity makes
the Exodus spiritual and offers it to all who
believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The existential truth of Jewish belief
stems from the singular event that created the
Jewish nation, according to its historic memory.
Christians believe that the Resurrection of Jesus
Christ makes the Exodus universal; Jesus Christ
becomes the Passover lamb whose sacrifice redeems
all humankind from death; its existential truth
lies in victory over death.
Mormonism
offers quite a different sort of revelation: a
book purportedly translated through Smith's top
hat. In that respect, Mormonism resembles Islam
more than Christianity. As Franz Rosenzweig said
of Islam and the Koran, "The book sent down from
Heaven - can there be a more complete renunciation
of the concept that God Himself descends, and
gives Himself to humankind, to reveal Himself? He
sits enthroned in His highest heaven and sends
humankind - a book."
What attracts people
to the cult of the book? The answer is that we
covet the Kingdom of God. Christianity requires
each Gentile to abandon the nation of his birth,
and as an individual to join a new nation, the
People of God, the Israel of the Spirit. But the
barbarians who invaded the territory of the Roman
Empire during the 1,000 years from AD 200 to 1200
came to the cross not as individuals but as
tribes. From the half-Christianization of the
barbarians came the desire of each nationality to
be chosen in place of the universal church, the
spiritual Israel, and to be immortal not in the
Kingdom of Heaven but in its own skin. (See Why Europe chooses
extinction Asia Times Online, April 8,
2003.)
As Christoph Cardinal Schoenborn
said in a 2005 lecture at Hebrew University,
Identification of one's own people
as the chosen, and hence one's own country as
the Promised Land, is one of the sources of
European nationalism ... it was only in the 19th
century that nationalism assumed that
threatening perverted form of an ideology of
power which idolized one's own people, one's own
nation, and which led to the great catastrophes
of the 20th century.
In contrast to
the ethnic idolaters of Europe, the Puritan
founders of New England set out to be a new Chosen
People in a new Promised Land, famously expressed
in John Winthrop's "city on a hill" sermon of
1631. Like Cardinal Richelieu's Francophile
Catholic Church, or Henry XIII's Church of
England, the Puritans desired to be a Chosen
People of the flesh, not only of the spirit. But
unlike the Europeans, they sought to build the
city on a hill from a green field, with none of
the ethnic attachments that dragged down the Old
World.
American Christianity often fails
to understand its inner tension between the
earthly and heavenly kingdoms. Abraham Lincoln's
famous epigram said it best: Americans are an
"almost chosen people". Mormonism helps clarify
the issue, for it is a freakish variant of the
"Judaizing heresy" that underlay the founding of
America: the conceit that America was a new chosen
people in a new promised land. This worldliness
ultimately led the Puritans to Unitarianism, a
sort of pseudo-Judaizing that ends up in
agnosticism - for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson and
the Transcendentalists.
The trouble is
that people don't want to be an "almost chosen
people", pilgrims on this Earth hoping for the
Kingdom of Heaven. They want the kingdom in a
suburban subdivision with a shopping mall, and
they want to be chosen, by which they mean they
want these comforts as an eternal grant. They want
to build Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant
land, or in a pinch, in Utah's barren and
forbidding one.
That is why Americans fall
away from Christianity, to indifference, or
occasionally to cults such as the Latter Day
Saints. Americans keep returning to the Christian
message, roughly once every couple of generations,
in awakenings that later become ossified. Today's
bland mainline Protestants, whose members are
leaving in droves for the newer evangelical
denominations, arose in large part out of the
great awakenings of the 19th century.
There is nothing at all "American" about
"American religion", contrary to the assertions of
Bloom and Yale Professor David Gelernter. What
distinguishes America is the absence of ethnicity:
America is a state without a nation. But human
mortality is everywhere the same, and humankind
responds to it within a delimited range of
choices.
American must endure the same
tension between Christian salvation in the Kingdom
of Heaven and the emulation of Jewish salvation in
this world. The trouble is that Christians cannot
imitate Jews, not at least, for very long. The
"Judaizing heresy" of the Puritans was inherently
unstable. The Puritans lapsed into Unitarianism by
the time of the American Revolution. It was left
to the Calvinists like Jonathan Edwards to lead
the great awakening of the 1730s century, and
Methodists and Baptists to lead the great
awakening of the 1820s. Smith offered an
alternative to re-awakened Christianity in the
form of a frontier parody of Judaism, complete
with priests, temples, an Exodus and a raft of
silly rituals taken from Freemasonry.
The
Puritans saw themselves as a new Chosen People in
metaphor only. It was a metaphor they failed to
sustain. No more than its European forebears was
American Christianity able to overcome the desire
of half-converted Christians to be a Chosen People
in this world. The difference between America and
Europe is that in the absence of ethnic idolatry,
American Christianity has been able to regenerate
itself every second generation, in the form of a
new great awakening, while the Europeans lapsed
into an ethnic morass from which they have not
emerged.
If the Austro-Hungarian Empire
was a tyranny tempered by incompetence, as the old
joke goes, the Mormon Church is a megalomania
atrophied by age. Although the Latter Day Saints
claim 13 million members, less than one-third are
active. Unlike American Christian denominations,
the Mormons have had small success in Africa and
Asia, the centers of Christian evangelization. As
punishment for their sins, the Mormons must live
in their promised land in the Rockies. One can see
their present-day concerns in the selection at
Utah video stores, for example, local-market
movies about the forbidden love between a Mormon
boy and a Methodist girl.
Mitt Romney
should be judged on his own merits, not on the
dubious history of his church. Perhaps he believes
not a syllable of Smith's ravings, but remains a
Latter Day Saint out of deference to his family.
Contrary to his December 6 appeal, however, the
voters have every right to ask.
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