Mormon Apocalypse, Pt. 2
When Glenn Beck took the podium at his Restoring Honor rally, he began by listing off the names of American heroes and identifying their motivation to fight for their country: “You cannot coexist with evil.” If evil has reared its ugly head, an honorable man, like Washington and Lincoln, must stand and fight.
It’s a phrase that glimmers with righteous indignation. You think of that masked molester with a gun shimmying through your daughter’s bedroom window, and you want to go blow his brains out. Who tolerates evil?
“We have a choice to make today,” added Beck.
Over the course of his 6,000-word altar call, he clarified what he meant. As Americans, we must choose to exercise “faith, hope, and love.” We must “pick up our stick” as Moses did, and stand for freedom. We must not fall asleep like the disciples of Jesus at Gethsemane. We must tithe at a church, synagogue, or mosque. We must “pledge our lives and fortunes” to eliminating our national debt. We must study the “sacred scriptures of our country”—the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, “I Have a Dream.” “This isn’t about one church or one faith over another; it is about the eternal principles of God.”
That last is an interesting contrast. In another time, “denominational differences,” as Charlie Brown told Linus, tended to separate. And there were even bigger heretics to fry when it came to the differences between “faiths” such as Christianity and Islam. Or Christianity and Mormonism.
But Glenn Beck is a Mormon, and these “eternal principles of God” he espouses reflect that fact. And for conservatives standing at the anxious bench on the Washington Mall, Beck was the one mediator between Mormon ideologue Cleon Skousen and man.
Like Beck’s, Skousen’s Mormonism is not the sort that publicly preaches that Jesus and Lucifer are brethren or that Elohim was once a mere mortal. In The 5,000 Year Leap: Twenty-Eight Great Ideas That Are Changing the World (Glenn Beck’s favorite book) Skousen elaborates on a list of principles that, he claims, were cemented into the foundation of the United States. They include “The United States of America shall be a republic” (no. 12) and “The unalienable rights of the people are most likely to be preserved if the principles of government are set forth in a written constitution” (no. 18).
The trouble is, Skousen claims that these ideas were derived by the Founding Fathers from the Bible, and modus ponens, the United States is God’s country. “The United States has a manifest destiny to be an example and a blessing to the entire human race” (no. 28).
What’s so Mormon about all of this? The above could have been said by any number of Christians who paint the Founding Fathers not as the wise, classically trained deists they were but as devout Bibliophiles.
And yet everything about this America-is-God’s-country ideology is Mormon to the core. It serves as the false foundation of a religion that finds the center of human history not in the Incarnation, Cross, and Resurrection of Christ but in “another revelation of Jesus Christ” in the terrestrial “promised land” on which we stand. It is Manichaean, declaring our external enemies evil and ourselves good, locating wickedness not in the hearts of sinful men but in the foes of a human government that will wither as the grass. It is the religion of America—not the real, historical America, but the America of myth and fantasy.
“If we do these things,” Beck preached, “we will heal our nation.” The phrase is reminiscent of 2 Chronicles 7:14, so often cited at rallies on the National Day of Prayer. If my people, which are called by my name, shall . . . return to limited government (no. 19)? Operate according to the will of the majority (no. 20)? Be debt-free (no. 27)? The assumption here is that Americans, like the Israelites of old, are uniquely “my [God’s] people.” And that it is not “I the Lord” but “We the gods” who can “heal their land.”
Observers of American Christianity have noticed that, by and large, evangelicals no longer place much emphasis on America’s divine mission to protect and defend Israel. Attendance at Christians-for-Israel conferences is down. John Hagee and the Left Behind movies now evoke embarrassment. The Bush Years are over. America has “outgrown” dispensationalism.
All true, but there has also been a transference. America’s divine mission is no longer the protection of Israel but the preservation of “freedom” here and abroad. Muslims are no longer the enemy of Jews but the enemy of “our way of life.” And conservative American Christians—Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox—are joining evangelicals in this new dispensationalism, as they did at the Restoring Honor rally (alongside “240 men and women from all faiths represent[ing] thousands of clergy”). There they applauded a man who denies that Jesus is the eternal Son of God, as he invited them to “find out who God truly is.”
Read "Mormon Apocalypse, Part 1" here.
This article first appeared in the November 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. To subscribe (12 issues for $19.99), click here.
Entries(RSS)
Aaron,
You are only one of many protestants I admire but one of the few who I listen to when it comes to christian teachings. Thank you as always for your thoughtful prose.
Mr. Wolf,
The Puritans were dangerous enough with their cold Cromwellian zealotry; they have, however, become doubly dangerous in their bifurcated Arianization, made most evident after the Second Great Awakening and the Burnt over District: the Unitarian/Universalist faction now made up of zealous atheists, agnostics and apostate Christians and the faction of the new theology made up primarily of, although not exclusively, Mormons.
The South was once a bastion, across denominational lines, of the Trinitarian theology of the Church, while the North, particularly among its elites, had already abandoned the Triune God. Now, as Protestant denominations themselves decay in the South, giving way to "independent churches," the spirit of Arius is finding its way even into those denominations who label themselves "fundamental." The cult of "Jesus" has gone a long way in deconstructing the Trinity.
Mingle that with the long-held New England/Puritan notion of "American Exceptionalism," a fiction which now permeates every region of the country and almost every soul therein, and you have a movement ready for the following. Perhaps we are entering Joachim of Fiori's Age of the Holy Spirit with Glen Beck as its prophet and Romney as its leader!
"one of the few who I listen to when it comes to christian teachings"
Mr. Peters,
You are the other one. "The South was once a bastion, across denominational lines, of the Trinitarian theology of the Church, while the North, particularly among its elites, had already abandoned the Triune God. Now, as Protestant denominations themselves decay in the South, giving way to "independent churches," the spirit of Arius is finding its way even into those denominations who label themselves "fundamental." The cult of "Jesus" has gone a long way in deconstructing the Trinity."
It's been said, "The corruption of the best is the worst." Since Oklahoma is kind of only half southern, I can't speak for the "full South", but my state was once upon a time conservative democrat, now she has grown as GOP and beholden to Washington D.C. as Texas. It's a shame to watch.
Thank you for your always excellent posts.
There is a simple solution. It may take time, it may be painful, but it is the only way. And it is thus:
Christ is God. Willful refusal to acknowledge Him when we pray is a sin of sacrilege.
Those of us who understand this must, MUST explain it unflinchingly to any of our fellow Christians who accept the first premise. We CANNOT pray with Mormons, Unitarians, Deists, Jews, Muslims or anyone else who does not accept the divinity of Christ taking the lead. We simply cannot. If this means leaving prayer out of the public sphere, so be it. Better to omit the Lord's name than to take it in vain; better to keep the Word hidden in our hearts than to cast pearls before swine.
We must proclaim this truth lovingly and patiently but strongly and persistently. Only when Christians again understand that they are different from non-Christians will they be able to act as levain in the world, as salt and light, yet again.
Mr. Nicholas,
AMEN!
Mormon Apocalypse Part 1 was one of my favourite Chronicles pieces when I read it a year ago.
What a fascinating insight into how nationalism replaces and becomes a religion.
The opening words - which I paraphrase from a distorted memory - were impressionable. "America is special. America is destined for greatness. God has specially ordained America. The last decade has shaken many Christians of these illusions, but others still remain in them."
Then there was another passage in the article, which went: "Imagine if God had specially mandated America as his kingdom. Imagine if that meant that a war against America is a war against God himself." And so on. It was an indication of what a frightening little cult was being formed by the unholy mixture of religion and nationalism which declared its opponents to be enemies of both God and country.
Mr. Sanjay, the "frightening little cult" is not recent nor is it so little. Study the war of 1861-65 against the Soiuth and the propaganda that preceded and followed it. It is all there. The enemies of America (i.e., New England) are the enemies of God.
Thanks Dr. Wilson, I just did start searching about ACW propaganda to discover about these nationalist-religious undertones used in the war, so that I can learn more about this. I understand you have regularly discussed the Puritan roots of the Northern US mentality, and I wonder if you believe that Puritanism and Mormonism share common roots in terms of their righteousness and nationalism.
I am vaguely familiar with how such rhetoric was also used by the British and French against the Orthodox peoples in the Crimean War. Some priests in both countries made up absolute lies about how Serbians and Russians intended to "convert everyone else to their pagan heresy". It has a very effective, dehumanizing impact on people, who see enemies in war as agents of Satan rather than just ordinary people.
Mr. Sanjay,
If I could be a meme carrying vector into your conversation with Dr. Wilson, I would suggest that there are several commonalities between Puritanism, particularly in its New England idiom, and Mormonism, one being Arianism or, if you will, neo-Arianism, the denying of the Trinity. While Puritanism retained in cold zealotry, at least in the persons of its elites, clergy and intellectuals, it decayed into Transcendentalism, Unitarianism and ultimately Universalism, with the usual sputniks of atheists, agnostics and pseudo-Christians.
The Smiths were New Englanders who moved west into the Burnt Over Region of New York. Mormonism is one of those sputniks, a very virulent one.
Yes, the "Burned over District" of Western New York (and similar regions in Ohio, and later Kansas) carried the overflow of poorer New England population in the antebellum period. Puritanism there became Mormonism, Adventism, prohibition, abolitionism, feminism, militant "Christian nationalism," social gospel, etc., in every case traceable back to Mass., Vermont, and Conn.