#theodemocracy

[making-mormonism]

Some relevant paragraphs from the essays in Grant Hardy’s new Oxford Annotated BoM:

Coming at a time when many citizens of the United States were trying to imagine what their national destiny might be, the Book of Mormon taught that America, no less than the Holy Land, had a key role to play in God’s plans for humankind, particularly in the last days leading up to the Millennium. According to the new scripture, European settlers were only the most recent immigrants to be led by God to the New World, and they had a chance to avoid the tragic fates of the Jaredites and the Nephites who had preceded them. As Mormon prophesied, addressing his readers directly:

We can behold the decrees of God concerning this land, that it is a land of promise; and whatsoever nation shall possess it shall serve God, or they shall be swept off when the fulness of his wrath shall come upon them. … And this [the Book of Mormon] cometh unto you, O ye Gentiles, that ye may know the decrees of God—that ye may repent … that ye may not bring down the fulness of the wrath of God upon you as the inhabitants of the land have hitherto done. (Ether 2.9, 11)

This ominous warning of recurring destruction reflects the book’s premillennial temperament, which stood in contrast to competing ideas of American progress. The land was especially blessed, but the inhabitants could come and go in typological reenactments orchestrated by God. Thus the American experiment from Columbus to the Puritans to the Revolution (all alluded to in 1 Ne 13.10–19), which came at the expense of indigenous peoples, was not necessarily bound to succeed. The Book of Mormon evinces considerable anxiety about the precariousness of freedom, morality, and Providential favor as it illustrates the dangers of pride, rebelliousness, false religion, and corrupt government, along with class and ethnic divisions.

White Americans were meant to identify with the “Gentiles” in the Book of Mormon (as in 1 Ne 13–14), while Native Americans were to see themselves as the descendants of the Lamanites. The relationship was to be proselytizing with the assistance of European settlers to indigenous peoples rather than conquest, with Indians eventually being restored to a position of prominence. Unrepentant, disbelieving Gentiles, however, would be scourged by latter-day Lamanites (3 Ne 20–21)—a threat that seemed to envision a resurgence of the sort of tribal alliance that Tecumseh had put together before his death in 1813. Early Latter-day Saints believed that these events were imminent and would take place within the territory of the United States, though uncertainties in prophetic chronology and geography left open the possibility of later fulfillments across North and South America.

Perhaps unexpectedly, the ancient inhabitants of the New World were described more in biblical terms than in nineteenth-century Indian stereotypes. The Book of Mormon mentions in passing the “Great Spirit” (eighteen references, all in Alma 18–19; 22), mound-building (Alma 16.11), and burying weapons (not explicitly identified as hatchets or tomahawks [Alma 24]), but Lamanites are never described as red men, and there are no references to wigwams, moccasins, blankets, feathers, or canoes, all of which appear in the “Book of Pukei” (an 1830 parody of the Book of Mormon), Oliver Cowdery’s 1831 address to the Delaware Indians, and an 1835 LDS hymn. Nephite relations with the Lamanites roughly paralleled those of white settlers to Native Americans in scenes of missionizing and warfare, but the ethnic boundaries were more porous in the Book of Mormon, with Nephites becoming Lamanites and vice versa, and a surprising reversal of spiritual roles in the generation before Jesus’s visitation. In the Mormon scripture, the Nephites were generally more civilized and blessed than the Lamanites, yet the book’s prophecies foretold a time when American Indians would enjoy divine favor as covenant Israel, while European immigrants would be guests on land that God had given to the indigenous peoples as their perpetual inheritance. That is to say, white settlers would gain salvation and a share of that inheritance only if they were adopted into the covenant that God had made with the Lamanites and their native descendants.

(p. 789–90)

For what it’s worth, I don’t necessarily agree with Hardy’s reading. I think the adoption of Gentiles into the Lamanite covenant as discussed in the BoM should be understood as a kind of trans-racial adoption, wherein Gentiles become not just part of the Kingdom of God in America alongside and underneath the Lamanites, but are made indistinguishable members of the One People Israel in America, mirroring JS’s thoughts on Gentile Christians and their not-necessarily-supersessionist relationship with Jews, but also the ways in which white settlers adopted American Indian names, imagery, children, and practices as they—especially on the Western frontier (consider someone like Davy Crockett, or any number of other settlers who “went savage,” many of whom were storied in JS’s day, or even the Mormons, who were themselves regularly targeted by Gentiles for becoming too much alike the Indians [see W. Paul Reeve’s Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (OUP, 2015) for more on this])—came to understand themselves as emphatically American, firmly attached to the American continent, rather than as temporarily removed Europeans.

I should also note that “and build a power independent of the US government in those regions, along "theodemocratic" lines” is a bit ahistorical/presentist here. JS’s original intent was almost certainly to redeem the whole of the American people and the US government along with them; he didn’t really turn towards his more nationalistic understanding of the Mormons as a separate covenantal people group who deserve religious autonomy within the US government until the Missouri period (1837–1841), and given his presidential election campaign in 1844 he doesn’t seem to have ever truly given up the idea in the way that Brigham Young had in the aftermath of the Martyrdom. Theodemocracy as we think of it today also wasn’t developed until much later on. While there are inklings in the BoM of a state ruled by godly judges who listen to the “voice of the people” after the abdication of Mosiah II, the book also speaks just as highly of a more traditional theocratic monarchy under Benjamin and the Mosiahs. Outside of the text, it’s not until the Missouri and Nauvoo (1841–1844) periods when JS really moves beyond more traditional notions of a theoretical kingdom of God represented on Earth by a church whose members vote on church matters (found in any contemporary congregationalist or synodal church) to one where the Kingdom of God shall be made manifest on Earth as a liberal state “where God and the people hold the power to conduct the affairs of men in righteousness[, a]nd where liberty, free trade, and sailor’s rights, and the protection of life and property shall be maintained inviolate, for the benefit of ALL” [Times and Seasons 5:510 (Apr 15, 1844). Also important to note that this system, as spoken of by JS and WW Phelps here, is strongly predicated on exaltation, a concept which is theologically absent from the BoM], and only later still under the heights of Young’s presidency in the 1860s and 1870s that the term reaches our modern understanding of it, where the Church maintains significant control over large-scale civil institutions through the control and devotion of rank-and-file members. (Though, of course, we can—and probably should—read the Nauvoo period as a precedent to this, and certainly anti-Mormon activists from the surrounding area did. We should also, for what it’s worth, consider these developments within the context of American popular anti-Catholicism, which targeted the Mormons under similar anti-popery and anti-clerical messaging.)

other future plot points:

- Founderism (Protestantism + American Civic Religion with canonized myth-historic Founding Fathers) has a religious schism between the Founderist pope (based in Disneystadt) and the Founderist antipope (based in the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid).

- the State Pantheon’s prophecy regarding the next Contingent, a figure capable of embodying the Contradictions of the Material (in the same ballpark as the Innocents from Disco Elysium). Most of the cast will attempt to claim that they are the Contingent at one point or another.

- The governors of the American League’s constituent states being like “can you believe people elected a vtuber? what an embarrassment” as if they aren’t all just as embarrassing.

- whirlwind romance B-plot where Liam becomes Jacob’s newest maidboy and Sunny recruits him to discreetly keep an eye on Jacob because she doesn’t trust him not to leave confidential information lying around. When asked why she doesn’t just hire some traditional opsec agents, she replies “because that would be boring.”

- Orbital fabricators exist in space but they’re mostly an excuse to dodge earth-based labor laws.

- there’s this guy who claims to be an ancient Jaredite who has conquered a large portion of former Iowa and claims that it’s the ‘Narrow Neck of Land’ from the Book of Mormon and he’s being revenge-funded by Marcus Aurelius Bezos in order to cause headaches for Sunny. There’s an actual plot here trust me

[lemuel-apologist]

when you try to develop a small town in utah for a ttrpg thing and you remember OH SHIT THE MORMONS

so you decide to make the population lower (25%) and make them mostly fall outside mainstream mormonism

but that many mormons seems too unrealistic

and then you remember RIGHT, SHIT, IT'S UTAH and you can't really divorce the state from the religion

[hazardous-waste-containment]

between the anti-Masonics, Mormon "theodemocracy," and the Know Nothings, the Jacksonian period saw multiple proto-fascist movements in the U.S.

Proto-proto-fascist, really

[kinka-juice]

I come from a state that notably tried to make Theodemocracy a thing, so our state constitution is a little more exacting, and to me it mostly gets to the core of the idea of separation of church and state:

"The State shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office of public trust or for any vote at any election; nor shall any person be incompetent as a witness or juror on account of religious belief or the absence thereof. There shall be no union of Church and State, nor shall any church dominate the State or interfere with its functions. No public money or property shall be appropriated for or applied to any religious worship, exercise or instruction, or for the support of any ecclesiastical establishment."

How well Utah's legislation follows this is definitely worthy of scrutiny, but the idea that a church should not dominate a government, interfere with its functioning, and government resources should not go to religious causes is a pretty good start.

They like to cherry pick