My dark Mormon pessimism

And so it ends. A week after I read 4 Nephi, with its utopian vision of a communitarian society living in peace and unity and justice—a week and a few chapters later (Mormon 1-6), Nephite society has been obliterated and the surviving Lamanites are degenerating into savages. Yes, I'm wincing at the 19th-century notions of "civilization" versus "savagery," especially as they're being applied here to Native Americans. But let's set that aside for the moment. Let me listen to the text. Let me share what I've learned from it.

I'm in the middle of doing a seven-week discussion series on American religious history for the Episcopal church Hugo and I attend. Every week I pose a question about this particular church's identity or mission, and then I sketch broad historical contexts that can help the group think through an answer to the question. Last week's question was "Why does the Advocate have a woman priest?" The contexts I provided included not only the post-1960s push toward women's ordination among mainline Protestants and Catholics but the much longer history of women's leadership in more marginal religious movements and the less visible but indispensible contributions women have always made to America's religious organizations.

In our discussion at the end, the priest wondered aloud if in the long view, women's ordination in the Episcopal Church might prove a historical blip, given the increasing clout of the global South, where much more conservative views on gender and sexuality tend to dominate. (A few years ago, I expressed a similar fear during a brief conversation with Susan Skoor, an apostle in the Community of Christ.) Another participant in the discussion made a quite passionate speech to the effect that God wills the advancement of women, and God's word does not return empty, ergo fundamentalists who fight progress on this question are fighting a battle bound to lose. I disagreed, also rather dramatically. I said, essentially, that since God has made us free to choose our own way, humanity is entirely capable of instituting centuries of oppression or even destroying ourselves—"slit our throat" was the expression I used. I hadn't intended to get quite that intense, so I laughed and said, "That's my dark Mormon pessimism talking."

And by "dark Mormon pessimism," I meant precisely what I read about this week. The Book of Mormon is ultimately a dark, tragic book. It's a story about failure. It's a story about a society on a path to destruction, and the best that God's servants can do is (a) save their own souls through their faithful witness and (b) try to convince as many other souls as they can to accept Jesus before they're killed and dispatched to the judgment bar. It's incredibly bleak. In fact, it doesn't seem very characteristically Mormon, if you're judging by the quiet tones of General Conference or the unflagging optimism of a Gordon B. Hinckley. It's a worldview that seems more appropriate to Christian fundamentalists waiting for the Rapture and the rise of the Antichrist and imagining that people who don't accept Jesus as their personal Savior before they leave this world are doomed to burn in hell forever. I'm thinking of a conservative evangelical I met some years back at an interfaith conference on sexuality who said that he saw liberal Christianity as a burning building, and he was trying to save what few souls he could from the conflagration. That's Mormon's worldview—except that Mormon reaches a point where he's convinced the people's hearts are so hard that there isn't even any point in witnessing anymore.

In fact, Mormon's worldview seems to me to be even more pessimistic than early Mormon apocalypticism. At least the early Mormons imagined that Jesus was going to come soon to save them. Mormon doesn't even have that hope. His hope lies centuries in the future, when the Book of Mormon will be recovered. But for the present—his present—everything that he has worked for, or that Alma worked for, or that Nephi son of Lehi worked for back in 600 BC... it's all come to nothing.

Which is why I can't buy into the kind of liberalism that imagines progress is inevitable. My religious tradition's foundational text tells me otherwise. God has given us the freedom to choose our own path, but that means that if the consequences of our choices prove disastrous, we're trapped. God isn't going to intervene, or at least God's ability to intervene is entirely dependent on the willingness of human agents to work with him, which limits what God can do. In the case of the Book of Mormon, the best God can do at the end is find someone to write up a record and bury it so it can come forth at a later date as an instrument for working toward the fulfilment of the millennial promises. But there's no Rapture here, no deus ex machina. There's no magic forcefield shielding the righteous. The whole ship goes down, and Mormon and Moroni go down with it.

Progress doesn't just happen. God wills it to happen, God is constantly calling us, God's Spirit is constantly blowing across the face of the earth, touching hearts, inspiring minds, raising up prophetic voices here and there, breathing life and power into movements organized for good. I believe that. The story of the Restoration gives me a vivid set of images for how that happens. If earth asks, heaven will answer. We can be endowed with power from on high. We can proclaim the truth before kings and rulers. We can gather the exiles. We can make a feast for the poor. We can build the kingdom. We can build Zion. We can heal the sick. We can make the desert blossom. We can bring the nations together rejoicing. We can help God establish centuries of uninterrupted peace. We can do this. Or we can pursue a path that will destroy our societies. The choice is ours; and if we choose wrong, there will come a point, as it does for the Nephites, when "the day of grace [is] passed" (Morm. 2:15), when we reach the point where nothing can undo the damage we've caused or prevent the collapse of everything we and generations past have created. Maybe in the distant future God can find a way to pick up the pieces and start again. But that won't help us in the here and now. We'll just be ruins and a voice from the dust.