Latter-day Scripture. Robert M. Price
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artistic and the fictive over the bare earth of pragmatism and the mundane. The secularist feels no need for it, just as one may feel no need for classical music. But having a tin ear is nothing to brag about either.
The grace, the gratuity, of religion includes a moral vision transcending the pragmatic, the lowest common denominator. As Aquinas knew, Aristotle had adequately defined righteousness, but Christ defined sanctification. One may be righteous without loving the enemy, but religion offers a vision whereby selfishness may be transcended by expanding the circle of the ego to embrace the estranged. Such is the path of the Bodhisattva. Heroism is not required, but it is admired. You have every right not to forgive. Justice does not require that you do. But if you heed the Buddha and the Christ, and forgive your enemy, you break through to a zone of transcendent freedom. As Tillich said, mercy is “creative justice.” And it is sacred. But we must not let it become legalism, literalism, so that one not only forgives the one who has injured one but also thinks it wrong to fight in defense of the innocent. In that moment, heroism has become fanaticism. Bravery has become snake-handling. Self-sacrifice has become repression.
I believe that both New Testament Christianity and Book of Mormon Christianity are human creations from page one. I know better than to think that either represents a set of facts written into the universe. Both are creations of the boundless and glorious human imagination And as a Humanist I cannot but stand amazed at the accomplishment of Joseph Smith, a man who willed a fictive universe into being, one so enriching and appealing to millions of people that it encircles the world today with zeal and works of mercy.
The Mormon Paradigm
As I say, I would find the Book of Mormon fascinating simply as a work of the artistic imagination My interest in it would require no further justification. No one, Mormon or non-Mormon, could convince me I am wasting my time with it. But, as it happens, I do find a good bit more in the Book. As I read it, there are at least four distinct levels of symbolism that speak to me as an American and as a Humanist.
First, we may see the Nephite struggle to survive with piety intact in the face of threats to body and to soul as a perfect self-mythologization of a religious community. For the early Mormons, as all know, were anything but armchair believers. They lived the epic of persecution for the sake of a new and radical faith. The Book of Mormon must have spoken to them because they were living it: how then could it not be true? It is a classic example of Bultmann’s dictum of myths expressing the self-understanding of the culture/community that produces them. When non-Mormons like myself look at the Mormon narrative, we know that it is true history—that of the pioneer Mormons of the nineteenth century.
Second, the Book of Mormon is a powerful statement of the traditional, patriotic American self-understanding, which I share, of our country. It is a new Promised Land brimming with opportunities, but with as many challenges and dangers, too, not the least of the dangers being complacency. Benjamin Franklin proposed that the national seal somehow make room for the scene of Moses leading the Israelites across the Red Sea. He was typical of Americans who saw their fledgling country as a new Israel emerging from the tyranny of Pharaoh George III. The Book of Mormon writes the very same image even larger: the fleeing family of Lehi represent this new, American Israel, disembarking on the shores of a Promised Land. Will they fulfill their manifest destiny to make their new paradise a shining beacon of freedom and prosperity? The paradigm is especially useful for us modern Americans, because the “America = Israel” paradigm of Joseph Smith is not jingoistic, at least nowhere near as chauvinistic as one might expect. There is no smug triumphalism here, no obliviousness as to one’s national failures and lapses into evil. The Book of Mormon is unblinking in its readiness to scrutinize and to broadcast the sins of the chosen people. That is what I call a wholesome and unsentimental American self-understanding. It does not fall into the self-righteous America-worship of the Far Right or the sophomoric posture of many Leftists today, a national self-hatred. If we Americans viewed ourselves as the Book of Mormon teaches us to, we would neither espouse an arrogant belief in ourselves as a super race, nor would we condemn ourselves as some kind of fascist empire. In other words, we would swerve neither to the right hand nor to the left, as Deuteronomy warns. I will be comparing the Book of Mormon to Deuteronomy in their shared pseudepigraphical character. But just as important is the parallel situations both address. In both we are shown a dawn-misted vista of a great land lying before the adventurous people of God. In both we read of a set of conditions of fidelity to the God who grants that land to his venturesome people. As long as they remain faithful to that covenant, their God will cause them to prosper in their new home. But disaster lies ahead if they fail! How quintessentially American! How quintessentially biblical!
Third, as a Humanist, I see the Mormon epic as symbolic of the human species’ adventure facing a mighty wilderness and making it over into a habitable kingdom in our own image. As humans, we are like the Lehite settlers. The magnificent, beautiful, and terrifying universe, indifferent to our needs, indeed, to our very existence, stands before us just as the New World did to Lehi’s clan as they stepped off their ark. We must impose our codes of morality and social responsibility upon this hostile landscape which is alien and resistant to our efforts. We give order to the chaos of the blind universe. And we must remain vigilant because chaos is ever ready, like the primeval forest, to reclaim what we have cleared and built over. We lend the world meaning, and thus every cosmos of meaning is a fictive cosmos. Joseph Smith created, virtually single-handedly, such a cosmos, and millions live within it quite happily, like Hobbits in Middle Earth. More power to them!
Not Just Grape Soda
Fourth, the epic of the Book of Mormon possesses a special relevance to us and the situation we face here in the West at the outset of the twenty-first century. It provides an interpretive paradigm enabling us, like Joseph Smith peering through the Urim and Thummim, to discern the signs of the present time. What is the basic premise of the Book of Mormon? It depicts the history of two religious communities which split off from Judah. Thriving and growing, these communities, the Nephites and the Lamanites, frequently came into conflict. The Nephites found themselves again and again forced to defend themselves, their faith, and their way of life against the perverse incursions of the Lamanites. Finally the Lamanites overwhelmed and obliterated the Nephites. Bloodthirsty barbarians always have an advantage over civilized nations who are by nature reluctant to fight and would rather dialogue. The Nephite culture survived only in the form of a book, buried in the earth for centuries till someone found it. What a flood of light this scenario casts upon our global crisis today!
For the roles of the rival tribes, both separated from Judah/Judaism, read the communities of Christianity and Islam. It is not hard to see that the Christians are the Nephites, with radical Muslims the villainous Lamanites. And the two appear to be headed to an all-encompassing death struggle in which liberal, democratic, Christian civilization, already perversely despised, is the target of obliteration. And we must not wait till it is too late to steel our will and resist the onslaught, perhaps nuclear, of the Lamanites. We must not allow Western civilization to be buried in the dirt as many would love to bury it.
This is a hard saying. It seems bigotry to paint the whole membership of Islam as savage suicide bombers and terrorists. And I do not mean to. One would have to ask, if there had actually been any historical Lamanites, would every one of them have dreamed of destroying Nephites? Well, they might have, had they undergone a hate-spewing catechism of propaganda like Arab children do today. But I feel sure not all would have. (Samuel the Lamanite was somehow open to the truth, after all.) I know that not all Arabs or Muslims want to see the West fall today. We need not take the terms of the myth literally in order to take the broad outline seriously. Eminent and humane Shi’ite scholar Sayyed Hossein Nasr estimates that only ten per cent of Muslims are militant haters and Jihadists. Let’s see: that makes “only” one hundred million of them. I don’t think we need to worry about painting with too broad a brush. I say that in our moment of history, America (including its Christians, Jews, assimilated Muslims, humanists, atheists, and what have you) is in the position of the Nephites, far more sinned against than sinning, and the Muslim extremists (including the governments of Iran and Syria, as well as Hamas and al-Qaida) are the malevolent hordes of Laman. The Mormon paradigm makes sense of our world crisis like nothing else does. In the present moment, we are all Mormons.
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