Opinion
Will This Election Be the Mormon
Breakthrough?
LCDM Universal History Archive/Getty Images
A postcard from around 1910, showing the first six presidents of the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints, who served from 1830 to 1918.
By HAROLD BLOOM
Published: November 12, 2011 The New York Times
THIS fall, we behold omens that will darken a year hence in the final phase of President
Obama’s campaign for a second term. His likely opponent, the Mormon Mitt Romney,
will be a pioneer figure whatever the outcome, since no previous member of that very
American church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has ever secured a
major-party nomination. Even should Mr. Obama triumph, a crucial precedent will have
been established.
Mr. Romney, earnest and staid, who is deep within the labyrinthine Mormon hierarchy, is
directly descended from an early follower of the founding prophet Joseph Smith, whose
highly original revelation was as much a departure from historical Christianity as Islam
was and is. But then, so in fact are most manifestations of what is now called religion in
the United States, including the Southern Baptist Convention, the Assemblies of God
Pentecostalists and even our mainline Protestant denominations.
However, should Mr. Romney be elected president, Smith’s dream of a Mormon
Kingdom of God in America would not be fulfilled, since the 21st-century Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has little resemblance to its 19th-century precursor. The
current head of the Mormon Church, Thomas S. Monson, known to his followers as
“prophet, seer and revelator,” is indistinguishable from the secular plutocratic oligarchs
who exercise power in our supposed democracy.
The Salt Lake City empire of corporate greed has little enough in common with the
visions of Joseph Smith. The oligarchs of Salt Lake City, who sponsor Mr. Romney,
betray what ought to have been their own religious heritage. Though I read Christopher
Hitchens with pleasure, his characterization of Joseph Smith as “a fraud and conjuror” is
inadequate. A superb trickster and protean personality, Smith was a religious genius,
uniquely able to craft a story capable of turning a self-invented faith into a people now as
numerous as the Jews, in America and abroad. According to the church, about six million
American citizens are Mormons, and there are more than eight million converts in Asia,
Africa and elsewhere.
Persuasively redefining Christianity has been a pastime through the ages, yet the
American difference is brazen. What I call the American Religion, and by that I mean
nearly all religions in this country, socially manifests itself as the Emancipation of
Selfishness. Our Great Emancipator of Selfishness, President Ronald Reagan,
refreshingly evaded the rhetoric of religion, but has been appropriated anyway as the
archangel of American spiritualized greed.
Marxist slogans rarely ring true in our clime, where religion is the poetry (bad and good)
of the people and not its opiate. Poetry is a defense against dying. The American Religion
centers upon the denial of death, literalizing an ancient Christian metaphor.
Obsessed by a freedom we identify with money, we tolerate plutocracy as if it could
someday be our own ecstatic solitude. A first principle of the American Religion is that
each of us rarely feels free unless he or she is entirely alone, particularly when in the
company of the American Jesus. Walking and talking with him is akin to receiving his
love in a personal and individual relationship.
A dark truth of American politics in what is still the era of Reagan and the Bushes is that
so many do not vote their own economic interests. Rather than living in reality they yield
to what oddly are termed “cultural” considerations: moral and spiritual, or so their leaders
urge them to believe. Under the banners of flag, cross, fetus, exclusive marriage between
men and women, they march onward to their own deepening impoverishment. Much of
the Tea Party fervor merely repeats this gladsome frolic.
AS the author of “The American Religion,” I learned a considerable respect for such
original spiritual revelations as 19th-century Mormonism and early 20th-century
Southern Baptism, admirably re-founded by the subtle theologian Edgar Young Mullins
in his “Axioms of Religion.”
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A religion becomes a people, as it has for the Jews and the Mormons, partly out of human
tenacity inspired by the promise of the blessing of more life, but also through charismatic
leadership. What we now call Judaism was essentially created by Rabbi Akiva ben
Joseph to meet the needs of a Jewish people mired under Roman occupation in Palestine
and elsewhere in the empire. A great sage, Akiva was also a leader of extraordinary
charisma, an old man when martyred by the Emperor Hadrian, presumably for inspiring
the insurrection of Bar Kokhba that ended at the siege of Bethar.
Joseph Smith, killed by a mob before he turned 39, is hardly comparable to the
magnificent Akiva, except that he invented Mormonism even more single-handedly than
Akiva gave us Judaism, or Muhammad, Islam.
I recall prophesying in 1992 that by 2020 Mormonism could become the dominant
religion of the western United States. But we are not going to see that large a
transformation. I went wrong because the last two decades have witnessed the deliberate
dwindling of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints into just one more Protestant
sect. Without the changes, Mitt Romney and Jon M. Huntsman Jr., a fellow Mormon,
would not seem plausible candidates.
Our political satirists, with Mr. Romney evidently imminent, delight in describing the
apparent weirdness of Mormon cosmology and allied speculations, but they forget the
equal strangeness of Christian mythology, now worn familiar by repetition. Jorge Luis
Borges shrewdly classified all theology as fantastic literature, and Joseph Smith’s
adventures in the spiritual realm are at least refreshingly original, and were even in 19thcentury America, when homegrown systems of belief sprouted prodigiously. Smith was
not a good writer, except for one or two of his sermons, as reported in transcriptions by
his auditors, but his mythmaking faculty was fecund.
The accurate critique of Mormonism is that Smith’s religion is not even monotheistic, let
alone democratic. Though the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints no longer
openly describes their innermost beliefs, they clearly hold on to the notion of a plurality
of gods. Indeed, they themselves expect to become gods, following the path of Joseph
Smith.
There are other secrets also, not tellable by the Mormon Church to those it calls
“Gentiles,” oddly including Jews. That aspects of the religion of a devout president of the
United States should be concealed from all but 2 percent of us may be a legitimate
question that merits pondering. When I wandered about the South and Southwest from
1989 to 1991, researching American religion, I was heartened by the warmth that greeted
me in Pentecostal and Baptist churches, some of them independent indeed. But Gentiles
are not allowed in Mormon temples.
Joseph Smith continues to be regarded by many Mormons as a final authority on issues of
belief, though so much of his legacy, including plural marriage, had to be compromised
in the grand bargain by which the moguls of Salt Lake City became plutocrats defining
the Republican party. The hierarchy’s vast economic power is founded upon the tithing of
the faithful, who yield 10 percent of their income to the church. I am moved by the
Occupy Wall Street demonstrations but remain skeptical that you can achieve a lessening
of money’s influence upon our politics, since money is politics. That dark insight has
animated the Mormon hierarchy all through the later 20th and early 21st century. The
patriotism of Mormons for some time now has been legendary: they help stock the C.I.A.,
the F.B.I., the military. Though the powers of the presidency are at this moment
somewhat diminished by the Republican House and the atavistic Supreme Court, they
remain latent. A Mormon presidency is not quite the same as an ostensibly Catholic or
Protestant one, since the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints insists on a religious
sanction for its moralistic platitudes.
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The 19th-century Mormon theologian Orson Pratt, who was close both to Joseph Smith
and Brigham Young, stated a principle the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
has never repudiated: “Any people attempting to govern themselves by laws of their own
making, and by officers of their own appointment, are in direct rebellion against the
kingdom of God.”
Mormons earn godhead though their own efforts, hoping to join the plurality of gods,
even as they insist they are not polytheists. No Mormon need fall into the fundamentalist
denial of evolution, because the Mormon God is not a creator. Imaginatively liberating as
this may be, its political implications are troublesome. The Mormon patriarch, secure in
his marriage and large family, is promised by his faith a final ascension to godhead, with
a planet all his own separate from the earth and nation where he now dwells. From the
perspective of the White House, how would the nation and the world appear to President
Romney? How would he represent the other 98 percent of his citizens?
Other Christians look askance at Mr. Romney and have no trouble saying so. Because of
his religion, they will vote only reluctantly for him, or even not vote at all. One of the
recent grace notes of our politics was sounded by the ebullient Robert Jeffress, senior
pastor of First Baptist Dallas, which boasts 10,000 members. Mr. Jeffress pronounced
that the Mormons were a non-Christian cult, as he endorsed his favorite candidate, Gov.
Rick Perry, a Christian statesman.
Mr. Perry gently demurred at Mr. Jeffress’s dictum, indicating also that he did not
endorse the pastor’s assertion that the Roman Catholic Church was “the Scarlet Harlot,”
presumably the Whore of Babylon in the Book of Revelation. Whatever his tactical
sleights, the Texas governor displays a continuous religiosity, unlikely to divert secular
Republicans clustered in gated exurbia and gracious Eastern suburbs.
We can be certain that President Obama will not care to address these arcane matters in
his debates with Mr. Romney. Doubtless Mr. Obama’s Christianity is sincere, but happily
it is irrelevant to his governing style and aspirations. There appear to be no secular
seeming Republicans running for the White House, except, ironically, Mr. Huntsman.
Mormonism’s best inheritance from Joseph Smith was his passion for education, hardly
evident in the anti-intellectual and semi-literate Southern Baptist Convention. I wonder
though which is more dangerous, a knowledge-hungry religious zealotry or a proudly
stupid one? Either way we are condemned to remain a plutocracy and oligarchy. I can be
forgiven for dreading a further strengthening of theocracy in that powerful brew.