And for this purpose have I established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose, and redeemed the land by the shedding of blood
The Voice of God to Joseph Smith the Prophet
The Doctrine & Covenants, 101:80
Jonathan Chait’s recent essay on the far right takeover of the GOP, informed by readings of recent books by, respectively, Geoffrey Kabaservice and David Frum, considers both the takeover itself and the state of the remnant moderate resistance. Yet there is one thing missing from Chait’s overview, as from the vast majority of contemporary political commentaries: The peculiar function of politicized faith in the rise of the eminent Bishop and High Priest of the Order of Melchizedek of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Massachusetts Governor, 2008 presidential candidate, 2012 Republican Party nominee, Willard Mitt Romney.
Chait like most pundits and polite observers minds the theoretical separation of church and state for which the United States of America has stood, with a certain radically inconsistent consistency, from its beginnings. Though Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a teenage convert to Mormonism, has occasionally brought up his and Mitt Romney’s shared faith, observers of American politics have rarely been asked to consider the fact that two of the federal government’s highest positions may soon be held by members of the church. Regarding Romney in particular, rather than venture into the territory of political theology (a journey from which no true pilgrim returns unchanged), Chait repeats the familiar narrative in which a constitutionally moderate technocrat has reluctantly embraced ideologues whose zealotry and rigidity are alien to him, as they are to the vast majority of other outsiders, including all right-thinking left-liberals by definition.
The counter-hypothesis, whose best proof is the Romney candidacy itself, is that Romney’s ascension confirms a studiously unremarked convergence of Mormon, American-evangelical, and rightwing Republican precepts. According to this view of the nominee and of the Republican right, the same view Romney himself adopts, his agreement with fellow members of his coalition is much deeper than policy particulars, as it is also much deeper than the outward forms of religious doctrine. If Mitt Romney as presidential candidate is driven by a religious – indeed, prophetic and messianic – mission too closely held and too easily misunderstood for public words, then its essential convergence with the politics of the Republican right would be of more than biographical, cultural, or esoteric interest: It amounts to the consolidation of a new theo-political establishment waiting only for a mass-electoral mandate.
The Trinary Covenant
For Mitt Romney himself, for the church in whose hierarchy he has held high positions, and for the broad coalition which he currently leads, America is the chosen vehicle for the realization of God’s will on Earth. Less religiously inclined hyperpatriots might explain their personal beliefs differently, but their demurrals will reduce to terminological quibbling. This commitment is defined by the hallowed foundational acts and documents of the American civic religion, and is extended to the American political-economic system as well as to the role of America in world history – seen, in the expressly theo-political phrases famously recycled and re-purposed by Ronald Wilson Reagan, as the “city on a Hill” and “last best hope of man on Earth” (“which… the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless“). A victory this Fall by Romney’s Republicans would validate theological American exceptionalism – “no apology” Americanism – as national official ideology.
From this simultaneously religious and patriotic perspective, which we have previously discussed under the heading of “Americanist Christianity,” American history (or America within world history) from colonial times to global political and economic pre-eminence embodies divine providence at work. This conclusion implies a threefold set of interconnected and mutually reinforcing political-theological commitments: to the American Idea as realized in the American nation-state; to Christianity both as religion and in the form of Christian civilization; and also to Judaism, both the scriptural sources of Judaism in the Old Testament as well as the concrete reality of the modern-day state of Israel.
To be clear, we are discussing structures of belief that at any given historical conjuncture or in any particular social-political context may lead more often to tension, friction, and open conflict than to mutual understanding and cooperation – as between Jews and Christians for much of Medieval and Modern history, or between Mormons and the rest of American society, religious and secular, up to the present day. The argument is not that mere symbolic and terminological appropriations necessarily amount to authentic interconnections, theological or other. From the perspective of American society as a whole, a merging of great religions traditional and civic remains a mainly socio- or theo-political phenomenon, not or not yet a fusion of Christian, Jewish, and American liberal-democratic doctrines in a conventional religious format. Large political movements in a modern mass democracy – even theocratic or, to borrow the Prophet Joseph Smith’s term, “theodemocratic” movements – can neither expect nor enforce doctrinal discipline to any great degree, or do so any more effectively than most religions have.
Still, if the conjoining of Christianity and Judaism is by no means a universally welcomed or authentically achieved (or this-side-of-eternity achievable) synthesis, it still reflects a reversal of nearly two thousands years of general persecution by Christianity of its own parent religion. Conflicting approaches to Christianity’s Judaic roots go back to the life, acts, and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, of course. In modern times, the alternative to “supersessionism” has been a major theme in diverse Christian sectarian movements – especially the Dual Covenant movement within Dispensationalism – but is also observable in the protestantism of the first North American colonists. A tradition of Judaic philosophy, from Moses Maimonides down through Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenszweig developed the potential from the other side.
At the least ironically, perhaps uncannily, the anti-Zionism of Cohen’s German-Judaic universalism was eclipsed by the events that simultaneously turned American society decisively against anti-semitism and framed the global era of American leadership. The American political-cultural realization of Jewish-Christian rapprochement was prepared by the Holocaust, the defeat of Nazi Germany, and the establishment of the United Nations coincident with the founding of the Jewish state. To legions of would-be interpreters of the Bible, these and related events seemed to resonate with or to fulfill theo-political prophecies from both Testaments, providing a background for further providential interpretation of Israel’s “miraculous” military victories through 1967. The key American political moment may, however, have been the virtually simultaneous birth of “Neo-Conservatism” and “the Moral Majority” during the formation of the Reagan coalition, accompanied by new entries for “Judeo-Christian” in American political lexicons – and, in short order, by the fall of America’s sole acknowledged global rival, the religiously atheistic Soviet Union.
In theo-political terms, one key result can easily be found today, or hardly missed, in the philo-semitism of Christian conservative politicians Rick Perry and Sarah Palin; of popular rightwing evangelists (tele- and other); and of the agitational propagandist Glenn Beck, who happens to be, like Mitt Romney, a Mormon celebrity who rarely or never mentions his religion while sharing his version of the trinary covenant with merely, or merely nominally, political true believers. Among rank and file members of the religious right, the standpoint is typically grounded on Biblical verses taken as explicit instructions to honor and support the Jews and the Jewish state (a common evangelical interpretation especially of Romans: 9-11). This Judeo-Christian-American unity position also makes a susceptibility to one-sided pro-Israeli bias and to crusading Islamophobia much easier to understand, along with the tendency to project an Islamic, or atheist, or collectivist, or nihilist, or Euro-statist, or other treasonous evil (sometimes all at once) onto all who stray even an iota from “true conservatism.”
Brought to the point of armed conflict, as in one way or another it has been continuously since the American Revolution, the standpoint becomes self-validating, because it has to be: No one dies or kills for the sake of merely offering a postulate or proposition or abstract idea for discussion; he dies or kills to prove it, concretely. The cup does not pass from his lips.
Our American Theology
This trinary formation, for the believer a set of three mutually inclusive covenants, also amounts to the essence and structure of Mormonism – Mormonism apart from the particulars of Mormon history and practice. If there is a Church of the Trinary Covenant, it would seem to be the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That the same structure of belief (or wish) increasingly characterizes the contemporary American religious right may also explain why the widely predicted resistance to a Mormon candidate has never quite materialized. The ideological core of Mormonism and of the contemporary right is identical: Providential Americanism – American Exceptionalism as a political, economic, moral, mytho-poetic, and theological certitude. Under whatever superficially secularized interpolations, the effect re-produces the contemporary moderate-free Republican program: More pro-Israel than the Israelis, combatively Christian, and assertively American, “real American.”
The early Mormon patriarchs seem to have arrived at a firm grasp of American political theology long before 20th and 21st Century theorists turned their full attention to it. A reciprocally American and prophetic history is central to the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, which considers the American Constitution a sacred, divinely inspired document – as made clear in the LDS Doctrine and Covenants (Chapter 101, verses 76-80) as well as in numerous other statements. The Church also developed an extensive theodicy of the American Civil War, and has taught that Native Americans are a Lost Tribe of Ancient Israel, that the Garden of Eden was located in Missouri, and that Jesus Christ will return in the Last Days to the same place.
Adam-ondi-Ahman-Tower, Missouri
The LDS 10th Article of Faith mandates belief “in the literal gathering of Israel and in the restoration of the Ten Tribes” and insists “that Zion (the New Jerusalem) will be built upon the American continent.” One might say without the slightest disrespect that, since for Mormons America is Zion, the non-distinction between Israeli and American interests – “no daylight,” not even “an inch of difference” – is utterly second nature for Mitt Romney. There is also something very typically American in Mormon beliefs that evoke science fiction (or Scientology), in the history of Mormon racism, and in the corporatist capitalism of Mormon economics, which pre-figured and by now dovetails with the Christian conservative “prosperity gospel.”
These examples frame a Mormon political praxis whose adaptation to the American ideological ecosystem is masked by an early history of violent persecution and armed conflict, and by notorious lesser elements of Mormon history, belief, and ritual. For now, the effective unity of the social conservative front does not seem to be impaired by stubbornly held doctrinal differences – whether Jews can be “saved” without accepting Jesus Christ, or should expect to be converted; whether the Mosaic or Noahide commandments, or the covenant with Abraham, best defines the Judaic contribution; and for that matter whether Mormonism is the one true religion, a Christian sect, or a non-Christian cult. We can therefore question how significant those difference really are even to their main exponents, at least on most days of the week.
In this special sense, then, neither conventionally religious nor narrowly political, a Romney victory would make Mormons of all of us, or all of us a little more Mormon – or it would perhaps confirm that we have on some level, the one that matters most over the long term, all become Mormons without knowing it.
As We Are He
Even in the event of a 2012 electoral defeat of the main party of our holy materialist trinity, the influence of the underlying political-theological convergence on our national life, and on the state of the world, will likely remain substantial, most evidently in the forced pre-emptive movement of the main alternative in its direction.
Given the sheer weight of American trade, arms, and culture in the world, even small differences in emphasis between the coalition-of-the-trinary-covenant and the coalition-of-the-trinary-covenant-with-reservations-and-additions may turn out to matter greatly for many millions of individuals. If it is the only space for political decision allowed to us, then it is the most important political decision, the decision on decisions and the only clear statement that there is: For the cultivation of those reservations and additions, or against it.
For the same reason, to say that this idea of America – of divine and universal promise incarnated in a national polity – may be problematic would be a vast understatement: Not to suggest a final judgment on Judeo-Christian Americanism, or the ability to declare one, but the notion seems to imply a collective sacrificial career or denouement, sooner or later. Few providentialists have even begun to consider the possibility, except in the leap to End Times prophecy or the resort to crank theodicies (AIDS or the latest hurricane as divine punishment). Instead, our compulsory public pieties of the right and of the left confirm the words of the Christian gospel, as Lee M. has suggested in a related context, regarding the unwelcomeness of the prophet in his own country. Lee M. points to the example of, or the example made of, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Most such names are presumably lost to whichever history in question.
Our politics of the trinary covenant also evokes the tri-phasic, ascending structure of history that, as Eric Voegelin demonstrated, is common to diverse theological as well as nominally secular historical-philosophical systems. On this reading the trinary covenant as historical process – Judaic to Christian to American; Ancient to Medieval to Modern; “I am that I am,” “I am He,” “We are He” – would comprise a form of what Voegelin condemns as gnosticism – “belief that a change in the order of being lies in the realm of human action.” Under Voegelin’s critique, whose leading elements appear across and beyond the left-right spectrum wherever the course of modernity comes radically in question, it appears that every alternative, as all the more the alternative of quietism under the reign of whichever idols, leads to the same place.
How would we as a society or people ever make an authentic choice at all, if the subject remains all but un-discussed? A worldview that cannot be seen for what it is, unconscious because collectively un-cognized, uncriticizeable because under a general taboo, must remain effectively unseen, and simply be seen through.
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To expand on what I was trying to say on Twitter about Mormonism’s Christian-Jewish fusion, I think the connection is more complex and dubious than you think. To me it seems like Mormons repurposed Zionism to flatter Americanism. Imitation is only winsome flattery before it crosses into cultural appropriation: when Mormons baptise Holocaust victims or call Jews “Gentiles” (ouch!!), there doesn’t seem to be much actual interfacing of the ideologies. That said I knew a handful of “Jewish Mormons” in the S.F. Valley and they got along well with the ward, although they had idiosyncratic doctrinal views and I can’t imagine there were many more than the ones I knew.
I think you’re wrong that Mormonism represents a Judeo-Christian fusion that threatens heightened Islamophobia. It might be useful for me to talk about the interesting connection between Mormons and Muslims here. Unlike most American right-wing Christian sects, Mormonism is officially neutral on the Israel/Palestine conflict. BYU has an Islamic Studies department that’s very similar to secular I-S departments in its sympathetic treatment of the faith. After Mormons, BYU enrolls more Muslims than members of any other faith group, probably because of the alcohol prohibition and the strict “honor code”. BYU-Hawaii even has a Muslim student president this year. If Romney wins, one of the things I’ll wish for is a rapprochement between Muslims and the Judeo-Christian American military complex. Maybe I’m being too hopeful there, but weirder things have happened.