On Fantasies: Fear and Loathing in Mormon Country
When Does Science Stop Being Science
I was flying down the sidewalk on Temple Street, weaving in and out of trade show attendees and religious tourists, when a sign caught my attention: No Skateboarding on LDS Church Property. Skateboarders are incapable of avoiding aesthetic rebellion, thus I took a picture with my board in front of the sign, went and visited a little 19th century log cabin, and then skated away on the property, popping a shitty little ollie on the way to make sure it didn’t go unnoticed. There’s no point in skating if you aren’t going to fulfill the ethos, otherwise you’re just exercising.
The sign confused me at first, because taking a glance around I had no idea I was on LDS property. I was across the street from the Salt Lake temple (obscured by construction and renovation scaffolding so I wasn’t able to take in its taboo majesty) and most of Salt Lake City is under some kind of LDS authority, so it didn’t exactly come as a surprise. Still, the monument wasn’t a temple, it was a library, and specifically a popular tourist attraction at that: the Family History Library, operated by FamilySearch, which is an LDS organization.
Unlike some of the Christian monuments I passed on my skateboard while riding to eat the best Mexican food I’ve ever had in America (the Red Iguana), the Family History Library was visited by a pretty diverse looking group of tourists. To put a finer point on it, most of the other monuments had a lot of white people, but the Family History Library was very clearly bringing in a much more diverse audience, observable from just a 10 minute loiter session outside.
I texted my pal Noah Kulwin later at the airport: I bet when you walk in and give them a name, they just hand you a card that says “Israelite.” That’s not true, of course, because the Family History Library is not some church kook operation. It’s a certified damn genealogical research center — mainstream genetic testing operations have relationships with the LDS, for example, and the LDS has made substantial contributions to genealogical research. This isn’t some creationist museum where Jesus is riding a dinosaur in Baptist country. This is the real goddamned deal; spit in a tube and we’ll tell you if you’re really Irish like you’ve been saying your whole life. Search your name and find irrefutable traces of your ancestry, including dates of death and arrivals via immigration or military services or centuries-old family mythology.
Just like every other non-religious Mormon attraction (and, indeed, much of Salt Lake City in general), there’s nothing overtly conservative or Christian about it, but there’s also a sort of musty Puritanical feel to even the city’s most “modernized” cultural areas. Salt Lake City has evolved such that I saw plenty of open LGBTQ+ comfortably donning Pride clothing without so much as a second glance from old conservatives, but not so much that it seemed as if any of those folks were comfortable expressing a lot of intimacy. Then again, I didn’t see a lot of Utahns of any persuasion doing so. It’s just not that kinda place, probably because the LDS has been cultivating it to be not that kinda place for the better part of 200 years.
That kind of stuff always fucks me up; that religious hegemony that is disguised as cultural hegemony. Suppression and subjugation disguised as popularism. Sure, Utah has never been “that kind of place,” but it’s not as if that occurred naturally. The LDS has a brutal history of suppressing dissent. They may not be as bad as Catholics at scale, but these were not a gentle people when settling the frontier. These were not a gentle people with women or indigenous people, at least not on a uniform or consistent basis.
It’s a kind of carnival trick, really. You say to someone, hey, Utah is pretty conservative and that culture is just really not accepting of modern secularism, and it builds up a perception among outsiders that is only further reinforced by visiting. But none of the monuments mention the people who were brutalized, even though everyone in Utah has at least a passing familiarity of their state’s history. Outsiders see a shining city on a hill with some churches and friendly people. Meanwhile, the residents know who to be afraid of, creating a natural incentive system to fall in line, if only instinctually for pain avoidance.
There’s No Good Bagels in Utah
A kind old woman who told me I looked like “one of those people from Haight-Ashbury” in the 1960s served me a bagel and coffee, and the bagel tasted like lightly toasted grocery store bread. On an unrelated note, the Jewish population in Utah hasn’t grown since the 1850s — about 5,000 Jewish settlers arrived near Salt Lake City in the mid 19th century and today that number still sits around 5,000, even as the rest of the state’s population grew exponentially. I don’t like mentioning ethnic demography because it always comes off as weird (and to be clear, this wasn’t something I knew offhand, which is Grade A nutjob stuff), but it’s relevant because of the LDS’ relationship with Judaism, the Jewish people, and — one of America’s favorite pastimes — Anglo-Israelism. Specifically, like a handful of other Protestant denominations in the United States, the Latter Day Saints movement has (on paper) a deep admiration for the people “of Israel.” They’re God’s chosen people, after all!
But despite that on-paper-friendliness, the number of Jewish people in Utah today is about the same as it was 150 years ago. Perhaps the charms of the Southwest evade American Jewish people, but it seems more likely that the LDS (like many other areas of the neighboring Bible Belt) has not exactly cultivated a “welcoming” atmosphere for American Jews. This is common in American Protestantism and is often part and parcel to the reason so many antisemites wholeheartedly support the state of Israel: it reinforces the racist dichotomy they’ve created, where Jewish people belong somewhere else and America is for White Christians. I’m not breaking new ground here. There’s articles, books, etc. out there if someone wants to dive into all the minutiae. I’m not interested in rehashing well trod territory, particularly when it’s ethnic disputes that I risk stepping on rakes over because I’m an American, and as an American I don’t believe in shit anyway.
Instead, where this intersects with my interests is specifically in the way modern genealogical research at the Family History Library feels like a feedback loop for Mormon Israelism. You see, while a lot of the public attention is focused on stuff like polygamy or the fact that Mormons didn’t let Black people into the church until like a week ago or whenever, LDS doctrine is pretty clear about the descent of all those baptized into the LDS: they’re children of Israel, descended of the angel Jacob.
I know what you’re thinking. “No, they’re not.” And you’re right, because they are not from Israel. They are from Oklahoma, or Utah, or an affluent suburb of Philadelphia, or wherever. They work at Citizens Bank, or Kroger, or some other place. But you’re also wrong because, like many Western Christian lunatics, Mormons have Israel Mindset.
The separation of the material and the divine can be a problem when thinking about things like “allegory” in religious faiths, because there is a beautiful interpretation of Israel that has never (and can never) die: that we are all descended of the children of God’s kingdom — scattered through the winds of manmade atrocity and natural disaster — and that we can unite through our shared struggle. Stuff like the Family History Library in Salt Lake City seems destined to undermine that allegory with dangerous Gnostic literalism. Rationalists can laugh this stuff off with confidence — they’re right! — but that laughter does little to sway the cultist who has been told they are descended of God’s chosen people. It does even less when they’re handed a piece of paper with genealogical science on it that says they are 0.05% Ashkenazi, or Sephardic, etc.
That’s powerful Gnostic ideology disguised as material science. Historically speaking, that kind of thinking has led to some very, very foul shit, specifically the event less than 100 years ago that everyone talks around every goddamn day in America.
Genealogical science is one of those things that seems to once again brush up against Eric Voegelin’s worst nightmares about the Gnostic West: that Science Gospelists are morons with a new vocabulary, applying it ahead of understanding and potentially seeding dangerous ideology disguised as rational insight. When viewed through the allegorical lens, our shared genealogical history should only serve to reinforce the concept of monotheism and negate dualistic interpretations of scripture. We are all indeed descended of the same Flesh, motivated by the same Word, but that Word has been scrambled by the Divine Winds.
God’s Chosen People is everyone, not a magic bullet piece of DNA evidence giving the illusion of “proof” of one tradition’s superiority — ethnic or linguistic or otherwise. Using genealogical links to try and essentialize tribal designations isn’t just rationally weird, it’s dangerous and a disgusting prerequisite to European race science.
That’s not unique to the Mormons. The Jesuits did it in Ethiopia, too. They did it in India and Japan. One of the biggest myths going in America is that Israelism is a uniquely Protestant phenomenon. However, despite the Catholic history of also being uniquely psychotic about the genetic history of Chosen People, the Vatican has distanced itself from the Family History Library and forbidden parishes from sharing church records with the LDS. On paper, this is because the Mormons have a tendency to baptize people after death to convert them. That makes the Catholics mad because even though the LDS thing is all pretend, it’s pretend in a way that undermines their fake thing they stole from the Africans a long time ago, or whatever. When the Vatican and the LDS fight, everybody wins as long as everyone remembers that the rooting interest is total destruction.
Off paper in the real world, they’re fighting for power, like any other institution. Psychic power, though, which is never fully internalized by American political analysts it seems. When they bow their heads to pray, will their third eyes be focused on Europe, or on Utah and the Zion of the Americas? Wherever it’s focused, though, it won’t be on Africa or Asia or the Arab World. The Latin Church Movement already made sure of that.
What Would Jiddu Do
Enough’s been written about Jiddu Krishnamurti that I think people can feel free to do their own reading on him. I don’t believe I would have much to add aside from his own work, or the work of those who were nearest him. I do think about him often, though, particularly as I continue on my own spiritual path. I think about Jiddu Krishnamurti when I think about the human Ras Tafari and Haile Selassie I and the broader concept of Rasselas, the parable about the Abyssinian Prince who left his kingdom to find paradise, only to find he’d left paradise in the first place.
What kind of power does prophecy have? Or the illusion of inevitability?
Jiddu Krishnamurti was tied to the Maitreyan line of spiritualist movements that have manifested at various times throughout the Near East, but his story is Western because he was raised by a Western theological philosophy society; subsequently indoctrinated by its interpretations of Eastern religions and faith systems. The Maitreya is a powerful concept — one that I sometimes think has parallels with the Ras Tafari prophecy — probably because it has little difference between the Christ Messianic prophecy. In my own study of Gnostic traditions and beliefs, I’ve always found those to be the most powerfully resonant parables — the ones that feel like an “uncanny valley” or “Bizarro World” version of something you already know. Like the game of telephone type stuff where there’s an echo of recognizability in it.
The Maitreya is the world teacher, and Maitri at its root is a Vedic concept for ultimate compassion and love; tenderness at its most unconditional. Like the Second Coming prophecy, the Maitreya is meant to return to the world not with Fire and Punishment but with Love and Wisdom. A means to replicate His ways such that the Blind can See. If you live in the West, you get the gist of Messianic Prophecy, so there’s no need to keep expounding. Maitreya is utopia, but specifically a utopia of mutual accommodation and understanding. No forced conversions. No Gods or Masters. Just knowledge to sustain oneself amidst the chaos until the Lord takes us home.
Jiddu Krishnamurti was raised to be the Maitreya but swore it off because it was too much pressure; too far-fetched. Despite that, he spent the rest of his life in spiritual pursuit, writing about his learnings and lecturing around the world to various philosophical and spiritual bodies. And wouldn’t you know it? He came to the same fucking conclusion that the Maitreya always has: there’s no system, language, or society that can manufacture the ethical and moral evolution of the human animal. Each person must arrive at it individually with their own framework, and with the patience, compassion, and kindness imbued to us by the Spirit.
Well, shit. I could’ve told you that much, Jiddu. I was hoping you’d tell me how the hell I’m supposed to manifest God’s Kingdom on Earth when my neighbor is spending his free time staring at the percentages on a genetic test wondering whether he’s the fucking Messiah.
In the late 90s, a schizophrenic Russian man who clearly had deeply held convictions about something entered the Family History Library with a .22 caliber and opened fire. Despite a significant number of Russian and Ukrainian immigrants in Utah, there is minimal Eastern Catholicism in the state, as the Russian Orthodox Church had similar feelings about the LDS as the Vatican until the early 1990s, when Russia officially recognized the LDS after the end of the Cold War. It’s hard to say why he did it — he was certifiably insane, after all — but I’m sure it wasn’t because of any of the genetic messiah prophecies. After all, it’s just for fun, right? Harmless fun.
I always find it’s easiest to zoom out and understand humanity itself as the Chosen People when in nature, surrounded by the systems we have elevated ourselves above (artificially, in some cases). It is easier to understand human nature surrounded by our source; the elements we evolved to overcome and the predator-prey instincts we are determined to suppress. Life can be so beautiful when you are submersed in the Dharma. I don’t understand why so many in America wish to make it into nothing more than petty revenge fantasy.
Thanks for reading. Long live the Kings.
really enjoy your narrative voice. thank you for putting this out into the world