How Will America End?
The Catholic Church helped preserve Roman civilization. Can Mormonism do the same for America?
by Slate author Josh Levin: updated on Friday August 7, 2009
When America disappears 100 or 500 or 1,000 years from now, it will be gone but not forgotten. As the world’s leading military, economic, and cultural power since World War II, the United States will linger in the global gene pool and influence whatever comes next. But how exactly will Americanness get transmitted to the civilizations that replace us?
For America’s intangible qualities to get preserved—our shared history, our ideals, our passions—someone needs to do the preserving. Edward Gibbon argued that the introduction of Christianity doomed Rome: “[T]he last remains of the military spirit were buried in the cloister.” There’s a stronger case to be made that the Christians kept Rome from being erased from our collective memory—that the Catholic Church was the one entity that maintained Roman hierarchies, Roman thought, and the Latin language as the rest of the continent descended into illiteracy.
are we Rome?
A religion is also a good candidate to keep America alive. The history of Catholicism shows that religious movements can outlast the political systems in which they arose. Our idealized conception of what America stands for has its origins in religious belief as well: the Puritans’ values of industry and self-reliance, and their desire for the nation to be a “city upon a hill.” A candidate to serve as America’s time capsule: the Mormons. In an aside in 2007′s Are We Rome?, Cullen Murphy posits that Salt Lake City could become “the Vatican of the third millennium,” with the Mormon Church “propagating a particular, canonical version of America.” Orson Scott Card, the Mormon science-fiction writer, lays out a similar premise in the 1989 short-story collection The Folk of the Fringe. In “West,” a group of Mormons sets out for Utah after a societal collapse brought on by nuclear war, biological warfare, and climate change. Despite finding that Temple Square is about to be submerged by rising waters, the travelers manage to keep the world alive by sticking together even as “places without Mormons were dying or dead.”
Why does Card think the Mormons will live through a disaster? He explains via e-mail that Mormon culture “has strengths and weaknesses, but it has almost all the attributes of a civilizational winner. … We have organizational practices and ideological elements that make it highly likely that wherever we are, we will outlast the collapse of governments and civilizations.” Asfar as organizational practices go, a 2007 church pamphlet recommends that families put together “a [three-month] supply of food that is part of your normal, daily diet” as well as stores of wheat, white rice, and beans for “longer-term needs.”* (Seventy-two-hour preparedness kits will suffice in a pinch.) The church, practicing what it preaches, owns a silo in Salt Lake City filled with 19 million pounds of wheat. The Mormons’ ideological preparations for the end of America include the widely held belief that the United States will not endure—and that when the Constitution “hangs by a thread,” Mormons will be there to save it.
Mormonism is an American religion
It was birthed in this country, and the church’s missionary work has made the religion one of the most-recognizable American institutions around the world. If the U.S. government dissolves or the continent gets submerged by rising seas, the Mormons have more reason than most to stick around. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints holds that the framers of the Constitution were divinely inspired, that American Indians are partly descended from an ancient Israelite tribe called the Lamanites, and that upon his return, Jesus Christ will rule both in the old Jerusalem and on American soil.
In Mormonism and the American Experience, Klaus J. Hansen refers to the church’s vision of the continent as a holy land as America’s “religious declaration of independence” Like the early Christians—a group the Mormons consider their direct ancestors—the early Mormons prepared for the end of the world as if it were coming next week, and coming to their backyard. In 1831, one year after the first publication of the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith received a revelation that the end times were nigh and that the New Jerusalem should be built in Missouri. Church newspapers soon began recording “signs of the times”: earthquakes, epidemics, and steamboat explosions. The belief that the Messiah was coming, says LDS scholar Michael Austin, generated lots of enthusiasm from early believers. It also led the Mormons to do “a lot of incredibly stupid things.” Austin says that Joseph Smith’s conviction that the millennium was afoot may have contributed to the 1837 failure of the Kirtland Safety Society, an Ohio bank started by Smith that issued notes in a manner that bore no relation to the capital on hand.
The apocalypse didn’t arrive in the 1830s or any other time, but Mormons have never stopped preparing for it. According to Austin, “pretty much every generation of Mormons has perceived itself as the last generation before the end times.”
Mormon America: the power and the promise
Zoom forward to today, and the Mormons have transformed, incredibly, from vagabonds to the epitome of old-fashioned American values. Seen as honest and incorruptible, Mormons are recruited in great numbers by the FBI. Dubbed by Harold Bloom “perhaps the most workaddicted culture in religious history,” they have proved spectacularly successful in both secular and Church business. (1999′s Mormon America: The Power and the Promise pegged the church’s assets at $25 billion to $30 billion.) They venerate the traditional family unit,rarely divorce, and live as much as a decade longer than the average American. They are just like us, only they’re always on their best behavior.
By the middle of the 20th century, the Mormons had become more “American” than any other Americans. In a 2008 New York Times Magazine feature, Noah Feldman suggested that prejudice against the idea of a Mormon president might push the LDS Church to move “even further in the direction of mainstream Christianity.” That theory, though, doesn’t reflect the everlasting pull of pioneer-era Mormonism. In The Angel and the Beehive, Armand L. Mauss argues that assimilation brought about a “new predicament of respectability … rather than the old one of disrepute.” Starting around 1960, the Mormon leadership renewed its emphasis on genealogy and the missionary program in an attempt to maintain Mormons’ “identity as a special people.”
If the Mormon Church does someday become a proxy for the United States, what parts of American civilization will survive? “Things that used to be American—motherhood and apple pie—would be restored to primacy,” Orson Scott Card says. Perhaps the wholesome Osmond family will come to represent the pinnacle of American entertainment, and Stephen Covey—the Mormon writer behind The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People—will be hailed as our society’s leading philosopher. Long sideburns will forever recede from memory. More seriously, a Mormon society would continue to speak English, to spread the gospel of capitalism, and to put forward the idea that America was and is a sacred place, a nation worth remembering and preserving.
