Mormonocracy

 from stupidpol:

> In fact there is a theological gulf between Mormonism and Christianity. The point of acknowledging it is not to distinguish heresy from orthodoxy, but to clarify the Mormon role in modern American culture—to explain how the Mormon Ethic came to integrate so smoothly with the twentieth-century Spirit of Capitalism, even more smoothly than the Protestant Ethic had done. To be sure, tensions between Mormon communalism and liberal individualism persisted throughout the nineteenth century, and down to the present the Mormon tradition continues to produce socialists, environmentalists, and pacifists as well as capitalists. But by now capitalists hold a commanding lead, and part of the explanation lies in Mormon theology.

> Beneath the silliness, however, Barnes’s book reveals an important truth about Mormonism’s origins amid the cultural ferment of the young republic. The yearning to enact an endless process of re-inventing the self, on an open prairie of boundless possibility: these grandiose sentiments animated penniless treasure diggers as well as New England intellectuals and Brooklyn poets. In his way Smith was a kindred spirit, as well as a contemporary, of Emerson and Whitman. Their celebration of the self and its potential survives in the success mythology of our own time, diminished by market discipline. Mormons, like other Americans, have had to orchestrate the tensions between private longings and public necessities.

> The dream of Zion was dead, at least in the form that Smith and Young had envisioned it. Now it was time for the organization men to take charge of the church, and it could not have been a more propitious moment. Utah became a state in 1896, the year that William McKinley’s election ushered in the reign of corporate capitalism in America. For the next six years, an unprecedented wave of mergers created the behemoths that would dominate the American economy throughout much of the twentieth century. Mormons, having shed their lascivious reputation, were poised to thrive in the new era, as the self-help ethic was re-shaped to suit the new corporate ethos of managerial expertise and “team play.” In the 1850s, Brigham Young was routinely depicted in the press as a tyrant surrounded by a slavish harem; but by 1930 the Mormon President Heber Grant showed up on the cover of Time, extolled for his business acumen and his church’s prudential morality. The Mormons, it appeared, had at last achieved respectability.

> While the theologians brought God down to Earth, they also raised man up to heaven. Humans shared God’s uncreated, eternal nature and they would one day share his glory through a process of “eternal progression”—“the refinement of the soul’s capacity to participate in divinity through the exercise of Christ-like virtues.” As they did for most Christians, “Christ-like virtues” came to resemble the dominant values of the moment. For Mormons as for their fellow Americans in the early twentieth century, this meant that the key to salvation became the cultivation of a disciplined character, committed to mastering the world through knowledge.

> This theology was ideally suited to the managerial ethos of early twentieth-century America. It was the moment when efficiency and uplift were twinned. Perhaps their most successful union surfaced in the Prohibition movement, which succeeded by 1919 in banning alcohol consumption from sea to shining sea. Managers hailed the prospect of a sober, punctual work force; moralists hailed the triumph of social discipline over sodden chaos. Mormons knew an opportunity to seize legitimacy when they saw one. In 1921, Heber Grant announced that adherence to Joseph Smith’s Word of Wisdom (abstention from alcohol and caffeine) would be required of any Mormon seeking a “temple recommend”—the permission to participate in temple rituals. Up until that time, the Word of Wisdom had been interpreted as non-binding health advice. Grant, like a good managerial progressive, made it a prerequisite for full membership in the church. Ever since, the Mormons’ abstemious habits have reinforced their ethic of disciplined achievement.

> But despite Spencer Kimball, the Udall family, and a handful of others, most Mormons joined in the Republican Kulturkampf that dominated the last third of the twentieth century—spearheaded by an awkward alliance of religious and economic fundamentalists. Indeed, the alliance was probably less awkward for Mormons than for Christians. Mormons embraced economic individualism and hierarchical communalism; they distrusted government interventions in business life but not in moral life; they used their personal morality to underwrite their monetary success. They celebrated endless progress through Promethean striving. They paid little attention to introspection and much to correct behavior. And their fundamental scripture confirmed that America was God’s New Israel and the Mormons His Chosen People. It would be hard to find an outlook more suited to the political culture of the post–Reagan Republican Party.

> Recent poll results confirm the merger of Mormonism and Republicanism. As Lee Trepanier and Lynita Newswander report in LDS in the USA, 65 percent of Mormons identify with or lean toward the Republican Party—15 percent higher than Evangelical Christians and 30 percent higher than the general population. Moreover, they write, “56 percent of Mormons prefer smaller government (compared with 43 percent of the general population), 49 percent of Mormons believe the government should do more for the needy (compared with 62 percent of the general population), and 54 percent of Mormons think the government should do more to protect morality (compared with 40 percent of the general population).” These figures confirm Mormon ties to the Republican Party, but they also reflect a worldview that may not travel overseas too well. The Mormon Moment is characterized by a vigorous missionary movement and a flurry of temple-building in foreign lands, but as Bowman reports, retention rates are low—hovering around 25 percent in Latin America, for example. Part of this stems from the resolute Americanism of the Mormons, their unwillingness to adjust to local customs or tastes. It may be that their faith is peculiarly American in more ways than one.

> The question leads us back to Weber, who viewed the transformation of the Protestant Ethic into the Spirit of Capitalism as part of the larger disenchantment of the world—the great loss of wonder. Modern capitalism, he argued, required that the world be perceived as inert matter, manipulable into commodities by technicians. A God who makes the world by organizing matter does indeed seem the ideal deity for this economic system. The Mormon Ethic merges easily with the Spirit of Capitalism.

> Or at least with a Spirit of Capitalism. What Weber’s argument left out was the huge irrational dimension of economic life under capitalism—the fantasies and fears, the dreams of overnight wealth and magical self-transformation, that pervade the popular imagination even as rational managers seek to maximize productivity and workers slog diligently. Magic and money are twinned, in our time as they were in the time of the treasure digger Joseph Smith. As the form of money grows more evanescent, evaporating from gold coins into numbers on a screen, its mysterious powers multiply—its power to compel fascination and reverence, to replicate itself indefinitely or disappear without a trace. Money remains enchanting. The magicians of money, the investment bankers and hedge fund managers who claim to have harnessed it to their ends, are as spellbound by its aura as the people who sweep their offices. (Maybe more so.) Indeed, it is possible to see the entire structure of capitalist rationality—the acres of statistics, the mountains of research—as a vast effort to contain the chaotic irrationality at the heart of the money economy. That effort has been more successful at some historical moments than at others. Perhaps the high point of the containment project was the Fordist moment of the mid-twentieth century—the era of generalized prosperity through mass production, of lumbering corporate hierarchies and organization men. This was the closest American society has come to the full realization of the Weberian Spirit of Capitalism.

> But what happened when money became detached from materiality, as it did (once again) during the last third of the twentieth century? Could Mormons become detached, too? It is tempting to see the Mormon presence at the Harvard Business School as a symptom of disengagement from material production, since business schools are temples of immaterial capital—sites of enchantment for Mormons and Gentiles alike. They are one of the places where young managers learn to press apparently rational methods into the service of money mania. As Clayton Christensen’s work demonstrates, it doesn’t matter what you make as long as you can sell it. The product is nothing, the method is everything.

> Romney presents himself as the quintessential CEO, the turnaround guy, the expert at re-organizing failed companies. But in fact he is merely another magician of money. He built his career by using the methods he learned at the Harvard Business School to conjure something from nothing—or less than nothing, as he loaded previously solvent companies with debt and stripped them of their assets (including, of course, their labor force). He may use the rhetoric of productivity to reconcile his faith with his economic practice, but the rest of us have reason to fear that we are back in Joseph Smith’s world of confidence men—of smiling scoundrels, earnest frauds, and Nauvoo bogus.