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The Mormons: People of an American-Born Faith
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10689 |
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CULTURE
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1 / 1986 |
6,775 Words |
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Thomas McGowan
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Perhaps the most obvious characteristic of the American dream is the effort to create and build the perfect world. The long line of American chiliastic seekers, which stretchers from the Puritan theocrats to contemporary visionaries, gives evidence to this hope and to the religious significance attributed to it. Utopian communitarians have almost always claimed to be forming some kind of "kingdom of God," city on a hill," or "new Zion".
According to their own self-understanding, Americans have been gifted with the freedom and the call to produce the perfect society. Freed from the space confinement of Europe they reconstructed the land in a relatively short period of time. Freed from the time confinement of tradition they were open to new ways of improving human life.
In the national consciousness, however, this creative thrust was as much a theological conclusion as a geographical category. Creation, the fundemental theological category, is God's work and is therefore necessarily good. Theologically, this theme of creation subsumes the theme of redemption. For example, God redeemed the slaves in Egypt by making them into a new people. Similarly, God redeemed the American continent in conjunction with his covenanted people by forming a new Eden and a new Israel.
This American self-interpretation has always involved a sense of being sent to fashion again and again new utopias from the blueprints of national myths. American utopian communities formed around these myths have usually had at least one thing in common: the determination within the religious tradition of the Puritan founders to build the kingdom of God here on earth. This kind of undertaking would seem like nothing less than blasphemous arrogance except for the belief that is the age of the Spirit and the kingdom is indeed possible.
R.W.B. Lewis in his important book The American Adam has identified one primary national myth which gives identity and focus to the American aspirations. He calls it "Adamic" because the American prototype, like Adam, is seen to be a figure of heroic innocence and vast potentialities poised at the start of a new history. A legendary character like Paul Bunyan immediately comes to mind, as well as Natty Bumppo, hero of James Fenimore Cooper's "Leatherstocking" novels.
These Adamic types stood alone in a virgin country which was as yet unpolluted by the sins of an effete Europe. The American myth saw life and history as beginning anew. It described the world as starting up again in a divinely granted second chance for the human race after the first chance had been disastrously mishandled. America, instead of being the result of a long historical process, was in fact something entirely new on the world's scene.
Lewis describes the hero of this new adventure as "an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefined by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources." He was easily identifiable with Adam, since Adam before the fall was also one whose moral position was prior to experience and who was therefore fundamentally innocent. As Lewis observes, "The world and history lay all before
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