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The Mormons: People of an American-Born Faith
| Article
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10689 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1986 |
6,775 Words |
| Author
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Thomas McGowan
Thomas McGowan is an Associate professor of Religious Studies
at Manhattan College in New York City. This article was
originally published in The Coming Kingdom: Essays in American
Millennialism and Eschatology, published by the International
Religious Foundation, New York, 1983. Reprinted by
permission. |
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
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