Understanding the Driving Force of a Movement

For a traveler of the interior West, few books are more natural to choose than Wallace Stegner's "Mormon Country." Nevertheless I had never read it until recently, after a friend put it into my hands. Stegner did an admirable job of being unprejudiced about Mormonism per se. Clearly, he was more interested in the human story of the Mormons than theological doctrines, and rightly so, considering the drama of the Mormon story.

Somewhere in the book, Stegner said (more or less), "After the faith had subsided a bit, the driving force was still there." But then he didn't say what that driving force was! That is really the question that interests me. Although the non-Mormon reader today may have no interest in Mormon theology, it was important to the Mormons of the time. Their great efforts were predicated on a theology that convinced them...but of what?

Stegner can be forgiven for not really explaining what the Driving Force was. It is difficult to look back into time and guess people's psychology merely from external actions or their beliefs-on-paper.

Cause and effect become confused here. Was there something unique in the theology that created the Driving Force, or was the theology merely the rationale for real forces that lay underneath?

One clue comes from looking at the geography of their birthplace: western New York state, a land of displaced New Englanders. Harvard didn't believe in God anymore. The thin soup of Deism and Unitarianism didn't meet people's emotional needs, which is really what religion is all about. But perhaps the Puritan DNA was looking to erupt in some new direction, and Mormonism was one of those outlets. (Abolitionism and Prohibitionism were others.)

Mormon culture took on characteristics redolent of the early Puritan settlers of New England, who had suffered persecution in the old country, and had crossed the Atlantic Ocean in an era when that was no small accomplishment. The Puritans had carved their New Jerusalem out of a wilderness; and had established a theocracy and a culture of hard work, cleanliness, and order.

But let's put aside the Puritan-American perspective in looking at the Mormons, and look for something more universal. Consider the psychology of the early days of the French Revolution or the Bolshevik takeover of the Romanov dynasty in Russia. It might seem paradoxical to compare religious eruptions to overtly atheistic revolutions. But the two extremes share more than they think: they are intoxicated by the notion that 'all things are now possible', and that the old world of vice and suffering are to be left behind. They all visualize a New Jerusalem, a shining city on the hill, and a heaven on earth.

Normally most people have more common sense than that. What would intoxicate them with the idea of Utopia becoming real? They needed to feel strong and confident because of some all-powerful outside force: Liberté! Egalité! et Fraternité! in the French Revolution, 'History' and Dialectical Materialism with the Bolsheviks. 

Here again, the Mormons had an advantage over other Protestant cults during the Second Great Awakening. The rest of them were too mainstream. Pioneering in the American West was a popular and prevalent idea for many impoverished Americans of that era. But Mormon theology was way out of the mainstream: it was a New Dispensation, a new vision, and not just a tweeking of the Protestant revolution of northern Europe in the 1500s. 

Make an analogy with the stock market: the New Dispensation of Joseph Smith was like a new semiconductor transistor stock in the 1960s, or Amazon in 1999.  Mormon competitors were like today's Intel or Hewlett-Packard announcing a new product line.