Theocratic Blues: Life During Wartime

 

Unlike many of you out there in InternetLand I  lived in a theocracy in the United States, yes the United States the country that supposedly has and has had a separation of religion and state, church and state. How did I manage that? Well once upon a time I once lived in a place where religion, in this instance the Christian religion, and politics, in this instance conservative and right wing populist politics, were intertwined.

When I say I lived in a theocracy I don’t mean that I lived in Saudi Arabia where Sunni Islam is intertwined with the monarchical Saudi state. Nor do I mean that I lived in Iran where Shia Islam is intertwined with the Iranian state. Nor do I mean that I lived in Russia where once again the Orthodox Church and the Russia state commingle. I mean that I lived in Mormon Utah.

When I lived in Utah between 1991 to 1993 some 72% plus of the state was Mormon. The legislature of the state of Utah was dominated by Latter-day Saints. Some 90% of Utah legislators were Mormon. While the Mormon population of Utah has declined since 1993, in 2021 it was around 60%, the number of Latter-day Saints in the state legislature has remained about the same, around 86% in 2021. The Mormon theocracy that dominated the Utah of the early 1990s, in other words, remains intact.

Many will tell you that when I lived in Utah Zion was not a theocracy. That would be, they point out and despite many who believe the contrary, unconstitutional. It would be a violation of the US Constitution, the founding document of the American state. And while I agree that Utah was not a Mormon theocracy officially, it was one in practise. In this it parallels nineteenth century America, an era when the United States was unofficially (and illegally) a theocracy.

I say that Mormon Utah was a theocracy for a number of reasons. I had, to backtrack a bit, moved to Provo, Utah to do research on Mormons (Provo is to Mormondom what the South is to the US religiously, it is, thanks to Brigham Young University,  the LDS Church run university, the buckle of the Mormon Bible Belt).  When I lived in Provo the city was around 95% LDS. BYU was around 97% LDS. BYU had rules that everyone, student, faculty, and staff alike, had to abide by. Men could not have hair below their ears or their necks. Beards were forbidden for males. Women could not have dresses or skirts that rose more than one inch above their knees. Alcohol was forbidden. Caffeinated beverages, whether coffee, tea, or soda pop, were verboten. Smoking was prohibited. Unmarried men or women could not live together in "sin" on campus or off.

Of course, one might wonder whether these rules were followed. After all couldn’t I get 3:2 beer at local grocery stores in Provo if I wanted? Couldn’t one go to Provo’s one pub? Couldn’t one get coffee and tea at one of the few local coffee houses? The answer, of course, is yes. I would point out, however, that according to information I heard though the samizdat mill the police force of Provo and the BYU Police, which could operate state wide, kept an eye out for BYU students who violated the “honour code”. The Provo cops supposedly even kept an eye out for students coming out of the lone pub. 

I would also note anecdotally (ethnographically) that when I was on campus everyone I saw was following the dress and grooming standards the Church commanded. I did run into “Jack Mormons”, those who were only nominally LDS, in Salt Lake City. I saw "Jack Mormons" who smoked. I saw some Jack Mormon males with long hair. I saw all this during one of my monthly visits there to bookstores (Sam Weller’s Zion’s Bookstore, in particular) and to Squatters, where one could get a beer for a reasonable price since they brewed their own (I sometimes, I have to admit, went to Temple Square after getting a beer buzz at Squatters and listened to the sister missionaries there; Gentle entertainment in Utah). I could do all this because Salt Lake City was only barely dominated by Mormons at the time and thus was, despite the presence of the Church bureaucracy there, a less theocratic place (less not absent) than Provo or the rural towns in the state where nearly everyone was LDS and nearly everyone practised what the Church preached (the plan of salvation or eternal progression, the ideology around which all Mormon practise flows).

I would describe the unofficial Mormon theocracy as a kindler and gentler version of a theocratic state. No one was burned at the stake when I was in Zion, No one was tortured on the rack. No one was killed for their beliefs of lack of beliefs. Mormondom, in other words, was different in these regards from Christian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant theocracies in Europe during the so-called Middle Ages (ironically Christians had been killed for their beliefs in the Roman Empire but then the group persecuted often replicates what happened to it in kind) and beyond. On the other hand, there were some of the feminist variety who taught at BYU who were fired. There were people, including Mormon historians, who were excommunicated from the Church. And there were individuals, Mormon historians, for instance, whose scholarly work and published presentations drew the ire of true believers who threatened them with bodily harm and even death via email and the telephone. Again, kindler and gentler theocracy.

I have been thinking about my life in theocratic Utah because the United States, thanks to right wing populist "Christian" nationalists who worship at the altar of the American state rather than the Christian god ignoring, in the process, almost every aspect of Jesus’ supposed Sermon on the Mount (so-called in one of its two versions), not to mention the prohibition against having gods other than YHWH, are on the verge of turning the United States again into a theocracy, though this time an official theocracy. One can reasonably argue that they have already established theocracies in certain US states. And that is scary given the history of religious intolerance.

It is scary because these theocrats are people convinced of their own absolute rightness. They, they believe, after all have god on their side. They are people who, because of this, are inherently intolerant and inherently fascist (fascism goes back to authoritarian monarchs who claimed that they were god or the representative of god; theocracy). They cannot be reasoned with because of this holier than thou attitude. Backed by Big Money, particularly from big oil sources, they are taking over school boards and cleansing school libraries of books which they regard as pornographic (meaning books characterised by sympathy toward gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, and other "outcasts") and which don't fit with their narrow and narrow minded ideology, and they are actively working for the firings of those who speak out against those they regard as saints (according to Reuters and the Guardian over 600 people were fired for freely speaking their piece about the theocratic and intolerant Charlie Kirk, for example). They are running for local offices, state offices, and federal offices. And they have an ally in that multi-divorced, bully, misogynist, arrogant, narcissist, and mentally ill bloke named Donald Trump. Their theocracy, I suspect, won’t be as kind and gentle as that of the Mormon Utah in which I lived. I only hope I can get out before the stone age horror begins yet again.

Is yet another Civil War in the American future? Should states like New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, New Jersey form a union of their own? Should California, Oregon, and Washington do the same? Should all of these explore union with Canada, a nation, like any nation, with flaws but nowhere  near the flaws of the theocratising United States)? Should Margaret Atwood be considered a secular prophet? Time, as always, will tell.