Herder and the Mormons

By Scott Horton

PBS’s flagship programs, American Experience and Frontline, have just aired a two-part piece entitled “The Mormons.” This program is a remarkable achievement—taking a difficult and highly controversial subject matter and treating it in a manner that will, I feel, seem dignified and fair to all but the most jaundiced observers. The balance struck between historically painful experience, social controversy, and opportunities for reaffirmation of the spiritual is extremely impressive. In American society today, Mormons have emerged as a new elite, wielding impressive political and social clout. For instance, Mitt Romney now figures as the pick of many pundits to gather the Republican presidential nod and he certainly has outstripped his rivals in raising funds for the campaign. And, in the scandal swirling about the U.S. Department of Justice one of the most amazing discoveries I have made is how all paths seem to lead to Salt Lake City—from Orrin Hatch to Kyle Sampson and Brett Tollman, Mormons occupying key roles in the administration of justice figure very powerfully in the story, and their tight-knit relationships make many aspects of it comprehensible.

The Mormon Church’s history is complex and fascinating, and the keynote that the program hits has it just right, I think: theirs is a trek from being outcasts on the periphery of American society, to being accepted and at the core. It is an amazing success story in this regard and it tells us much about the capacity for acceptance through transformation both within the Latter Day Saints Church and in America as a whole.

I have been out to Utah several times and addressed college audiences there. On the surface things look like much of the balance of the American West, but when it comes to question time, I find the LDS-dominated audiences to be far more engaging than the norm. They present a rich study in contrasts. On one hand, they reflect an intensely family-oriented society, bonded to their community. On the other, thanks to the missionary tradition, they have a familiarity with the outside world—and particularly with the developing world—that I rarely come across in America beyond the coasts. They reflect a global sensitivity and engagement. This is what most appeals to me about the Mormons, and it comes across well in the PBS programs.

On the flip side, Mormons have a difficult legacy of being unadjusted outsiders. This is an understandable reaction to rejection and acts of violence and discrimination to which early Mormons were subjected. From its roots in Upstate New York, the Mormon church established itself in Deseret with the pretentions of a church-state. It also went through significant transformations—rejecting polygamy in order to make its peace with the United States, and then in the seventies coming to a more enlightened view of racial politics. The film came to a sharp focus on the Mormon Church’s difficult relations with women, intellectuals, and homosexuals in its last hour. I couldn’t avoid thinking throughout this broadcast how similar in many respects this tension was to that found within other faiths—for instance Roman Catholicism and Islam.

And it also brought me back to faded memories of the writings of the Lutheran theologian and philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. In his Ideas Towards a Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784), Herder tracked the evolution of Christianity from its Judaic origins from an anthropological-philosophical perspective. He posited that religion involved revealed truths, and that in each human age exactly so much of the truth was revealed as was necessary for the further advancement and development of the human species. This work played a key role in the development of the German Enlightenment, inspiring Lessing, Kant and Moses Mendelssohn among others. But Herder the cleric was keenly aware of the threat this clinically scientific approach presented to the essential mystery of faith. He managed an amazing feat of simultaneous confidence in faith and science. Herder was of course long dead before the founding of the LDS Church, but I have no doubt that he would find in this church and its history a fascinating validation of his theories. In any event, I do.