elected to the plurality of gods

They are both waiting fot their angels to call them. The disordering of the senses and a powerful and arrogant imagination. A belief that what is best and most courageous in him goes back before The Fall. Yes, a medieval yearning for bad blood and the nobility of negation. The return of the pagan spirit wallowing in a hell shot through with glimpses of divinity in preparation for a descent into delirium. Somehow, a redemption through sin, through the self destructive. The fantastical science fiction often attributed to Mormon writers captures the Janus side of erect righteous faith: that of the poet rebel in Rimbaud. Lurking in the shadow of Mitt Romney is there  an Arthur Rimbaud ? …

Harold Bloom:Mr. Romney, earnest and staid, who is deep within the labyrinthine Mormon hierarchy, is directly descended from an early follower of the founding prophet Joseph Smith, whose highly original revelation was as much a departure from historical Christianity as Islam was and is. But then, so in fact are most manifestations of what is now called religion in the United States, including the Southern Baptist Convention, the Assemblies of God Pentecostalists and even our mainline Protestant denominations.

However, should Mr. Romney be elected president, Smith’s dream of a Mormon Kingdom of God in America would not be fulfilled, since the 21st-century Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has little resemblance to its 19th-century precursor. The current head of the Mormon Church, Thomas S. Monson, known to his followers as “prophet, seer and revelator,” is indistinguishable from the secular plutocratic oligarchs who exercise power in our supposed democracy.

The Salt Lake City empire of corporate greed has little enough in common with the visions of Joseph Smith. The oligarchs of Salt Lake City, who sponsor Mr. Romney, betray what ought to have been their own religious heritage. Though I read Christopher Hitchens with pleasure, his characterization of Joseph Smith as “a fraud and conjuror” is inadequate. A superb trickster and protean personality, Smith was a religious genius, uniquely able to craft a story capable of turning a self-invented faith into a people now as numerous as the Jews, in America and abroad. …

Paul Verlaine called Rimbaud an angel in exile, albeit a filthy runty one who would spike a glass of milk with semen as a way of catching the attention of the gods. He resort to all physical, social and moral vulgarities he could think of to refashion himself, from teenage rabble-rousing at  readings to near eternal intoxication. Romney at Bain capital is an equal montrosity, replete with a well stocked inventory of evils equal to Rimbaud’s descent to “l’enfer”, the hedge fund style that helped implode the global economy.

For Rimbaud, the spiritual project is contexted intrinsically in terms of creativity. Here the re-creating of himself is synonymous  to the remaking of poetry, into the confessional and surreal expanding on the Baudelaire idea. Romney is also a study in re-invention, but his spirituality remains a mystery, probably hidden in Rimbaud’s hell, a grab bag no-one wants to open. The problem that Rimbaud faced was not merely to lead the life of a poet as a social gesture and identity,  but to integrate the process of visionary poetry into same process as visionary life. A Personal vision  can be considered poetic vision, and poetic vision becomes a universalized moral vision with  implications for all humanity. Perhaps in this sense, Mormonism is like Marcel Duchamp and dadaism, also a break with the past, a disordering of the senses through rupture and life, his, as a weird conceptual project that mans something and nothing at all simultaneously. A banal, ready-made for the white house…

( Bloom)…Persuasively redefining Christianity has been a pastime through the ages, yet the American difference is brazen. What I call the American Religion, and by that I mean nearly all religions in this country, socially manifests itself as the Emancipation of Selfishness. Our Great Emancipator of Selfishness, President Ronald Reagan, refreshingly evaded the rhetoric of religion, but has been appropriated anyway as the archangel of American spiritualized greed.

Marxist slogans rarely ring true in our clime, where religion is the poetry (bad and good) of the people and not its opiate. Poetry is a defense against dying. The American Religion centers upon the denial of death, literalizing an ancient Christian metaphor.

Obsessed by a freedom we identify with money, we tolerate plutocracy as if it could someday be our own ecstatic solitude. A first principle of the American Religion is that each of us rarely feels free unless he or she is entirely alone, particularly when in the company of the American Jesus. Walking a

alking with him is akin to receiving his love in a personal and individual relationship.

A dark truth of American politics in what is still the era of Reagan and the Bushes is that so many do not vote their own economic interests. Rather than living in reality they yield to what oddly are termed “cultural” considerations: moral and spiritual, or so their leaders urge them to believe. Under the banners of flag, cross, fetus, exclusive marriage between men and women, they march onward to their own deepening impoverishment. Much of the Tea Party fervor merely repeats this gladsome frolic.

AS the author of “The American Religion,” I learned a considerable respect for such original spiritual revelations as 19th-century Mormonism and early 20th-century Southern Baptism, admirably re-founded by the subtle theologian Edgar Young Mullins in his “Axioms of Religion.”

A religion becomes a people, as it has for the Jews and the Mormons, partly out of human tenacity inspired by the promise of the blessing of more life, but also through charismatic leadership. What we now call Judaism was essentially created by Rabbi Akiva ben Joseph to meet the needs of a Jewish people mired under Roman occupation in Palestine and elsewhere in the empire. A great sage, Akiva was also a leader of extraordinary charisma, an old man when martyred by the Emperor Hadrian, presumably for inspiring the insurrection of Bar Kokhba that ended at the siege of Bethar.

Joseph Smith, killed by a mob before he turned 39, is hardly comparable to the magnificent Akiva, except that he invented Mormonism even more single-handedly than Akiva gave us Judaism, or Muhammad, Islam.

… I went wrong because the last two decades have witnessed the deliberate dwindling of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints into just one more Protestant sect. Without the changes, Mitt Romney and Jon M. Huntsman Jr., a fellow Mormon, would not seem plausible candidates.

Our political satirists, with Mr. Romney evidently imminent, delight in describing the apparent weirdness of Mormon cosmology and allied speculations, but they forget the equal strangeness of Christian mythology, now worn familiar by repetition. Jorge Luis Borges shrewdly classified all theology as fantastic literature, and Joseph Smith’s adventures in the spiritual realm are at least refreshingly original, and were even in 19th-century America, when homegrown systems of belief sprouted prodigiously. Smith was not a good writer, except for one or two of his sermons, as reported in transcriptions by his auditors, but his mythmaking faculty was fecund…. they clearly hold on to the notion of a plurality of gods. Indeed, they themselves expect to become gods, following the path of Joseph Smith.

There are other secrets also, not tellable by the Mormon Church to those it calls “Gentiles,” oddly including Jews. That aspects of the religion of a devout president of the United States should be concealed from all but 2 percent of us may be a legitimate question that merits pondering. When I wandered about the South and Southwest from 1989 to 1991, researching American religion, I was heartened by the warmth that greeted me in Pentecostal and Baptist churches, some of them independent indeed. But Gentiles are not allowed in Mormon temples.

… I am moved by the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations but remain skeptical that you can achieve a lessening of money’s influence upon our politics, since money is politics. That dark insight has animated the Mormon hierarchy all through the later 20th and early 21st century. The patriotism of Mormons for some time now has been legendary: they help stock the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the military. Though the powers of the presidency are at this moment somewhat diminished by the Republican House and the atavistic Supreme Court, they remain latent. A Mormon presidency is not quite the same as an ostensibly Catholic or Protestant one, since the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints insists on a religious sanction for its moralistic platitudes.

The 19th-century Mormon theologian Orson Pratt, who was close both to Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, stated a principle the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has never repudiated: “Any people attempting to govern themselves by laws of their own making, and by officers of their own appointment, are in direct rebellion against the kingdom of God.”

Mormons earn godhead though their own efforts, hoping to join the plurality of gods, even as they insist they are not polytheists. No Mormon need fall into the fundamentalist denial of evolution, because the Mormon God is not a creator. Imaginatively liberating as this may be, its political implications are troublesome. The Mormon patriarch, secure in his marriage and large family, is promised by his faith a final ascension to godhead, with a planet all his own separate from the earth and nation where he now dwells….

 

Mr. Perry gently demurred at Mr. Jeffress’s dictum, indicating also that he did not endorse the pastor’s assertion that the Roman Catholic Church was “the Scarlet Harlot,” presumably the Whore of Babylon in the Book of Revelation. Whatever his tactical sleights, the Texas governor displays a continuous religiosity, unlikely to divert secular Republicans clustered in gated exurbia and gracious Eastern suburbs.

…Mormonism’s best inheritance from Joseph Smith was his passion for education, hardly evident in the anti-intellectual and semi-literate Southern Baptist Convention. I wonder though which is more dangerous, a knowledge-hungry religious zealotry or a proudly stupid one? Either way we are condemned to remain a plutocracy and oligarchy. I can be forgiven for dreading a further strengthening of theocracy in that powerful brew. Read More:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/will-this-election-be-the-mormon-breakthrough.html?pagewanted=3&_r=2

ADDENDUM:

So far, Mitt Romney, who praised Skousen as recently as recently as 2007, has evaded most questions by acting as if he was being subjected to some kind of religious test for public office. He’s been supported in this by some soft-centered types who think that any dislike for any “faith group” is ipso facto proof of some sort of prejudice. Sorry, but this will not wash. I don’t think I would want to vote for a Scientologist or a Moonie for high office, or indeed any other kind, and I think attempts to silence criticism of such outfits are the real evidence of prejudice. The waters are muddied, of course, by the fact that the first attack on Romney came from a man who is himself a clerical bigmouth, exploiting religion for political purposes and handing out Rick Perry endorsements. This is the sort of Southern Baptist who believes, in the words of the old ditty:

We are the pure and chosen few
And all the rest are damned
There’s room enough in hell for you
We don’t want heaven crammed.

As I pointed out a few weeks ago, Perry has not just accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior, but has expressed the view that those who do not join him are headed for eternal damnation. He has sought to revise and extend his second set of remarks, but not by much. And he believes in miraculous births from virgins, talking snakes, walking cadavers, and other things that feel distinctly weird and cultish to me. The fact is that what we have here is a clash between two discrepant forms of Christianity, in which the good Pastor Jeffress holds no especially high ground and in which the Latter-day Saints, unless they lie, are among the fastest-growing churches in the United States.

The Mormons apparently believe that Jesus will return in Missouri rather than Armageddon: I wouldn’t care to bet on the likelihood of either. In the meanwhile, though, we are fully entitled to ask Mitt Romney about the forces that influenced his political formation and—since he comes from a dynasty of his church, and spent much of his boyhood and manhood first as a missionary and then as a senior lay official—it is safe to assume that the influence is not small. Unless he is to succeed in his dreary plan to borrow from the playbook of his pain-in-the-ass predecessor Michael Dukakis, and make this an election about “competence not ideology,” he should be asked to defend and explain himself, and his voluntary membership in one of the most egregious groups operating on American soil.Read More:http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2011/10/is_mormonism_a_cult_who_cares_it_s_their_weird_and_sinister_beli.html