Modern Mormons have lost the plot of their Zion-bound pioneer ancestors. 

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Pioneer Day was never a big deal in my family. That was largely because half my childhood was lived outside of Utah, where we enjoyed being Mormon minorities within regions dominated by other cultural groups. When we returned here, however, many of the blind spots and excesses common to any majority population quickly became apparent.

Consequently, I grew to resent hearing about "the pioneers" from my fellow Utahns, because somewhere deep inside I suspected that their pious panegyrics were really exercises in self-praise through proxy. Not everyone made this impression, mind you, but just enough to leave a sour taste in my teenage mouth.

It wasn't until I got into the history field that I became better acquainted with the pioneers, learning to both understand and respect them. Here were people from numerous nations and tongues—and we acknowledge their many frailties and foibles as well as their impact on the people they displaced—who were nevertheless willing to enter the unknown for a vision, improving their minds and making merry along the way.

Their church was a laboratory to create a "Zion" society, wherein there was to be neither rich nor poor but rather "the pure in heart." Such was the vision for which the Mormon pioneers lived, however haltingly within the larger 19th century American context of racism, class distinctions, violence and everything else.

Within this project, every individual contributed their gifts and talents for the good of the whole, where the idling rich no longer lived off the laboring poor, and where humanity's relationship to nature was no longer one of exploitation, but of concord.

This vision, as you might suppose, had just as hard a time breaking through then as it does now, for the fears and greed to which we are all susceptible howl for complete and total reign. The pioneers had a term for that kind of society, too: "Babylon."

That was a world in which "every man prospered according to his genius, and ... every man conquered according to his strength; and whatsoever a man did was no crime," to quote an Ayn Randian character from The Book of Mormon. Its methods of establishing order and values were by force and violence, its lifeblood principally wealth and possessions—or as the pioneers would have called them, Mammon and idols.

Why this abbreviated survey of the pioneer vision? Because I believe it remains valuable for us today, whether we are Mormon or not. This week, it's worth considering what all the fuss was about to begin with.

It is a constant embarrassment to me that many American Mormons, for all their good qualities, have nevertheless fallen prey to the persuasions of what their ancestors likely would have called Babylon: the idea that their god sanctifies oppression or views life as callously and cheaply as we do. To see self-described Latter-day Saints parroting the rhetoric of alt-right provocateurs, the paranoid rot of the John Birch Society or the circular sophistry of PragerU renders their reverence for their pioneer ancestors rather flat.

Christian Nationalism and fascism are on the rise today, and as disturbing and offensive as these phenomena are to me, I am not convinced that the true force behind them is religion, government, or hopeless human depravity. It is rather simple greed—one which motivates rich donors to engage in generations-long warfare against anything that threatens their possessions and power. Politicians, the resentful and the lonely are all mere tools for this larger "Babylonian" project.

Mormons (and Christians) losing the plot of their beliefs are not the only contributors to this mess, either. I would contend that other factors include the "modern" contempt for all things spiritual, self-isolation through a world lived online, and the general tendency toward dogmatism (religious or secular) that have so characterized the Age of Reason.

Whether packaged as outright hostility or couched in therapeutic terms, the results are the same: a miserable, frightened, angry and floundering populace. Whether cloaked as God's way, self-expression, natural processes, survival of the fittest, taking care of one's own, legalistic license, nihilistic nothingness or just "being realistic," each of us has felt this pull to justify our hatreds and viciousness and call them good.

Such an invisible pull is ancient, of course, but today's state of affairs has been in silent overdrive since at least the Reagan-driven '80s—indeed, we remain the inheritors of that vapid and dishonest time.

And look at what it has wrought: Blind prejudices everywhere, ecosystems destroyed and money upheld as the measure of all things.

"It has been supposed that wealth gives power," summarized Brigham Young in 1862. "In a depraved state of society, in a certain sense it does, if opening a wide field for unrighteous monopolies, by which the poor are robbed and oppressed and the wealthy are more enriched, is power. In a depraved state of society money can buy positions and titles, can cover up a multitude of incapabilities, can open wide the gates of fashionable society to the lowest and most depraved of human beings; it divides society into castes without any reference to goodness, virtue or truth. It is made to pander to the most brutal passions of the human soul; it is made to subvert every wholesome law of God and man, and to trample down every sacred bond that should tie society together in a national, municipal, domestic and every other relationship."

To flee from such things and do better was the vision of those immigrants to what later became the Beehive State. That so few of the pioneers lived up to the vision in their day should tell us something of the difficulty of the human challenge. That some came close to it at all should tell us something of our capacities.

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