By Rajiv Shah
After watching the Pioneer Day parade, a week later, I walked into a top University of Utah institute in the Salt Lake City, and on the very entrance I found copies of the Salt Lake City Weekly freely available. I picked up one of them. Containing mostly ads, scanning through, I found an article titled Pioneer Day, which interested me.
It is authored by Wes Long, who happens to be from the Mormon community, a Christian sect which owes its allegiance to what they call "Latter Day Saints". A close knit community, Mormons dominate Utah's population, and are said to love to have up to 4-5 children in their family.
The article (available online here) surprisingly says, the Mormon Church originally was a "laboratory to create a Zion society, wherein there was to be neither rich nor poor but rather the pure in heart", underlining, "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."
The word Zion puzzled me, but it's pretty common in Utah. Even a bank is named after Zion. An online search suggested that the word is derived from Jerusalem, where Christianity was born, and has nothing to do with Zionism, the ideology that rules the roost in Israel in its anti-Palestine campaign. In fact Jews make up just 0.2% of Utah's population, or around 6,000 people.
The article continues, "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."
Regretting that this type of society sought to be built by the Mormon pioneers does not exist any more, the article states, today, "greed" is rampant -- "we are all susceptible howl for complete and total reign", it says, adding, "The pioneers had a term for that kind of society, too: Babylon."
After watching the Pioneer Day parade, a week later, I walked into a top University of Utah institute in the Salt Lake City, and on the very entrance I found copies of the Salt Lake City Weekly freely available. I picked up one of them. Containing mostly ads, scanning through, I found an article titled Pioneer Day, which interested me.
It is authored by Wes Long, who happens to be from the Mormon community, a Christian sect which owes its allegiance to what they call "Latter Day Saints". A close knit community, Mormons dominate Utah's population, and are said to love to have up to 4-5 children in their family.
The article (available online here) surprisingly says, the Mormon Church originally was a "laboratory to create a Zion society, wherein there was to be neither rich nor poor but rather the pure in heart", underlining, "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."
The word Zion puzzled me, but it's pretty common in Utah. Even a bank is named after Zion. An online search suggested that the word is derived from Jerusalem, where Christianity was born, and has nothing to do with Zionism, the ideology that rules the roost in Israel in its anti-Palestine campaign. In fact Jews make up just 0.2% of Utah's population, or around 6,000 people.
The article continues, "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."
Regretting that this type of society sought to be built by the Mormon pioneers does not exist any more, the article states, today, "greed" is rampant -- "we are all susceptible howl for complete and total reign", it says, adding, "The pioneers had a term for that kind of society, too: Babylon."
The article, which appeared in the paper's Private Eye column, laments, "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."
It underscores, "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."
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