They had evidently not read Stanley Hauerwas. There were perhaps no actual American flags in the visitor’s center—and anyway, this wasn’t a sanctuary—but even so, it’s hard to imagine a more American aesthetic. The brand was boardroom Christianity: well-manicured lawns; well-dressed staff; the whole place conference room clean. “Successful” was mentioned several times, for children, for careers, never in a way that would imply the cross (the martyrs, etc.) as a success. The sculpture of the resurrected Christ was a copy, apparently in plaster, of a nineteenth century Danish marble: that great highpoint of assimilated Christianity, made infamous by Kierkegaard, in its new world simulacrum.
The strangeness here is that the Latter Day Saints have a deep genetic affinity both to the restorationist streak that runs obliquely through Kierkegaard—the church has been lost to the world and must now be restored—and the history of Anabaptist persecution that indirectly pushes someone like Hauerwas to be so critical of Americanist Christianity. Joseph Smith unearthed the golden plates from this hill; he received his revelations in and around these upstate New York farms; this is not the Utah of Mormonism only because they were persecuted out of it, first to the midwest, then to the Salt Lake basin. At Hill Cumorah, they’ll tell you of this persecution with authentic incredulity. They’ll be the most surprised that America could do such a thing.
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