I’ve been re-reading Jon Krakauer’s “Under the Banner of Heaven” lately. This isn’t a novel observation, but I see in the Mormons a pattern I guess is present in a lot of successful religions:
1. Prophet receives revelation and gathers followers.
2. Followers are persecuted.
3. Persecution tightly binds followers into a cohesive unit.
4. Followers escape persecution and gain temporal power.
5. Despite temporal power, followers continue to nurse feelings of persecution.
The Mormons were hounded out of every place they landed. (Not entirely without reason, it seems. Joseph Smith was not, apparently, a noble and lovable figure when it came to non-believers.) But, when Smith was killed and Brigham Young led them out to Utah, they gained temporal power but continued to nurse the traditions of persecution.
Christians were persecuted by the Romans, but eventually, they took over the Empire and Western Europe and, yet, you can go to Worldnet Daily, probably right this minute, and find some story about how unfairly Christians are treated these days.
Jews were persecuted, escaped, gained temporal power, lost it, and were persecuted again – quite a bit. I’m not sure where to put them today on the temporal power/persecution continuum.
I don’t, honestly, know enough about Islam to put fit it in this pattern with any precision. I know that Muhammad was chased out of Mecca, went to Medina for awhile, then came back to Mecca where Islam exploded out of the Arabian peninsula. I imagine Muhammad’s time of exile figures prominently in the Islamic tradition and, regardless of the ebb and flow of temporal power, sees their religion as being under attack from non-believers.
I think that persecution, real or imagined, is useful in creating a barrier between the particular religious community and the Other. It creates feelings of solidarity with one another and a feeling of distinction from non-believers.
The Jews have decent temporal power, Israel? They have significant influence in US politics and I’m not sure about European.
Muslims have decent temporal power but I’m not sure how much they consider themselves persecuted. I guess ask folks in Yemen and Pakistan with regards to drones. Iran might have something to say about a persecution complex as well.
My contention is that the strength with which traditions of persecution are cherished do not ebb and flow based on the reality of persecution or lack thereof.
You can tweak the perspective to get insecurity no matter what the facts are on the ground. The most powerful nation on earth is still confined to a rock in the suffocating cold of the endless void that’s just one random meteor strike from obliteration.
Or, go to persecution.com, and find treatment that goes far beyond “unfair”. I also forward this site to other Christians when they complain that we’re being persecuted in this country. Christian persecution still happens, but not in this country.
“Persecution” is a pretty broad term. There’s a rather broad difference between claiming (with an extremely high degree of validity) that the Holocaust took its physically horrible toll, and that in various locations in the Middle East Christians live with the threat of physical violence. At a somehwat lesser level, perhaps, the interplay between minority Catholics and Majority Protestants in Northern Ireland comes to mind. And then there’s the hue and cry in this country that laws mandating contraceptive coverage in employer paid health coverage constitute signs of religious persecution against Christians, particularly Cathoics. It’s stretches the ordinary meaning of the term to include that broad of a range.
It’s said that in Nauvoo IL, opposition to the Mormons largely derived from their tendency to “dominate community, economic, and political life wherever they resided”.
Groups, political, cultural, religious, often define themselves by their opposition, their otherness from a status quo.
But if you acknowledge that large religous movements are spiritual in rhetoric and ritual, but political in their operation, there should almost always be an element of “persecution” in their world view. It creates and maintains their oppositional identity.
The Bahai suffered and continues to suffer oppression by the dominant muslim community in Iran. Jews suffered serial persecution during the diaspora. Sikhs have far-right christian mayors trash their literature in the garden spot of Garrett, Indiana.
Imagine the Angel Moronica delivering, in a dazzling display descending from heaven, Platinum and Titanium tablets to downtown Salt Lake City. Then imagine the Angel Moronica sharing the tablets with church leaders and advising them that Joseph Smith was a con, a fraud, and a serial liar that made up the Book of Morman and the fanciful claims therein. And the Angel is back to clear up the record.
Or Beavis goes to the love-in in the episode Holy Cornholio instead of sending Stewart. http://www.mtv.com/videos/beavis-and-butt-head-season-9-ep-4-holy-cornholio/1674146/playlist.jhtml
And the Great Cornholio declares that the prophet Muhammad was really a Jewish con man named Myron Turtlebaum and Cornholio is taking things back.