Last Saturday was Pioneer Day and I released an article exploring the reality of what actually happened to the Saints as opposed to the myth of how we talk about the Saints of that era today. They were not American pioneers – nearly half of them were not even American. They were not vigorously going to settle the American West in order to spread American culture and society. They were not pioneers. They were refugees, the victims of genocidal hatred fleeing ethnic cleansing and extermination efforts illegally immigrating into northern Mexico in order to escape the barbaric violence they were subjected to in the United States. They didn’t want to leave, they simply had no choice. It was that or have their homes destroyed, their men shot, their women raped, and their children starved to death.
After publishing that article on Saturday I went to church on Sunday and sure enough the “pioneers” were the topic de jure. I was struck though by the hymns we sang. While the opening and closing hymns were both about the “pioneers” they both have very different tones. You can see the cultural, social, and historical shift in the way the church was both seen by American society and how it saw itself in that society and its history.
Voices of the Era
The first hymn we sang, O’ Ye Mountains High, was written by Charles W. Penrose in 1854 and was originally known simply as Zion. Penrose, who would eventually become an Apostle and serve in the First Presidency, wrote the hymn combining his knowledge of the persecution the Saints faced and were still facing with his own longing to join the main body of the Saints in the Salt Lake Valley. The hymn therefore expresses well the feeling of the Saints about what had happened to them and their responses to such treatment. Though spoken of as the Mormon La Marseillaise (the revolutionary national anthem of France) at the time for its fervor and popularity in the church at that time, O’ Ye Mountains High has been toned down quite a bit in the current hymnal. Even so, some of its original fire still shines through. Here are the second and fourth verses as they stand in the hymnal today:
[2]
Tho the great and the wise all thy beauties despise,
To the humble and pure thou art dear;
Tho the haughty may smile and the wicked revile,
Yet we love thy glad tidings to hear.
O Zion! dear Zion! home of the free,
Tho thou wert forced to fly to thy chambers on high,
Yet we’ll share joy and sorrow with thee.[4]
Here our voices we’ll raise, and we’ll sing to thy praise,
Sacred home of the prophets of God.
Thy deliv’rance is nigh; thy oppressors shall die;
And thy land shall be freedom’s abode.
O Zion! dear Zion! land of the free,
In thy temples we’ll bend; all thy rights we’ll defend;
And our home shall be ever with thee.
Notice first of all that there is no talk of crossing the plains to build the American nation or blazing trails to push back the wilderness frontier here. This hymn clearly tells the truth about what had happened to the Saints. They were driven out of the US by forced and compelled to flee for safety into the mountains of the west. These people understood themselves as people under constant threat of destruction by a large, perverse, and wicked foe – the United States. And their response to this violence was defiance. They wished death upon their oppressors. And why wouldn’t they? How do you think the victims of any ethnic cleansing feel about those trying to exterminate them?
They weren’t American pioneers pushing forth American civilization. They recognized that Americans and the American state were their brutal victimizers who had attempted to murder them all. If you look at the rhyming sequence of verse four you’ll notice it doesn’t follow the rhyming sequence of verse 2 (or any of the others for that matter.) That is because the line that ends with “freedom’s abode” actually read much differently promising, “And the Gentiles shall bow ‘neath thy rod.” In other words, the Saints hoped to not only defend themselves against their American attackers, the Saints hoped to triumph and spread the authority of the church and of Zion over the United States. (pgs. 19-21)
This viewpoint isn’t unique to Penrose either. We can see these in many other poems of the era as well. Take for example A Song for the Elders by Philip Margetts. He was another British convert who was baptized in 1841 and migrated to the Salt Lake Valley in 1850. As such he is another writer giving an authentic voice to the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of the Saints. Below are select verses from his song:
[2]
Then let us be united
Throughout the valley’s length,
And we’ll subdue our enemies,
For unity is our strength.[4]
We know that mobs have drove us,
But BRIGHAM has declared,
If our religion we will live,
We never need be scared.[5]
Then lets us study wisdom,
Capitalization of BRIGHAM in the original
That we can always say
We’re not remiss in duty,
We watch as well as pray;
That we all may be ready
As minute men on hand
To roll the Mormon wheel and drive
Corruption from the land.
Notice here again we have the same beats hit in O’ Ye Mountains High. The Saints in the Salt Lake Valley are not there because they chose to migrate there. They aren’t there because they are the pioneer vanguard of the American state as it expanded westward. The Saints are in the Salt Lake Valley because they have been viciously driven there by brute force. And their main goal in the western lands is not to Americanize the Natives or expand America’s political and cultural hegemony over the continent. The Saints are working and preparing so that at any moment they, like the Minutemen of the Revolutionary War, will be ready at a minute’s notice to ride out to meet and defeat any threat from the government. The Saints will drive corruption from America and subdue the enemy who has driven them to the valley, which means Margetts is talking about subduing the American state. I do not think that this allusion to necessarily be a violent one. Zeal to preach the Gospel and convert those without the (Restored) Gospel is often expressed in militaristic imagery, but it is without a doubt that there were those who were literally prepared to fight off the United States government and anyone else who tried to violently persecute the Saints again.
Voices of Their Grandchildren
Compare the fervent and defiant feelings expressed in these hymns of the “Pioneer Era” with the saccharine hymn we sang to close our meeting last Sunday, They The Builders of the Nation. Just read these opening verses:
[1]
They, the builders of the nation,
Blazing trails along the way;
Stepping-stones for generations
Were their deeds of ev’ry day.
Building new and firm foundations,
Pushing on the wild frontier,
Forging onward, ever onward,
Blessed, honored Pioneer![2]
Service ever was their watchcry;
Love became their guiding star;
Courage, their unfailing beacon,
Radiating near and far.
Ev’ry day some burden lifted,
Ev’ry day some heart to cheer,
Ev’ry day some hope the brighter,
Blessed, honored Pioneer!
Where is the sorrow? Where is the pain? Where is the anger? Where is the truth telling and honest experience? Where is the defiance of Earth and Hell? What happened to to the promises to subdue their enemies, drive out the world’s corruption, and the declaration of triumph over their oppressors? How did we go from such powerful truth telling about the real experience of the refugees, illegal immigrants, and religious rebels who were rejected by America and violently ejected from its borders to this insipid, sentimental propaganda about the Saints building the American nation as its pioneers?
In contrast to both Penrose and Margetts, the authoress of They The Builders of the Nation, one Ida Romney Alldredge, was born in 1891, not just long after the end of the Pioneer Era but after the Saints had stopped practicing polygamy and Utah had become a state. Alldredge, grew up during the years in which Latter-day Saints, having finally found some place in American society were seeking to accommodate themselves to it and prove that they were as “American” as anyone else from any other state. Now that they were no longer hounded by the mobs and the government, now that they had found a modicum of respectability and were no longer outsiders, their identity and history had to be revised. No longer could they identify with the poetry and songs of their ancestors – renegades, rebels, and rogues that they were. Instead the Saints wanted legitimacy and one of the ways they sought it was by turning their history as refugees into one of pioneers because being refugees and illegal immigrants weren’t part of the American story, but the story of the intrepid pilgrim pioneer was foundational to the American mythology.
The Fallout
Latter-day Saints essentially sold themselves on a lie and now that error is so entrenched in our culture that it may be impossible to excise, which is really bad.
Why?
There are numerous reasons. The two which most concern me center on nationalism and politics.
This false tradition does to us what the false traditions of their fathers did to the Lamanites. Their poor understanding of their own history led them into error and poisoned their whole society with hatred and violence. The mythology that the early Saints were American pioneers absolves the United States of one its greatest religious crimes by essentially erasing decades of pogroms, ethnic cleansings, murder, massacres, and attempts at genocide which culminated in to total ejection of the Saints from the nation entirely. The Pioneer Myth recasts our true history and warps it into the story of the Saints as American pioneers voluntarily leaving the comforts and ease of civilization in order to expand America’s culture into the western wilderness, thereby forging an American identity for Mormonism.
It takes the modern American nationalism common among the Saints in the United States and casts it back into the past, thereby legitimizing the nationalism of today and all the venial prejudices and gross bigotries that comes with it. At its worse it can becomes a justification for American warmongering throughout the world. After all, the pioneers were Americans who fought the Native Americans in order to establish American society in what had been foreign territory by colonizing it for the glory of the nation and if it is alright to do it then it must be okay to do it now in Iraq.
Because the Pioneer Myth enforces American nationalism it also enforces American politics, even at their most brutal. By erasing the identity of who our spiritual and/or literal ancestors were as refugees, illegal immigrants, and victims of genocidal ethnic cleansing the Pioneer Myth diminishes our own ability to hear the voice of and empathize with the people who are suffering those problems today. As I said in my previous article when discussing the Utah Compact and refugees in Utah, the Saints are better educated than many other Americans on these issues, especially than conservatives and Republicans. But too many of us still end up supporting political programs that cause inestimable suffering and politicians who profit from beating, hurting, and killing others all in the name of some nationalistic and ephemeral goal such as “protecting America.” Whether that be the way the War on Terror has destroyed the lives of millions or the way that the lockdowns destroyed the lives of millions – in other words whether it be government action carried out by Republicans or Democrats – the partisanship is irrelevant and the outcome is all the same. It is all suffering and death built on a foundation of nationalistic propaganda and myth. The version of that myth adapted for Latter-day Saints is the myth of the pioneer.
False Traditions and Truth Telling
If we knew who our ancestors really were we might empathize even more with those suffering the same plight today and therefore be more willing to question and act against the same barbaric organization, the American state, as it does the same thing to people today as it did to our spiritual and literal ancestors in the past. This is why true history matters so much and is so important. It provides the framework through which we recognize ourselves, define ourselves, organize ourselves, and act upon the world. If that framework is full of propaganda and lies then we will be led down dark paths to justifying and doing terrible things and causing a lot of suffering and pain in the world. If that framework is based upon our real history then the identity we form based upon it will be radically different.
If we knew our true history and understood it as the result of what happens when the government has too much power over society such that it can crush minorities beneath its orders, we would not be so submissive to the state when it abuses our rights and the rights of others. Instead we would adopt the radical and revolutionary fervor of our ancestors and be willing to stand up to the base wickedness of the governments so many of us live under, reject their militarism and oppression, and stand with those who have been the target of state oppression and suppression.
This is why these stories are so important to tell. The lies turn us into oppressors and collaborators with the very same violent governments that oppressed and brutalized our lineal and spiritual ancestors. The truth encourages us to liberation and to be liberators. It causes us to recognize the evils and repeated wickedness of those who hold power and the organizations of domination which they lead. As the Lord Jesus Christ Himself said it:
If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
John 8:31-32
Only when we are armed with the truth can we change the world and build Zion until she fills the entire world. Discarding Pioneer Myth is one of the important milestones in that endeavor and the sooner we do it the sooner we will better be able to transform the world through the power of Christ and escape being co-opted/having our faith co-opted as tools of the state to support its brutal, violent, oppressive policies.