Mormons and Muslims

Stewart W. writes:

I have recently seen reviews of the new Jon Voigt movie “September Dawn,” which is an account of the Mountain Meadows Massacre in the Utah Territory in 1857. The film appears to be a typical Hollywood incarnation of your “First Law,” with Christians being the evil majority and Mormons the saintly minority in an unspoken but obvious comparison to Muslims, and it prompted me to ponder the similarities and differences between Islam and Mormonism.

There are many parallels between the “first generations” of both religions, and yet they took very different paths after their respective foundations. Both religions started out with a radically new revealed religious text (although the Mormon text does not purport to be the direct word of God), and both groups started out as a despised and persecuted minority. Both migrated from their original homelands to establish themselves as a dominant regional power, and both were then involved in violent acts and conflicts with “non-members”; the Mountain Meadows Massacre being the most significant in Mormon history, although there were also Johnston’s Army and the Black Hawk War.

However, from that point, the Mormons as a group made a conscious decision to change, eventually transforming themselves into the uber-Americans they are today, while the 1,300 year history of Islam is written in blood for all to see.

What led to the difference? Clearly, the fact that one group was composed of civilized Americans, while the other (especially at the beginning) was composed of stone-age savages. In addition, the early Mormons were opposed by a confident, dynamic, young, expansionist nation, while the Moslems were faced with warring tribes, and later with the dissolute remnants of spent civilizations. Are there any other differences that might be significant? Is the difference primarily religious, or is it cultural and racial?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 17, 2007 02:36 PM | Send