When the Roman empire fell, the Catholic Church helped preserve Roman civilization. When the US eventually falls, who will preserve American civilization?
Edward Gibbon argued that the introduction of Christianity doomed Rome: “[T]he last remains of the military spirit were buried in the cloister.” There’s a stronger case to be made that the Christians kept Rome from being erased from our collective memory — that the Catholic Church was the one entity that maintained Roman hierarchies, Roman thought, and the Latin language as the rest of the continent descended into illiteracy.A religion is also a good candidate to keep America alive. The history of Catholicism shows that religious movements can outlast the political systems in which they arose. Our idealized conception of what America stands for has its origins in religious belief as well: the Puritans’ values of industry and self-reliance, and their desire for the nation to be a “city upon a hill.”
What religion might serve as America’s preservationist? In the 1960 novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr. imagines a group of monks playing the same role as their European forebears, preserving knowledge in a post-apocalyptic America. Considering this country’s microscopic monk supply, it’s hard to imagine monasteries banding together to combat data rot. Evangelical Christians seem like a more logical contender: Around 100 million Americans identify as evangelicals, and the idea of the United States as a promised land is pervasive in evangelical thought. But while they’re often thought of as a homogeneous bloc, evangelicals are really a diverse and fragmented lot. That makes the movement resilient and adaptable but not exactly the best vessel for preserving a culture. The early Catholic Church, in contrast, was more disciplined and hierarchical, a far better candidate both to survive a collapse and to carry forward societal traditions.
A better candidate to serve as America’s time capsule: the Mormons. In an aside in 2007′s Are We Rome?, Cullen Murphy posits that Salt Lake City could become “the Vatican of the third millennium,” with the Mormon Church “propagating a particular, canonical version of America.” Orson Scott Card, the Mormon science-fiction writer, lays out a similar premise in the 1989 short-story collection The Folk of the Fringe. In “West,” a group of Mormons sets out for Utah after a societal collapse brought on by nuclear war, biological warfare, and climate change. Despite finding that Temple Square is about to be submerged by rising waters, the travelers manage to keep the world alive by sticking together even as “places without Mormons were dying or dead.”
Why does Card think the Mormons will live through a disaster? He explains via e-mail that Mormon culture “has strengths and weaknesses, but it has almost all the attributes of a civilizational winner. … We have organizational practices and ideological elements that make it highly likely that wherever we are, we will outlast the collapse of governments and civilizations.” As far as organizational practices go, a 2007 church pamphlet recommends that families put together “a [three-month] supply of food that is part of your normal, daily diet” as well as stores of wheat, white rice, and beans for “longer-term needs.” (Seventy-two-hour preparedness kits will suffice in a pinch.) The church, practicing what it preaches, owns a silo in Salt Lake City filled with 19 million pounds of wheat. The Mormons’ ideological preparations for the end of America include the widely held belief that the United States will not endure — and that when the Constitution “hangs by a thread,” Mormons will be there to save it.
Mormonism is an American religion. It was birthed in this country, and the church’s missionary work has made the religion one of the most-recognizable American institutions around the world. If the U.S. government dissolves or the continent gets submerged by rising seas, the Mormons have more reason than most to stick around. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints holds that the framers of the Constitution were divinely inspired, that American Indians are partly descended from an ancient Israelite tribe called the Lamanites, and that upon his return, Jesus Christ will rule both in the old Jerusalem and on American soil.
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The Latter-day Saints’ oscillation between contemporary society and their pioneer days makes them the perfect time capsule: They will always retain a piece of the American character, yet they have enough of a toehold in the past — and enough grain in the silo — to resume their pre-modern ways.
If the Mormon Church does someday become a proxy for the United States, what parts of American civilization will survive? “Things that used to be American — motherhood and apple pie — would be restored to primacy,” Orson Scott Card says.
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Orson Scott Card emphasizes that post-collapse Mormons would be organized but open to others: “If we did not approach things that way, we would fail, because our very survival as an organized group would frighten others who saw us as a threat,” he writes, adding that Mormons “learned that one the hard way” during the polygamy years. In the event of the American end times, Card continues, the church would likely continue to “regard the Constitution of the United States as a divinely ordered document—including a reasonable separation of church and state. There would be no Mormon Taliban, no Mormon equivalent of sharia imposed on non-Mormons.”In The Folk of the Fringe, Card writes that “civilization lives on among those folk whose bonds of faith, tribe, and language are strong.”