#6 - Mormon Spaceships
Mormon Spaceships
The 2019 nCoV rages on — the death toll rises, borders are closing, and anxiety is gripping much of the population. I hope you are all doing well. There’s a space to be concerned about the present crises gripping this world, and there’s a space to step back, to ponder, to reflect, to meander, to rest. Welcome to the sixth issue of Camp of the Children. Today, we discuss Mormon interstellar travel.
The Nauvoo, or Why Mormons are a Good Fit for Interstellar Travel
In Leviathan Wakes, we are introduced to a generation ship by the name of Nauvoo, commissioned by the Mormons to bring them to Tau Ceti, in the hopes of establishing a human settlement in another solar system. The ship itself is massive, measuring more than two kilometres in length, and almost a kilometre wide on each side, meant to sustain a community across the centuries it takes to travel to another star system.
A generation ship, or generation starship, is a hypothetical type of interstellar ark starship that travels at sub-light speed.Since such a ship might take centuries to thousands of years to reach even nearby stars, the original occupants of a generation ship would grow old and die, leaving their descendants to continue traveling.
And why do the Mormons plan to leave this solar system behind? It seems that they were motivated to escape the harsh restrictions on procreation that were imposed in order to give a measure of breathing room to the already-crowded systems on Earth, Mars and habitations in the outer reaches of the solar system, the Belt.
A generation ship was a statement of overarching ambition and utter faith. The Mormons had known that. They’d embraced it. They’d constructed a ship that was prayer and piety and celebration all at the same time. The Nauvoo would be the greatest temple mankind had ever built. It would shepherd its crew through the uncrossable gulfs of interstellar space, humanity’s best hope of reaching the stars (463).
The ship itself, Nauvoo, was named after a city in Illinois, which was a city settled by Mormons escaping the persecution that they were experiencing in Missouri. In Nauvoo, Joseph Smith directed that a Temple be built — a great Temple built out of adversity even while the people were strapped for resources. A testament to faith.
But what continues to fascinate me is why Corey chose to have the Mormons attempt interstellar travel. Yes, to escape the procreation restrictions which were incompatible with their faith, but building a generation ship to reach another solar system is not a natural reaction to the problem. Yet, for some reason, it seems intuitively plausible (at least to me) that it would be the Mormons who would attempt such a thing. No, not because of the silliness that popular culture ascribes to Mormonism, but something about their faith that strikes me as being very compatible with the idea of interstellar travel.
For that, I take reference from Professor Stephen H Webb’s article at First Things, “Mormonism Obsessed with Christ” (February 2012). I am not in a position to validate Professor Webb’s claims about Mormon doctrine, but these paragraphs strike me as going to the heart of why I (having read this article about a year ago) sense a coherence between Mormonism and the generation ship depicted in The Expanse:
Christianity has always affirmed the goodness of matter and the integrity of the human body, but Mormonism offers that Christian dogma gone mad. For Smith, Christ’s pre-existent form was as physically real as we are today. Christianity teaches that the incarnation happened in a particular place and time, but for Smith, taking Hebrews 13:8 (“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever”) very literally, the Son has always been Jesus. The body of Jesus Christ is the eternal image of all bodies, spiritual and physical alike. The incarnation is a specification (or material intensification) of his body, not the first and only time that God and matter unite.
The eternal embodiment of the divine is metaphysically audacious, and it explains why Mormonism is so inventive. Mormon metaphysics is Christian metaphysics minus Origen and Augustine—in other words, Christianity divorced from Plato. Mormons are so materialistic that they insist that the same unchanging laws govern both the natural and the supernatural. They also deny the virgin birth, since their materialism leads them to speculate that Jesus is literally begotten by the immortal Father rather than conceived by the Holy Spirit.
By treating the spiritual as a dimension of the material, Smith overcomes every trace of dualism between this world and the next. Matter is perfectible because it is one of the perfections of the divine. Even heaven is merely another kind of galaxy, far away but not radically different from planet earth. For Mormons, our natural loyalties and loves have an eternal significance, which is why marriages will be preserved in heaven. Our bodies are literally temples of the divine, which is why Mormons wear sacred garments underneath regular clothing.
There’s a lot in there that also reflects some of Dan Simmons’s approach to Christian theology in Endymion and Rise of Endymion, which I hope to address one day. Needless to say, this departs in key places from orthodox Christianity, but my point here is simply that a theology that is material may tend to motivate exploration of the present universe as part of a broader eschatological move. Perhaps the Mormons were fleeing from persecution, but perhaps, perhaps they were on the cusp of achieving some progress towards the final realisation.
Status Board
Reading: I’m continuing on in James SA Corey’s Expanse series, but taking it a bit more slowly now. I’ve felt slightly burned out reading, perhaps because I did speed through the last three books in that series quite quickly, or perhaps because, while I appreciate the world being built in that series, a lot of the action scenes are far more involved than I’d like.
Listening: I’ve just listened to an interview with Matt Mercer of Critical Role on Between the Sheets. It was a wonderfully touching and meaningful interview which revealed so much about how online communities serve as surrogate homes for those who are marginalised where they live. Any account of the internet (especially the negative ones) needs to account for the obviously and undeniably beneficial role that this medium has had in bringing people together, offering support and belonging in a harsh world.