Imagine a better future for us all. Who is all there?: Perfection and Futurism in Mormon Cosmology

"Joseph Smith's Vision of the Celestial Kingdom," by Robert T. Barrett.

When you imagine a better future for us all, in this life or another, who is there? Are there trans people? Are there disabled people? Are there Indigenous Peoples? Are there countries and religion, too? Is there change, conflict, and diversity? Or homogenous endless perfection?

Mormons as, Millenarians & Zionists, are utopic, future-thinking people. Leaders teach to live not for this life but to “Endure To The End.” And this future is homogenous endless perfection. Everyone agrees. The Lion lays with the Lamb. Conflict and diversity are abolished from our bodies.

But this story never aligned with my embodied experience. The idea that the “natural man is an enemy to God” in need of perfection didn’t make sense with my experience of the complex mess of joys and griefs of a humanimal earth life. And the more I learned of and unlearned the illusory separation of land and human culture the more this divisive ideology made no sense—was counter to my senses.

My senses tell me that the conflict born of the diversity contained within ecosystems is not a fallen state of any past utopia to be overcome in hopes of achieving some future utopia. What’s good for the wolf is good for the deer is good for the river is good for the living ecosystem. In other words the idea that “what’s good for the spider is bad for the fly” is not ecologically sound.

Colonial utopias tend to be free from conflict and diversity as diversity and conflict go hand in hand. The colonized mind doesn’t know how to separate conflict from abuse (nor abuse from aid, but that’s another story). But conflict is not abuse. Conflict and diversity are central to the ecology of earthlings.

My senses tell me this is also true cosmologically. That the big banging, particle colliding, supernova-ing universe was created through conflict, opposition, diversity. That when misunderstood the trough and valleys of the basic shape of the universe would seem as polemically opposed rather than intrinsically interdependent points on a spiral.

When you imagine a better future for us all, in this life or another, who is there? Who and what is included in your sense of perfection?

Image of "premortal life" from LDS.org

In Mormonism (and so many others) life on earth begins in stasis, in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were born into abled, eternal bodies which experienced neither sickness nor hunger. The Lion laid with the Lamb. It was perfect. Pure. A Utopia.

The Mormon “plan” also ends in Utopic deathless perfection. Those who strive to be go(o)d enough enter into the perfectest heaven–the Celestial Kingdom. In this imagined future every body is perfected as God is–heterosexual, abled, cisgender, pure, white

The second “great purpose” of this church is the project of “the perfecting of the Saints.” The Family Proclamation states that God’s children became earthlings to “obtain a physical body and gain earthly experience to progress toward perfection...” 

Interlude: Mormon Cosmology says “God created man in his own image” is literal. Mormon God is physically embodied—a corporeal, heterosexual, abled, cisgender, white man. 

Their origin story is pre-Genesis in a pre-mortal life. Mormon God made many spirit children through physical intercourse with many polygynous wives. For us, the spirit children, to become like our God Dad and Moms we had to get and perfect human bodies on earth.

A war broke out. Jesus vs. Lucifer. The body we each are born into on earth is a result of our actions in this war.

Perfection is frequently used in talks by Prophets and Apostles as an antithesis of disability. 

Apostle Holland told followers in 2013 that in Heaven their disabled loved ones, “will stand before us glorified and grand, breathtakingly perfect in body and mind.”

The year before Pres Nelson reassured his followers that “A perfect body is not required to achieve one's divine destiny. In fact, some of the sweetest spirits are housed in frail or imperfect bodies." 

In Mormonism, the disabled body is rendered the polar opposite of the Edenic body. The most fallen of us all.

Well, more accurately, the Black / African, queer, disabled, and apostate body. As, liike many other US eugenic hierarchies, literal disability is metaphorized into a white-supremacist and anti-queer construct. 

This church’s 1949 anti-Black manifesto describes the “failure of the right to enjoy in mortality the blessings one the priesthood (anyone of African descent was denied this “right”) is a handicap which spirits willing assume (for the privilege of being born on earth.)” 

Apostle M. E. Peterson said in 1954: “In spite of whatever they might have done in the pre-existence to justify being born over there as Chinamen…with all the handicaps of that race…if they now, in this life (become a good Mormon) that means they can have exaltation. Isn't the mercy of God marvelous?”

In 2016 Apostle Bednar shared, “Some people have physical limitations, they may be born with a body that is not fully functional,” and compared this embodied experience to that of being “attracted to someone of the same sex”.
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In this Church’s 2007 anti-queer manifesto Mormons are taught that, like disability, queerness will also be relieved from the Celestial body. “As we follow Heavenly Father’s plan, our bodies, feelings, and desires will be perfected in the next life.”

When you imagine a better future for us all, in this life or another, who is there? Are there trans people? Are there disabled people? Are there Indigenous Peoples? Are there countries and religion, too? Is there change, conflict, and diversity? Or homogenous endless perfection?

Mormon temple interior