Skip to main content

Does Mitt Romney Think He's a Jew?

Romney in Yarmulka at Wailing WallWile in Jerusalem Mitt Romney made an appearance at the Wailing Wall in a Yarmulka. Was he just trying to pay tribute to Orthodox tradition or does he think he’s Jewish? Perhaps both.

Conservative Christianity teaches “supersessionism,” the idea that God’s covenant with Christians replaced his covenant with the Jews and now Christians are the Chosen People, the spiritual heirs of Abraham. Traditionally, Mormonism takes this a step further – teaching that Mormons are not only the spiritual heirs of Abraham, they are his physical descendants as well.

Mormonism includes a ritual called the “Patriarchal Blessing” in which a member in good standing receives a set of pronouncements spoken by an older male who is thought, during the ritual itself, to act as a latter day prophet. Like many of Mormonism’s better known distinctive features, such as plural marriage and wearing sacred undergarments, the practice was instituted by Joseph Smith himself.* One of the most central functions of the Patriarchal Blessing is to reveal which great-grandson of Abraham a person can claim as his ancestor. Per Mormonwiki:

Through these blessings, Latter-day Saints are told their lineage from the tribes of Israel. All tribes have been represented, but Latter-day Saints descend mostly from the sons of Joseph—Ephraim and Manasseh.
One former Mormon describes the experience: “While reading my patriarchal blessing I took note that it says I was: ‘born through the loins of Ephraim.’ I found it fascinating how patriarchs could tell which tribes people were descended from.” Just as Hindus disagree over the historicity of the Ramayana and orthodox Christians disagree over the literal truth of the Bible, Mormons are of various minds about whether their bloodline is metaphorical or literal.

This peculiar-seeming teaching offers a fascinating window into the way that sacred stories emerge and evolve. It also offers a window into one way that religious sects compete and seek status.

Twelve Tribes of Israel  In the Bible story, the Hebrew people are divided into twelve tribes based on the twelve sons of Jacob, one of whom is Joseph of the “Technicolor Dreamcoat.” The story of Jacob’s twelve sons and the twelve tribes of Israel bring together two passions of the Bible writers, both of which played a central role in the development of Mormonism: genealogy and numerology.

The concept of Chosen People creates a fixation on blood lines, and the Bible writers often go to great lengths to establish the lineage of powerful men. In fact, two of the New Testament writers, each with a different audience in mind, offered contradictory genealogies of Jesus which theologians have struggled for centuries to reconcile. The Mormon religion continued and expanded the obsession with bloodlines to the point that vaults in Granite Mountain, Utah, now house almost two million rolls of microfilm with genealogical records. Mormonism teaches that family is forever, which is why a man controls his wife’s standing in heaven and members can be baptized on behalf of deceased antecedents, and it is important to know who your ancestors were.

The number twelve traces its own lineage of significance clear back to the signs of the zodiac and manifests repeatedly in the Bible. Joseph Smith himself was influenced by Freemasonry, which provided the sacred symbols that appear on Mormon undergarments. It also reinforced a fascination with numerology and biblical numerology in particular.

Thus there were twelve signs of the zodiac, twelve months in the year, twelve Tribes of Israel, twelve stones in the pectoral, and twelve oxen supporting the molten sea in the Temple. There were twelve apostles in the new law, and the New Jerusalem has twelve gates, twelve foundations, is twelve thousand furlongs square, and the number of the sealed is twelve times twelve thousand.

The numbers three and seven also had early magical significance that shaped the beliefs of Bible writers and early Christians. Think seven days of creation, three days before the resurrection, the holy trinity, or the command to forgive your neighbor “seventy times seven.” Like the number twelve three and seven are built into the structure of the Mormon bureaucracy:

The triangle is one of the most potent forms in magic, and the 1835 revelation provided numbering of priesthood offices which added to 180 (the number of degrees in a triangle). The revelation specified that in ascending order the deacon’s president presided over twelve deacons, the teacher’s president over twenty four teachers, and the elder’s president over ninety eight elders. . . . There were three men in the first presidency, twelve men in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, seventy men in the seventy . . .

Like Christianity, though, the number twelve remains chief among the numbers assigned special powers and significance.

We humans are storytellers to the heart, and at the heart of every story is a protagonist, whether an individual or collective, who matters more than the rest. Because of this, two ideas – bloodlines with special rights and numbers with special powers have maintained their appeal for millennia. They can be found all around us –in Harry Potter, for example, or New Age spirituality, or faded tabloids about the British monarchy. Ironically, we frequently fuse our ancient superstitions with modern scholarship methods and technologies. Hence the lack of a 13th floor in many modern hospitals. Hence, too, the microfilm archive in Granite Mountain.

Our quest to bend nature’s rules or society’s rules, to stack the odds in our favor, means that we are constantly vying for a little more status. For that reason, it would come as no surprise to a scholar of sacred stories that a preponderance of Mormons are said to descend from the lineage of Joseph. The twelve sons of Jacob and their offspring may comprise the Chosen People according to the biblical chronicle, but not all of the twelve are equally favored by either God or their earthly father. In fact, tales of the Hebrew patriarchs are often stories about paternal favoritism and its consequences, both positive and negative.

While reading my patriarchal blessing I took note that it says I was: ‘born through the loins of Ephraim.Within the broader narrative of Chosen People are stories of chosen sons and mothers who compete viciously to ensure their sons receive extra standing or privilege. Father Abraham and Yehovah both favor Isaac over Ishmael, Abraham’s son born of the slave woman, Hagar. Isaac and Yehovah favor his son Jacob over his son Esau. Jacob and Yehovah favor the sons of his wife Rachel over those of her ugly older sister Leah. They favor Joseph most of all, which is why his brothers throw him into a pit and sell him to an Egyptian slave trader where he becomes a confidant of the Pharaoh, ultimately ruling over them all. Among those in the know, announcing that someone is the heir of Joseph is indeed a patriarchal blessing—a pronouncement that he has the most favored bloodline out of the favored twelve.

The belief that ancestry matters to God has drawn the LDS Church into several kinds of awkward dogmas. Officially sanctioned racism was prominent in theology and church practice for a century and a half after Smith founded the religion. According to the story, a tribe of Israelites traveled to the Americas around 600BC, but split into two warring factions. The evil faction, the Lamanites, eventually killed off their righteous brethren and were punished with brown skins, becoming the forebears of Native Americans. Offspring of Adam’s son Cain (who murdered his brother) were cursed with even darker skin, became the forebears of Africans. Anyone with African blood was banned from the full privileges of Mormon membership until 1978 and Utah refused to celebrate MLK Day until 2000. Recent DNA research showing Native Americans to have Asian ancestry has caused consternation and even defections among science-minded Mormons.

Mormon Church leaders like Mitt Romney appear to have moved beyond the divinely sanctified racism of church history – at least when it comes to matters of skin color. But the issue of privileged bloodlines remains. In the Mormon version of the end times, the descendants of Abraham through Isaac and Jacob will be gathered together into the land promised so long ago by Yehovah to a wandering band of Semites. The tribe of Judah will return to the land surrounding Jerusalem, but the tribe of Joseph (divided between Ephraim and Manasseh) as part of “ten lost tribes” will be gathered together in Zion, also called the New Jerusalem, centered in Jackson County, Missouri. According to the Tenth Article of the Mormon Faith, this is not a spiritual metaphor:

We believe in the literal gathering of Israel and in the restoration of the Ten Tribes; that Zion (the New Jerusalem) will be built upon the American continent; that Christ will reign personally upon the earth; and, that the earth will be renewed and receive its paradisaical glory.

Does Mitt Romney think he is a son of Abraham and that Zion will be his inheritance? It is hard to imagine otherwise. He worships a god that cares who your father was, and his father, and his father before him and who, in part, allocates blessings accordingly. Indeed, Mormon doctrine may offer a little insight into why Romney appears so untroubled by an America where fortunes increasingly are dictated by heredity.Mormon Patriarchal Blessing

* Note: The LDS Church, the dominant denomination of the Mormon religion, does not condone polygamy or plural marriage where it is forbidden by law. However, it is assumed that some men will have multiple wives in heaven. In the U.S., the practice is retained only by fundamentalist sects that are independent of the LDS denomination.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Are You an Atheist Success Story?

By Avangelism Project ~ F acts don’t spread. Stories do. It’s how (good) marketing works, it’s how elections (unfortunately) are won and lost, and it’s how (all) religion spreads. Proselytization isn’t accomplished with better arguments. It’s accomplished with better stories and it’s time we atheists catch up. It’s not like atheists don’t love a good story. Head over to the atheist reddit and take a look if you don’t believe me. We’re all over stories painting religion in a bad light. Nothing wrong with that, but we ignore the value of a story or a testimonial when we’re dealing with Christians. We can’t be so proud to argue the semantics of whether atheism is a belief or deconversion is actually proselytization. When we become more interested in defining our terms than in affecting people, we’ve relegated ourselves to irrelevance preferring to be smug in our minority, but semantically correct, nonbelief. Results Determine Reality The thing is when we opt to bury our

So Just How Dumb Were Jesus’ Disciples? The Resurrection, Part VII.

By Robert Conner ~ T he first mention of Jesus’ resurrection comes from a letter written by Paul of Tarsus. Paul appears to have had no interest whatsoever in the “historical” Jesus: “even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, we know him so no longer.” ( 2 Corinthians 5:16 ) Paul’s surviving letters never once mention any of Jesus’ many exorcisms and healings, the raising of Lazarus, or Jesus’ virgin birth, and barely allude to Jesus’ teaching. For Paul, Jesus only gets interesting after he’s dead, but even here Paul’s attention to detail is sketchy at best. For instance, Paul says Jesus “was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” ( 1 Corinthians 15:4 ), but there are no scriptures that foretell the Jewish Messiah would at long last appear only to die at the hands of Gentiles, much less that the Messiah would then be raised from the dead after three days. After his miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus—an event Paul never mentions in his lette

Christian TV presenter reads out Star Wars plot as story of salvation

An email prankster tricked the host of a Christian TV show into reading out the plots of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Star Wars in the belief they were stories of personal salvation. The unsuspecting host read out most of the opening rap to The Fresh Prince, a 1990s US sitcom starring Will Smith , apparently unaware that it was not a genuine testimony of faith. The prankster had slightly adapted the lyrics but the references to a misspent youth playing basketball in West Philadelphia would have been instantly familiar to most viewers. The lines read out by the DJ included: "One day a couple of guys who were up to no good starting making trouble in my living area. I ended up getting into a fight, which terrified my mother." The presenter on Genesis TV , a British Christian channel, eventually realised that he was being pranked and cut the story short – only to move on to another spoof email based on the plot of the Star Wars films. It began: &quo

ACTS OF GOD

By David Andrew Dugle ~   S ettle down now children, here's the story from the Book of David called The Parable of the Bent Cross. In the land Southeast of Eden –  Eden, Minnesota that is – between two rivers called the Big Miami and the Little Miami, in the name of Saint Gertrude there was once built a church. Here next to it was also built a fine parochial school. The congregation thrived and after a multitude of years, a new, bigger church was erected, well made with clean straight lines and a high steeple topped with a tall, thin cross of gold. The faithful felt proud, but now very low was their money. Their Sunday offerings and school fees did not suffice. Anon, they decided to raise money in an unclean way. One fine summer day the faithful erected tents in the chariot lot between the two buildings. In the tents they set up all manner of games – ring toss, bingo, little mechanical racing horses and roulette wheels – then all who lived in the land between the two rivers we

Morality is not a Good Argument for Christianity

By austinrohm ~ I wrote this article as I was deconverting in my own head: I never talked with anyone about it, but it was a letter I wrote as if I was writing to all the Christians in my life who constantly brought up how morality was the best argument for Christianity. No Christian has read this so far, but it is written from the point of view of a frustrated closeted atheist whose only outlet was organizing his thoughts on the keyboard. A common phrase used with non-Christians is: “Well without God, there isn’t a foundation of morality. If God is not real, then you could go around killing and raping.” There are a few things which must be addressed. 1. Show me objective morality. Define it and show me an example. Different Christians have different moral standards depending on how they interpret the Bible. Often times, they will just find what they believe, then go back into scripture and find a way to validate it. Conversely, many feel a particular action is not

On Living Virtuously

By Webmdave ~  A s a Christian, living virtuously meant living in a manner that pleased God. Pleasing god (or living virtuously) was explained as: Praying for forgiveness for sins  Accepting Christ as Savior  Frequently reading the Bible  Memorizing Bible verses Being baptized (subject to church rules)  Attending church services  Partaking of the Lord’s Supper  Tithing  Resisting temptations to lie, steal, smoke, drink, party, have lustful thoughts, have sex (outside of marriage) masturbate, etc.  Boldly sharing the Gospel of Salvation with unbelievers The list of virtuous values and expectations grew over time. Once the initial foundational values were safely under the belt, “more virtues'' were introduced. Newer introductions included (among others) harsh condemnation of “worldly” music, homosexuality and abortion Eventually the list of values grew ponderous, and these ideals were not just personal for us Christians. These virtues were used to condemn and disrespect fro