On Sept. 11, 1857, 137 men, women and children traveling west to California stopped to rest at Mountain Meadows in Utah. Fearing a reprisal from the federal government, which opposed the nascent, theocratic state the Mormons had established in modern-day Utah, Mormon leader Brigham Young declared martial law in August of that year and said, “If any miserable scoundrels come here, cut their throats.” When this band of innocent pioneers entered the Mormon-controlled territory, a militia of apocalyptic Mormons slaughtered them, sparing just 17 of the youngest children.
This incident is recounted in the upcoming film “September Dawn.” Unsurprisingly, conservatives are angry, asking the inevitable question: why depict Mormon terrorists from the 19th century and not the Muslim terrorists of today?
But while Hollywood may certainly evince a political bias in the movies it chooses to produce, the contention that “September Dawn” is liberal propaganda does not hold up under scrutiny.
The film stars the conservative actor Jon Voight, who most certainly does not share the politics of his daughter Angelina Jolie.
“I didn’t even know [former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney] was running when we began this,” he told an audience at a screening earlier this year.
Perennial right-wing scold Michael Medved nevertheless saw a political motivation in the production of “September Dawn,” asking, “Why frame an indictment of violent religiosity by focusing on long-ago Mormon leaders rather than contemporary Muslims who perpetrate unspeakable brutalities every day?”
But religious extremism (nor its depiction in popular culture) isn’t exclusive to one particular faith. That there may be a lack of movies depicting the current threat of Muslim terrorists does not mean that Hollywood ought not produce movies depicting atrocities committed by Mormons, even if they occurred 150 years ago.
If conservative critics of Islam are going to tell us about Mohammed’s violent conquests and sexual congress with a 9-year-old girl, then they should be mature enough to sit and listen to the truth about the founder of the Mormon faith.
Joseph Smith did, after all, famously declare, “I shall be to this generation a new Muhammed.” Convicted by a New York Court in 1826 of being “a disorderly person and an impostor,” Smith was a megalomaniacal charlatan, of whom L. Ron Hubbard (pardon the pun) was a latter-day version.
Medved wrote, “Despite the turbulence of their founding generation, Mormons have been conspicuously peaceful, patriotic, hard-working and neighborly for at least the past 117 years [since the church repudiated and banned polygamy].” Unless Medved considers race discrimination “patriotic” and “neighborly,” he ought to shorten this century-plus long period of goodwill to at least 1978, as it was only then that the church allowed.
Don’t dare suggest that this policy was changed for the cynical reason of improving Mormon PR; rather, it was through the church president’s “extended meditation and prayer in the sacred rooms of the holy temple” that the decision to stop discriminating against people with dark skin was made.
Maybe of more interest to Medved, a Jew, is that as recently as 2002 the church was found posthumously baptizing Jewish Holocaust victims, after it had expressly promised to stop this practice.
Conservatives are right that Hollywood is oversensitive to Muslim sensibilities, but they ought not despair at the lack of films depicting Muslim terrorism. If conservative are not satisfied with what Hollywood is churning out, they can always produce such movies themselves. There’s plenty of religious fanaticism to go around.
Examiner Columnist James Kirchick is assistant to the editor in chief of The New Republic.
