BRIGHAM AGE MINDSET

The Restored Gospel has solutions to the problems of disaffected young men

A few years back I wrote a blog post¹ trying to explain the emergence of the “alt right,” which back then meant, to me at least, something along the lines of Steve Bannon, not white nationalism. I saw it as a reaction to the inability of mainstream right wing thought to respond to the problems of the here and now, and particularly how it was deformed by its unwillingness to speak uncomfortable truths.

Perhaps not much has changed since then; the fault lines on the right look pretty similar to the mid-2010s, even as the right seems to have gained new adherents in the wake of the disastrous Biden presidency. But now there is another iteration of alternative right wing thought, less specifically political, more philosophical or even spiritual in character, which is currently gaining in popularity with young men.

“If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.”

-Ross Douthat, Feb. 2016

I refer to a sort of neo-Nietzscheanism, sometimes called “vitalism,” which is in the air among certain Very Online Right Wing Young Guys who find traditional Christian conservatism uninspiring. They really, really, don’t like the left, but they also blame Christianity for providing the moral premises of leftism, like “equality” and “compassion.” They see the otherworldliness of Christianity providing the left with a durable advantage; while the Christian man stores up his treasure in Heaven, the leftist hoovers up everything worth having on Earth. While the Christian turns the other cheek, the leftist beats him senseless.

Of course there are also the standard Nietzschean complaints about “slave morality” and of a God so apparently weak that he was literally murdered. Beyond that, there are more prosaic complaints about the mundane lives of American Christians and their moribund aesthetics. At a time when the cultural left is seemingly unassailable, they don’t want any hint of weakness, only strength.

You can find these vitalist critiques made variously by atheists, LARPing Norse pagans, or merely disgruntled lapsed Christians. But their most exemplary proponent goes by the nom de tuit of “Bronze Age Pervert,” or “BAP” for short.² For the unfamiliar, BAP is the author of two books of popular philosophy, integrating ideas from Nietzsche, Strauss, and ancient Greece, among other classical traditions, with his own humorously grandiose literary persona.

Perhaps the primary source of BAP’s appeal (to which I am not immune) is that he is very funny. He uses extreme, and sometimes offensive, examples to highlight the contradictions and absurdities of the social consensus. In one well-known passage from his first book, “Bronze Age Mindset,” he paints a hypothetical picture of one of Deseret’s favorite sons:

Imagine a Mitt Romney, but different… a Romney who actually was capable of acting like he looks, and was worthy of his looks. Imagine a younger Romney who rouses the nation to a new war, against India, through power of charisma and speech alone. Then he leaves on a ship to head the armies conquering India. But then come rumors that Mitt ran a Black Mass Satanist dinner in New York. Also, people awaken one day and find that someone defaced the Holocaust Museum and the Lincoln Memorial… rumors spread that it is Mitt and his friends, in preparation to overthrow the government. So he is recalled from his command to stand trial. Instead of returning, Mitt runs to Russia where he becomes a major advisor to Putin. Soon though, he finally has to leave in a great hurry when it is discovered he’s been banging Putin’s wife in secret. He runs to China where, again, he miraculously becomes a major political force and advisor, adopting Chinese customs and language with ease. After some time he leaves China and ends up living in Afghanistan with the tribesmen as one of them, in one of their mud fortresses, where he is finally found by American special forces and he goes out fighting, charging them repeatedly with machine gun in his glorious black-and-gold armor and Dune-like headset. Exactly such, and more, was the life of the ancient Alcibiades from Athens.

This passage is funny because of the absurd imagery of Mitt Romney plotting to overthrow the government and integrating seamlessly into an Afghan tribe, dying in a blaze of black-and-gold violence. But it also makes one wonder: Why is a man like Mitt Romney, handsome, strong, fiercely intelligent, eloquent, fecund, vigorous, a natural leader, admired by all who know him well... why is he so… housebroken? Why are his actions seemingly bounded by concern for his public image as it is cultivated by the miserable, sniveling bugmen in the increasingly-irrelevant media?

The vitalist answer is that, for ideological reasons, we have inverted the natural order by allowing the weak to dominate the strong. While the pagans of old would have recognized Mitt-but-Different’s heroism and will-to-power as a virtue, Real Mitt is forced to bow to, and even recite, equalitarian pieties. In fact, the precise qualities that should be signs of his greatness are instead held against him as “straight white wealthy male privilege.”

It should be obvious why this message is appealing to intelligent young men. Society sends a message that whatever they accomplish is unearned. They are racially and sexually discriminated against in college admissions and employment. Even where they are allowed to flourish in the modern economy, they find “email jobs” to be less fulfilling than the dream of convening a roving band to put cities to the sword and carrying away war brides. Mitt’s comfortable existence appears to them to be fettered by golden handcuffs, fastened on one hand by Christian morality and on the other by liberal dogma.

It would be easy to dismiss this as online babble unworthy of consideration, but as someone who has interacted with quite a few of these guys, I think that would be too hasty. Although it’s unclear how much of an influence these ideas are in their personal lives (perhaps a few have started lifting weights because a guy with a Greek statue in his twitter avatar told them to “DOMINATE”), it mostly seems to be an expression of powerlessness and frustration with a modern order that clearly sees no place for them and their rightful impulses.

I take that seriously, because as a father of kids growing up in Clown World, I share their frustration. I also see some validity in their criticisms of modern Christianity, including in myself. But what I find most interesting about their critique of Christianity is the extent to which it maps onto the biggest differences between LDS doctrine and mainstream Christianity.

In saying this, I do not mean to say that “BAPism/neo-Nietzscheanism/vitalism” is consistent with LDS beliefs.” Some points are, others are not; that’s not the point. The point is that much of what they dislike about Christianity is not inherent in Christian doctrine, but is peculiar to modern mainstream Christianity, which differs from LDS beliefs in significant ways.

Nor am I attempting to explain why “vitalists should become LDS.” That’s a different article. What I’m hoping to elucidate here is how vitalism’s critiques of modern Christianity are useful to us as Latter-day Saints, to understand both the value of the Restoration in correcting defects in mainstream Christian belief, and the ways in which we ourselves may even be falling short of the vision set forth by the Restored Gospel.

Doctrine of the Body

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of the physical body in the ideology of the vitalists. Like the ancient Greeks, they prize physical beauty above perhaps all else. An impressive “fizeek” is the coin of the realm; BAP himself regularly posts images of impressively-built men showing off their bodies. If you’re thinking of joking that this sounds a little gay, well, you’re not the first.

Now why, besides the natural desire of all people to be beautiful and desirable, is this so important to them? First, it represents strength, power, excellence. It is a refutation of leftist worship of ugliness and mediocrity. On a more personal level, the default for most thoughtful young guys these days is not to have had any kind of serious girlfriend up through their young adulthood. Hitting the gym becomes not so much an attempt to get girls as a way to transcend the need for validation from women. A humorous internet truism is that a guy who posts a picture of his muscular physique will typically receive all manner of praise from men, straight and otherwise, but none from women.

Not to paint with too broad a brush, but there is much in mainstream Christian theology which could be understood as hostile to the physical body. To name only a few points, there is:

1. The belief that God cannot have a physical body or this would make him a limited, imperfect being

2. The belief that Christ did not and indeed could not have married

3. The belief that a celibate life in the priesthood or a monastic order is higher and holier than married life

4. The denial of marriage (and therefore procreation) in Heaven

5. The veneration of ascetic saints, flagellants, etc.

One could draw upon these examples to create a picture of a religion which sees the physical body as a necessity but something less than completely divine. I have seen many Christians criticize the vitalist focus on the body as pure vanity.

Meanwhile, in Latter-day Saint belief, God has a body, and Christ also has a body. Our creation in “the image of God” is not figurative. Christ may have taken a wife in his mortal life and if not will assuredly have one in the eternities.

We believe that when we are resurrected, our actual physical bodies will be restored to a “perfect” state. Marital bonds exist in the resurrection, with all that entails (yes, even that). And the highest level of exaltation requires posterity.

Moreover, we believe that “the spirit and the body are the soul of man.” President David O. McKay said that the Church is “in no sense ascetic.”³ We have the Word of Wisdom, even if many of us live beneath its privileges. If there is a more pro-physical body belief system in all of Christianity, I do not know it.

Doctrine of Exaltation

Here is how a vitalist might uncharitably summarize the Christian narrative of salvation:

Man is a degraded and depraved creature who would rightly be condemned to Hell were it not for God’s mercy. So God becomes a man, dies, is resurrected, and because of this Man can go to heaven if and only if he recognizes his utter unworthiness and depravity and worships God for eternity, ever mindful that he is always a subject and never a king. Everything you obtained in your life is as ashes, even your marriage ends at death, all you have is your salvation which wasn’t even your own doing.

To a vitalist this is clearly inferior to ancient notions of eternal glory. What makes a man echo through history are his earthly deeds, to achieve greatness on the battlefield and impose his will on the world and die gloriously. Moreover, to men who already feel enslaved by modernity, the picture of Christian commitment as simply a transference of abasement from liberal idols to Christ is not inspiring.

The LDS doctrine of exaltation, while it retains the need to worship and obey God, also allows Man to retain much more of what he gains (gainz?) in life.⁴ His marriage and familial relationships, first and foremost. His physical body. To the extent that he has obtained knowledge and intelligence that gives him advantage over other men, he retains that advantage in the next life. While his wealth dies with him, his patriarchal empire and the knowledge he has obtained from God endure and eternally expand…

… and expand….

… until he is “given all things” and becomes a “priest and king” and receives the fullness and glory of God, “Wherefore, as it is written, they are gods, even the sons of God.”⁵ If you want a vision that can compete with earthly glory, it has to be glorious. The LDS belief in exaltation provides that.

Manhood and Priesthood

One might reasonably expect an ideology which extols strength over weakness to have a fairly low opinion of the weaker sex. In the case of vitalism, one would be right. In one instance, BAP boldly and hilariously disregarded any attempt to preserve his reputation against insinuations of homosexuality:

Only the male intellect, clouded by the sexual impulse, could call the undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged sex the fair sex; for in this impulse is to be found its whole beauty. The female sex could be more aptly called the unaesthetic.⁶

On a more serious plane, vitalists and young right wing men generally have reasonable concerns about how the feminization of daily life, in work and school and, yes, church, affects young men whose masculine impulses have to be curbed in order to make organizations function and leave place for the advancement of women. As BAP says, “The defeated male that is turned into a peon and a neutered beast for women and hidden masters is a terrible thing to see. The jockeying for status, the physical fights, the adventures boys are supposed to have in a state of nature…all of this is in nature meant as preparation for life, for a life of conquest and expansion.”⁷

Society’s unwillingness to allow boys to be boys, or girls to be girls, is a serious problem. Young men are looking for ways to express their masculinity, which they aren’t finding in modern liberalism or in the churches.

Now of course there are Christian churches that place emphasis on traditional sex roles. But it’s a shrinking number every year, and even the ones that ostensibly believe in the importance of fathers and husbands are prone to adopt implicitly feminist memes under the guise of calling upon men to “man up.”

This can take many forms, such as casting fathers in the role of a feckless “sitcom dad,” who deserves the henpecking his wife gives him. “Happy wife, happy life,” they say, as if it were straight out of Ecclesiastes. Men are asked to be “servant leaders” of their home, because asking them to simply lead their home would not convey their inferior position to their wives.

Because mainstream Christianity thinks of “salvation” as a process only of removing sin, and not of becoming exalted as gods, they think of “goodness” as merely the absence of sin, not the pursuit of greatness and magnitude. This worldview inherently favors girls and women, who are more conscientious and compliant, over men and boys, who are boisterous and daring but also do more things wrong. So women are seen as saintly by default, men as rascals needing women’s beneficent touch to become truly Christian.

These are specific gender roles, to be sure. They just aren’t the roles that young men want to see themselves in.

Nor is the Church of Jesus Christ immune to these memes. LDS people also watch sitcoms, and they’ve imbibed these same bad habits of mind to some degree. However, there is a key difference, which is that gender roles are built into the very fabric of our theology.

This distinguishes us from churches which on the outside might seem more anti-feminist. A church which prohibits women from speaking in church does so only because they read about in the epistles. They are checking off a box of compliance with the Bible, but there is not the bone-deep understanding of maleness and femaleness as an eternal aspect of our personality. Their triune God has no parts nor passions, and is not “male” in anything but a metaphorical sense. As noted above, they do not believe in permanence of sexuality after this life.

By contrast the LDS Proclamation on the family specifies that “Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.” Our Heavenly Father is a man, and our Heavenly Mother is a woman. To become a husband and father is to take up the family business, to aspire to godhood.

The Catholic Church, like the LDS Church, has no women priests. They say they do so because Christ had no woman apostles and therefore they adhere to tradition. We say that we do so because men and women have different responsibilities, and priesthood is a responsibility belonging to men.

If you’re going to tell young men to quell their impulses towards violence and promiscuity (or, more pathetically, dissolution in pornography), you have to give them something to aspire to as men that is greater than being a schlubby husband to a women who at best tolerates you and at worst holds you in contempt. You have to give them a model of manhood that is worth sacrificing for, that is glorious. LDS doctrine provides us with that model, and I actually do believe that we do a pretty good job of living up to this ideal.⁸

When it’s really clicking, the LDS way of life exemplifies what feminists refer to as “benevolent sexism.” We love women, they love us, we just don’t think we’re the same, and that’s good, because we aren’t, never have been and never will be.

Foreordination and Inequality

The lodestar of modern left-liberalism is “equality,” which is really a term of art for cutting down the strong, successful, and beautiful to make everyone else feel better about themselves. Right wing publisher Mystery Grove put it best when he said, “Communism is when ugly deformed freaks make it illegal to be normal then rob and/or kill all successful people out of petty resentment and cruelty. The ideology is all just window dressing.”

Even ostensibly right-wing Christians have trouble resisting demands for “equality” because the word alone sounds like something that Jesus would support. “No respecter of persons, right? God doesn’t play favorites.”

I have no desire to argue LDS theology justifies inequality, per se. The Book of Mormon is if anything even clearer than the Bible in emphasizing that “all are alike unto God.” But enshrining equality as the highest of values, higher than righteousness itself, is clearly contrary to what Latter-day Saints know about pre-mortal life and eternity.

In LDS scripture, before the first man even set foot upon the Earth, God looked out upon the pre-mortal spirits and saw His “noble and great ones,” whom he foreordained as His “rulers” on the Earth.⁹ He noted to Abraham, “These two facts do exist, that there are two spirits, one being more intelligent than the other; there shall be another more intelligent than they; I am the Lord thy God, I am more intelligent than they all.”¹⁰ This view of “intelligence,” elsewhere defined in LDS scripture as “light and truth,” as something that men possess in unequal measure even before they come to earth, and as a basis for granting rightful rule unto some and not unto others, is offensive to equalitarianism, but it does conform with what our own eyes tell us about the world.

Likewise, the LDS view of eternity does not place all those redeemed by Christ into one uniform “Heaven.” Instead there are 3 degrees of glory, which are subdivided even further into separate “heavens or degrees”; this subdivision into levels of glory is perhaps as multiple as the number of souls inhabiting them. God does not play favorites, but “equality” as an independent principle simply is not a fundamental feature of the LDS concept of eternal life, and therefore we are justified in not accepting its dictates as binding upon us.

Some of the differences I’ve sketched out above are observable in practice; others are more notional. But the doctrinal scaffolding is there for LDS men to live their religion in ways that are aspirational to young men disaffected from the modern world. It would deform our religion to try and ape a movement just because it has become momentarily fashionable, but it’s healthy to ask ourselves if that movement has any criticisms that are valid even by our own standards. Even if that just means you lift more weights, it will be useful to you. And your wife, and the son who looks up to you as a model of manhood. You must be VITAL and DOMINATE like Joseph Smith.

“The Prophet came up while the brethren were moping around, and caught first one and them another and shook them up, and said, ‘Get out of here, and wrestle, jump, run, do anything but mope around; warm yourselves up; this inactivity will do nothing for soldiers.’ The words of the Prophet put life and energy into the men. A ring was soon formed, according to the custom of the people. The Prophet stepped into the ring, ready for tussle with any comer. Several went into the ring to try their strength, but each one was thrown by the prophet, until he had thrown several of the stoutest of the men present.”

-John D. Lee

1. https://www.jrganymede.com/2017/02/23/whence-pepe/

2. https://x.com/bronzeagemantis

3. April 1963 GC

4. D&C 130:18-19

5. D&C 76:55-58

6. https://x.com/bronzeagemantis/status/1646213900994752512

7. Bronze Age Mindset, pp. 50-51

8.

9. Abraham 3:22-23

10. Abraham 3:19