Post by dgriffin on Aug 9, 2009 0:57:49 GMT -5
Slate
How Is America Going To End?
The Catholic Church helped preserve Roman civilization. Can Mormonism do the same for America?
When America disappears 100 or 500 or 1,000 years from now, it will be gone but not forgotten. As the world's leading military, economic, and cultural power since World War II, the United States will linger in the global gene pool and influence whatever comes next. But how exactly will Americanness get transmitted to the civilizations that replace us?
A better candidate to serve as America's time capsule: the Mormons. In an aside in 2007's Are We Rome?, Cullen Murphy posits that Salt Lake City could become "the Vatican of the third millennium," with the Mormon Church "propagating a particular, canonical version of America."
www.slate.com/id/2224050?nav=wp
Or, I suppose, the Southern Baptist Convention. Or the Church of Stop Shopping.
How Is America Going To End?
The Catholic Church helped preserve Roman civilization. Can Mormonism do the same for America?
When America disappears 100 or 500 or 1,000 years from now, it will be gone but not forgotten. As the world's leading military, economic, and cultural power since World War II, the United States will linger in the global gene pool and influence whatever comes next. But how exactly will Americanness get transmitted to the civilizations that replace us?
A better candidate to serve as America's time capsule: the Mormons. In an aside in 2007's Are We Rome?, Cullen Murphy posits that Salt Lake City could become "the Vatican of the third millennium," with the Mormon Church "propagating a particular, canonical version of America."
www.slate.com/id/2224050?nav=wp
Or, I suppose, the Southern Baptist Convention. Or the Church of Stop Shopping.
