There is only one reason that true prophets have ever been rejected throughout history:
“That person does not meet my expectation for prophethood.”
Well, how were those expectations formed?
Below is a gallery of prophet images from movies and games:
In a recent Public Square article, I wrote about Jung’s notion of archetypes, which are powerful subconscious forms of reality:
Archetypes are perceived in concepts like hero, mother, warrior, trickster, rebel, magician, lover, wounded healer, and more. They are the basis for humanity’s stories, and we encounter the archetypes in our experiences of life.
But on its way into our conscious mind, an archetypal concept like apocalyptic vision passes like a game of telephone through our subconscious, where it is shaped by our culture along with our life experience and other reference points. We see this evidenced in the different personal stylistic and other “flavors” that characterize apocalyptic visions from prophetic figures in scripture.
The way we conceptualize the term “prophet” can be greatly warped by culture and other subconscious factors to a degree that we no longer have a healthy or realistic relationship with that archetype. The Christ spoke of John the Baptist and said, “What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind? But what went ye out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? behold, they that wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses.” Joseph Smith is reported to have gone in plain clothes to meet a group of new converts and asked one of them, “I suppose you are looking for an old man with a long, gray beard. What would you think if I told you I was Joseph Smith?”
In both of these instances, the questions being asked are interrogating the hearers’ experience of the archetype of prophet. Do they have an erroneous mental model of the prophet archetype based on their culture or other influences? In the prepper communities where people like Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow met, the archetype of prophet seems to have been greatly warped by Visions of Glory and other similar works that seem to conflate the archetypes of prophet and magician. Several individuals have gone so far as to personally identify with this warped prophet archetype, producing streams of fabulist false prophecy.
Our subconscious archetype of prophet can be shaped by our consumption of media like movies and video games, where prophet-figures demonstrate magical powers. Prophets are portrayed as wizard-magicians who remove the pain of uncertainty from the world by casting spells and doing dramatic sign-acts. Messages in books like Visions of Glory, or in the materials of the Isaiah Institute, speak to those archetypes.
It is not an accident that Visions of Glory is at the center of numerous horror stories of prophet-delusion, from Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow to Tim Ballard. when people consume those kinds of materials, they end up with a mismatch between their subconscious prophet-archetype, and the real thing. I described that here:
That subconscious formation and reinforcement of archetypes explains why so many people who consume Visions of Glory and a number of other materials are unable to affirm that President Nelson is a legitimate prophet of God. They end up seeing him as merely a “key-holder,” whereas people like Thom Harrison who fit the magician/wizard archetype are viewed as the true prophets in the church. People develop a mismatch between archetype and reality, which is the basis for all prophet-rejection throughout history.
A serious study of scripture and history would do wonders for recalibrating our expectations and lessening the power of our archetypes. We could start with a serious study of John the Baptist:
John the Baptist, preeminent prophet
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