Back in early August, Susannah Black Roberts, Senior Editor of the Christian journal Plough Quarterly, issued this provocation on Twitter/X:

This is me late to the game, but like… Mormon theology is basically Nietzsche right… Why did I just notice this… THAT is why Bryan Johnson is like that!

First off, we should brush aside Roberts’s comments about the ex-LDS Bryan Johnson and his search for a medical, godless, eternal life. Johnson no longer practices nor believes the doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Roberts’ comment was certainly intended as a criticism, but hopefully, one issued for the purpose of engendering some good theological conversation. Of course, this statement was made casually on a casual social media platform, but for the LDS faithful and those like me, interested in or sympathetic to the LDS faith, this is still a statement worth engaging. Why would one of the main editors of one of America’s leading Christian publications, someone who has done great, quality work with a fantastic publication, make such a statement?

Indeed, a cursory search on social media or various search engines shows that this editor is not alone in her view of Latter-day Saints. Therefore, Roberts brought up something excellent for us to consider—and in an epigrammatic way that old provocateur Friedrich himself could appreciate. Taking this thought seriously, I discussed it at length over the past few months with a good friend of mine, Eric McDonough, a faithful member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a thoughtful person, and a good friend. I came out of those conversations with a few points which I feel ought to be considered. After all, there is an unfortunate lack of serious grappling with The Book of Mormon among non-LDS thinkers and writers—which ought to be corrected.

As a point of clarification, I am not trying to pick a fight with Mrs. Roberts. I love the work she has done, especially at Plough. I am simply trying to respond to her in a manner in which a serious person ought to respond to a good provocation: by using it as a prompt for reflection.

“Proper Christians” and Latter-day Saints

First, we must momentarily get over the distaste many good people have for Friedrich Nietzsche and his legacy. Roberts’s intended insult highly oversimplifies Nietzsche and misunderstands Mormonism. In “What Does Nihilism Affirm?” delivered at Pembroke College, Oxford, and in another 2017 lecture, American philosopher and LDS member James Faulconer shows that “Nietzschean nihilism” (understood correctly) is not only compatible with Christian thought, but does a better job addressing important philosophical problems than alternative views. Nietzsche should not be dismissed simply because he has a bad reputation in some circles. As Cornel West says, “Every major intellectual has to come to terms with Nietzsche,” even if they ultimately disagree with him. 

Second, we must realize that Roberts, like many such Christians, believes that the Church of Jesus Christ gets God wrong in a way similar to how Nietzsche gets God wrong. According to this view, both members of the Church of Jesus Christ and Nietzsche believe they can make themselves into gods or even God Himself. Those believers also see “proper” Christianity as Christ reaching down to pick up the oppressed and the powerless in the palm of His hand for protection and asking His followers to prioritize doing the same. (The same individuals tend to think that Latter-day Saint theology is somehow opposed or indifferent to this.) Additionally, these Christian people seem to think of ‘Mormons’ as not properly monotheistic, while some would even go so far as to say they are polytheistic.  

Despite the supposed anti-Christian philosophies espoused by Nietzsche and his followers, who often misconstrue his admittedly esoteric teachings, it is important to remember that Nietzsche wished to condemn the lack of vitality that he saw in the essentially godless modern iterations of European Christianity. It is possible, I believe, to make the case that Latter-day Saints, even as seen in The Book of Mormon itself, also critique the inert “slave morality” of modern Western Christianity, particularly in the forms it existed at the time of The Book of Mormon’s publication in 1830—a full three decades before Nietzsche’s first publication. Importantly, The Book of Mormon amazingly and shockingly addresses the major philosophical questions facing the modernizing nineteenth-century world, but also by predating and predicting them, as must be obvious even for those who only consider The Book of Mormon as having been written in the 1820s.

What Nietzsche Actually Wrote

In such works as On the Genealogy of Morality and Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche critiques Christianity—and similar religions—as having developed a “slave morality.” A slave morality reverses the natural order of things, glorifying suffering and victimhood and vilifying strength and power. He believes this was innovated by the oppressed in Rome to overthrow the Hellenistic powers. Nietzsche also lumped Stoicism in with this critique, claiming that Stoicism paved the way for this overthrow by being a philosophy of resignation, making its practitioners weak, and even wrongly making Zeus into a monotheistic god. He thinks these beliefs were implemented subtly, starting with slaves and servants, then women, then men. Ultimately, Nietzsche felt that this kind of Christianity encouraged the masses to accept subjugation, powerlessness, and suffering as goods in and of themselves. This was Nietzsche’s complaint with Christianity rather than a critique of Christ Himself, whom Nietzsche greatly admired and held in high esteem, even above Socrates.

Nietzsche saw Jesus as an exemplar of authenticity and amor fati which encapsulates an embracing of fate, reality, and the whole of life. He saw Jesus as living a life of radical love and forgiveness. In sharp contrast, however, Nietzsche saw the institutionalized Christian Church—systematized in the Catholic Church and wrongly demystified with the Reformation—as adopting a “slave morality,” of being life-denying and even life-defying because it stifled human creativity, potential, and vitality.

Instead, Nietzsche sought to build on and correct Schopenhauer’s “will to life” with his embrace of the “will to power”—the desire to live, to embrace suffering for life not because of life, to overcome individual weaknesses, to channel force and strength for creative rather than destructive purposes. In a word, to say “Yes!” to life.

Nietzsche and The Book of Mormon

Similarly, The Book of Mormon supports, highlights, and emphasizes agency. As many prophets and apostles have loved to say in conference talks, “Pray as though everything depends on God, and work as though everything depends on you.” The Book of Mormon regularly teaches a form of self-reliance and righteousness pursued by an active rather than a passive engagement with the suffering of life for life. 2 Nephi 2 clarifies this by stating that redemption comes through Jesus the Messiah, that freedom of choice and real agency are essential to existence and the progression of man, that Adam fell in The Garden that men might exist for good, and that humans are free to choose true freedom and eternal life. One section reads: 

Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy. And the Messiah cometh in the fullness of time, that he may redeem the children of men from the fall. And because that they are redeemed from the fall they have become free forever, knowing good from evil; to act for themselves and not to be acted upon, save it be by the punishment of the law at the great and last day, according to the commandments which God hath given. Wherefore, men are free according to the flesh; and all things are given them which are expedient unto man. And they are free to choose liberty and eternal life, through the great Mediator of all men, or to choose captivity and death, according to the captivity and power of the devil; for he seeketh that all men might be miserable like unto himself.

This is not a passive morality. Rather, like Nietzsche’s, it is a morality for individuals who are highly accountable for their specific actions and are essentially proactive in their salvation (though not through so-called “saved by works” doctrine, as some Christians accuse). It is a living engagement with The Truth, with the foundational nature of the universe.

A key illustration of this is the way the Book of Mormon contrasts the active righteousness of the Nephites with the decadent laziness of the Lamanites. Or the way the book condemns the institution of priestcraft among the Nephites by Nehor, as well as condemning the Zoramites in Alma 31, who began to worship idols and practice in synagogues that appealed to their vanity and moral relativism.

So, in a certain regard, Mrs. Roberts is right to say that Latter-day Saints have something in common with Nietzsche’s philosophies. Both reject a system of morality that allows acceptance of passivity. Both embrace agency and proactiveness. Both encourage taking ownership of one’s own life rather than remaining subservient and dependent—“to act for themselves and not to be acted upon.” Though this, of course, should not contradict the commandment that followers of Christ, as the LDS faith demands, make and keep covenants that bind them to God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, and, in that regard, unlike some of Nietzsche’s desirings, Christians are not the sole authors of their own lives.

In his own way, too, Nietzsche somewhat supports the view of the Book of Mormon, the Book of Moses, and Joseph Smith’s “King Follet Discourse” that God is a truly real being to whom eternal, spiritual men should aspire. Nietzsche certainly explicitly wanted to leave behind the powerless, abstracted God of modern Europe (Pascal’s “God of the Philosophers”) for a wilder, more primitive god or gods. The God of Latter-day Saint theology is a powerful, physical, “wild” God—not wild in the Dionysian sense Nietzsche desired but certainly not separated from the God of the Old Testament as the God of modern Christianity often seems to be.  This is God as present, material, in real existence, ever-expanding, eternally progressing, dynamic; God as the Hebrews experienced Him in the wilderness, as Lehi experienced Him in leaving Israel for America. As Terryl Givens puts it in Wrestling the Angel, LDS beliefs represent a “drastic redefining of primitive Christianity and its tangible, speaking God. … The texts of [Joseph] Smith’s revelations at times sound like the voice of God orienting a lost pedestrian to the site for New Jerusalem.”

Additionally, it is not unusual that Nietzsche himself should help people better understand and adhere to religion, Christianity, and even the LDS faith. Harold Bloom implicitly compares Nietzsche’s critiques of Christianity to Joseph Smith’s in The American Religion. Even Hugh Nibley was not against learning from Nietzsche, as seen in Nibley’s 1979 essay “Conflict in the Churches Between the God of the Bible and the God of the Philosophers.” Illustratively, in January 2024, Wayfare ran an interview with Charles Stang, a professor of Early Christian Thought and Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, in which he said:

Nietzsche … was a huge catalyst for my return to religion, to Christianity. I think in some ways his book The Anti-Christ  … catalyzed my own interest in learning about early Christianity. … Nobody takes questions as seriously as Nietzsche. … What really gripped me with Nietzsche was this idea that we can become so much more than we are. That was like a siren call that just went straight into the center of me, and I think it was what I was always hoping Christianity would be about. And in some ways, of course, Christianity is about that. But the version of Christianity I encountered in a suburban Midwestern upper-middle-class white church seemed not at all to foreground that project of self-transformation and self-transcendence. I heard it in Nietzsche, and I fell hard for him, and that question has been an absolute mainstay of my adult life.

The “Madman” and Joseph Smith

In The Gay Science (which Faulconer usefully examines in his 2020 book Thinking Otherwise: Theological Explorations of Joseph Smith’s Revelations), in a precursor parable to the infamous Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche says there once was a “madman” who ran to the market seeking God, but the people of the market did not believe in God and mocked him. So the “madman” chastised the people, saying that God was indeed real but that they had killed him, causing great harm to the world, making an irreparable crack in history. When the people of the market only stared at the “madman” with astonishment at his interruption, he realized he had come too early and that the citizens there did not yet realize what they had done. So the “madman” ran to all the churches he could find, trying to make them understand “the death of God.” When the churchgoers argued with him, he could only reply, “What, after all then, are these churches now but the tombs of God?” Both the people of the market and the people of the churches had “killed God” through the emptiness and unseriousness of their belief and the poverty of their credence, and they had locked His body away in the sepulchers of their powerless churches.

Likewise, in Pearl of Great Price, in Chapter 1 of “Joseph Smith—History” (verses 18-19), Smith says about the appearance of The Father and The Son to him in the forest:

My object in going to inquire of the Lord was to know which of all the sects was right, that I might know which to join. No sooner, therefore, did I get possession of myself, so as to be able to speak, then I asked the Personages who stood above me in the light, which of all the sects was right (for at this time, it had never entered into my heart that all were wrong)—and which I should join. I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt; that: “they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof.”

For reasons such as these, it appears that the Book of Mormon miraculously appeared in history at just the right time, including many elements of classic and classical philosophy within it, essentially baptizing the best classical philosophical ideas, answering many issues of Enlightenment philosophy, and thinking the thoughts of the best modern philosophers before they even conceived of them. And it is true, of course, that statements like 2 Nephi 2:11’s “It must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things” places Latter-day Saint theology outside of typical Christian orthodoxy.

Additionally, Latter-day Saint theology answers Nietzsche’s issues with historical Christianity in part by emphasizing that followers of Christ ought, as Romans 8 says, to remember they “have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear” and that “we are the children of God: and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.”

Bringing it all Together

Latter-day Saint theology explicitly works to answer the problems with Christianity—and the Christian-influenced world at large—that were obvious in the nineteenth century, issues that continue and persist to the present day, the kinds of problems Nietzsche expressed so thoroughly in his work but never quite answered himself.

As Eric McDonough said to me when we discussed the topic of this article:

The Book of Mormon synthesizes all these advanced things quite adeptly, and makes it look easy, doing so with simple language. Joseph Smith was 23 when it was published, and he had no context for any of this from his environs. And he dictated it in one draft. This is what it looks like when God moves in history. He does little things—like publish a book—from an obscure source. Then he lets those things change the world through the power of the Holy Ghost—the power of the truth of the idea—as people accept it with their agency. This is how the Condescension itself worked and even the Atonement, which was acted out in relative obscurity on a thief’s cross. If God were to act in history to restore His authority and His doctrine, this is how He would do it.

When people who are against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issue provocations against the LDS faith (which common occurrence is often never met with any intellectual rigor by thinkers outside the Church), it would do the faithful well to remember why they believe what they believe, and how this helps them live a good life, by the grace of God. For those, like me, who are not LDS but are Christian, it would do us well to learn from the same. As Joseph Smith said in History of the Church, “By proving contraries, truth is made manifest.”

The post Nietzsche and The Book of Mormon: Unexpected Philosophical Parallels appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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