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Show farms. The important feature of the City of Zion which is evident in nearly all Mormon communtities is the simple fact that the settlers lived in towns rather than spread out on individual farmsteads. This simple but powerful concept--an opposition between group and individual values--visually defines the Mormon western landscape. The concept of Zion then provided the Saints both with a plan for salvation and settlement. The Gathering spread the gospel, was instrumental in assembling the Saints, and offered, through the Order of Enoch, a method for preparing the earth, politically, socially, and materially, for the millennium. revolutionary program. It was an innovative, almost a In leaving the apostate world behind, the followers of Joseph Smith detached themselves from what Brigham young called the "tradition of their fathers" and looked forward to the building of a new world free from the plagues of the older, corrupt society. 53 The new social order being constructed could not resemble the old, but must stand in opposition to the larger society around it. If Jacksonian America of the early 1800s championed popular democracy, Zion would be theocratic and authoritarian. If a free-market, laissez-faire economic philosophy reigned, then Zion would be cooperative and communitarian. If Gentile society preferred a dispersed settlement pattern, Zion would be a nucleated community. 54 Life in Zion was to be a new experience and for the Saints, the old rules had to be discarded and a new set put into place. The Mormon Zion followed a millenarian pattern suggested in Kenhelm Burridge's New Heaven, New Earth; it was a "new-culture-in-the-making. 1155 Building Zion then implies the act of becoming, the process by which a new society is brought into being. 51 The act was synthetic, for as it |
