Central to Hugh Nibley’s religious convictions was a longing for Zion. He felt out of place in the late-20th-century American society, which he considered profoundly flawed and in need of fundamental rethinking. In fact, in light of Mormonism’s mandate to build Zion, Hugh Nibley believed that Mormons who bought into America’s standard economic liberalism were culpable for forgetting or ignoring this divine obligation.
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Learn more. This is an excerpt from Reapproaching Zion: New Essays on Mormon Social Thought. Read the book for the rest of the story.
Hugh Nibley envisioned Zion first as a literal place, and as a literal communitarian economic system, standing in direct contrast with the selfish economies that would surround it. He never seems to have bought into the modern Mormon vision of Zion as being merely “a quest for personal spiritual preparation,” which can occur wherever an individual lives.
Rather, Nibley’s view of Zion was reminiscent of early Mormons’ view that Zion was a place to which the Saints would gather. He did not view Zion solely as a literal place, of course. He also understood it as a radical critique of our dominant economic understanding.
His critique of the dominant Babylonian economy ultimately demands absolute separation between Zion and Babylon: “Babylon and Zion cannot mix in any degree; a Zion that makes concessions is no longer Zion.”
Nibley demands that Zion embody an absolute purity and separation. Because American economic life lacks that purity and separation, Nibley almost reflexively rejects it.
In the world of the twenty-first century, though, Zion cannot remain fully separate from Babylon, and certainly cannot escape every Babylonian influence. At the very least, Zion and its residents will be subject to the laws of one or more non-Zion countries. Those laws will necessarily influence how Zion is organized and how its residents act.
Notwithstanding Nibley’s absolutism in this regard, though, building Zion is an obligation we must undertake, and we must do so fully aware of the compromises we can and cannot make.
Hugh Nibley’s Zion
Hugh Nibley’s conception of Zion is ultimately two-fold. Most essentially, in Nibley’s conception, Zion is the “pure in heart.” This purity, Nibley tells us, requires Zion to exclude anything impure. Zion cannot mix with Babylon, or else it is no longer Zion.
But Nibley does not conceive of Zion solely as an attitude among believers. Nibley’s Zion also has physical heft. It is a city, one that has existed on Earth in the past and will exist here again in the future.
We must imagine a Zion society.
We may not recognize Zion merely by its “[b]uildings, walls, streets, and gates”; its residents may not appear as “throngs in shining robes.” But Zion has buildings, walls, streets, gates, and residents. In addition to being the pure in heart, Nibley’s Zion “is also a real city or any number of real cities.”
Of course, Zion differs from the traditional cities we know. We lack the skills to construct something so perfect and pure. As a result, it is not our right or responsibility to construct Zion. Instead, we must have two principal obligations with respect to Zion.
First, we must “conceive of it.” We must imagine a Zion society, wrestle with what that society consists of, and imagine how we could be part of that society. This conception seems central to Nibley’s project: he spends his time arguing that the society in which we live is not only imperfect, but is antithetical to the society in which we were born to live. Nibley wants to assure us that not only is Zion our ultimate goal, but that Zion is an attainable goal.
Second, although we do not have the ability to build Zion, we must be actively “preparing the ground to receive it.” When we have properly prepared the world for Zion, Zion will be “brought down from above” as it has been in the past.
Money is the tool Satan offers us to get power over other people.
And how do the Saints prepare the ground for Zion? According to Nibley, we prepare ourselves.
Zion is, after all, not the buildings or the roads or the clothes of the inhabitants. It is the pure in heart. And to become pure in heart, we must put Zion foremost in our hearts and minds. We must forsake Babylon. We must give up idolatry and covetousness. We must not pretend that we can somehow navigate both Zion and Babylon—allowing even a taste of Babylon to seep into Zion ruins Zion’s purity.
And when we can no longer support Zion, “it is bodily removed—taken up to heaven.”
Nibley does more than merely lay out our obligations to conceive of and prepare for Zion. He also offers what he sees as the necessary foundation for our preparation. According to Nibley, the “united order” is a necessary prerequisite to Zion’s existence on earth.
Nibley does not define exactly what he means by united order, but for our purposes, its exact definition is unimportant. Rather, the united order necessary to create Zion is an economic system based on some form of altruism and communalism, where members privilege the good of the community, rather than the individualism and selfishness that presumptively underlie a functioning capitalist economy.
If we wish to see Zion descend into our world, Nibley tells us, we must reshape our economic efforts to support the Zion community, rather than to ensure our maximum personal consumption.
It is worth noting that, as Nibley lays out his vision of Zion, money is notable in its absence. He considers money antithetical to the project of Zion. Money, in Nibley’s mind, allows us to consume more than we need and impels us to work at that which has no lasting value to acquire that which has no intrinsic value. Money is inextricably linked to inequality.
Ultimately, and most damningly, money is the tool Satan offers us to get power over other people.
Eschewing money would lead to significant impediments to trade with the outside world, of course, but such impediments may constitute a feature of Nibley’s vision of Zion.
Whether Nibley is right is ultimately irrelevant.
Zion, he says, must not be corrupted by Babylon, and the only way to ensure that Zion not be corrupted by Babylon is to keep Babylon out. Where the inhabitants of Zion are concerned with fulfilling their needs, and are uninterested in consumptions of luxury goods, Zion can remain self-sufficient, according to Nibley.
Whether Nibley is right that the negative consequences of money are fundamentally incompatible with Zion is ultimately irrelevant. A twenty-first-century Zion must have access to money. Money does more than facilitate trade; it does more than permit overconsumptive self-gratification; it does more than merely permit individuals (or the church) to acquire the land on which Zion will sit.
If that were the extent of Zion’s need for money, Zion could survive without money. But Zion needs money to comply with certain of its and its residents’ legal obligations, as we will see shortly.
Purity in a Babylonian World
In its early iterations, Zion managed to keep itself free from Babylon by, among other things, being physically separate from Babylon. Enoch, for example, led the people of God, and eventually established a city for his people to live in.
That Zion appears to have been in the mountains, separate from the surrounding people. As Hugh Nibley explains, Enoch’s city of Zion represented “the mass evacuation of a polluted planet.” And after Enoch evacuated God’s people from the polluted Babylon, he was able to keep that separation, and keep Zion’s enemies at bay, by his powerful invocation of the word of the Lord.
As a result, while the surrounding world fought and spilled each other’s blood, Zion existed peacefully apart from the chaos.
Similarly, after Joseph Smith’s death, Brigham Young led the Saints deep into the frontier, where they were “free from the restraints of gentile society.” Away from persecution, and from the corrupting influence of the American Babylon, Brigham Young believed that the Saints could start to prepare for Zion: “We are not going to wait for angels, or for Enoch and his company to come and build up Zion, but we are going to build it.”
Originally, Utah provided the distance that the Mormons needed to build Zion. While Utah technically belonged to and was governed by the United States, in practice, the limitations on transportation and communication left the Mormons isolated and autonomous.
Away from non-Mormon influence and governance, they worked to establish an economic system based on communalism and cooperation. The Mormon’s isolation, however, was based more on convenience than reality. Once the limitations on transportation and communication could be overcome, the Mormons’ Utah Zion would no longer be separate.
Like Hugh Nibley, Brigham Young was afraid of the corrupting influence of Babylon. He is famously reported to have said that his greatest fear was that the Mormons “will get rich in this country, forget God and his people, wax fat, and kick themselves out of the Church and go to hell.”
Wealth, in Brigham Young’s mind, would allow Babylon to infringe on Zion, and could destroy Zion’s purity. But attaining wealth was not the sole danger to the Mormon’s pure Zion. In the face of the impending completion of the transcontinental railroad, Brigham Young expressed the fear that it would “bring a host of non-Mormon settlers to Utah and bolster the economic power of non-Mormon merchants.” The railroad would bring Babylon directly into the heart of Zion, allowing Zion to interact with Babylon, to covet what Babylon had.
Today, there is essentially no frontier beyond which we can build Zion. With very few exceptions, all land on the Earth is subject to a national (and sometimes a sub- or supranational) government. Technology allows representatives of the governing state to communicate with and travel to essentially any land over which they exercise sovereignty.
As a result, the Zion we build will not even have temporary respite from Babylon.
Irrespective of where we establish Zion—and, in fact, irrespective of whether we build Zion as an actual, physical place, as Nibley anticipated, or construct it as a more metaphorical economy-within-an-economy—Zion will not exist separate from Babylonian laws and regulation, and will have to function both within and separate from the surrounding government.
Book excerpt. From Reapproaching Zion: New Essays on Mormon Social Thought edited by Samuel D. Brunson and Nathan B. Oman. Copyright © 2020 by Samuel D. Brunson and Nathan B. Oman. Published by By Common Consent Press. Used by permission of the publisher. Minor style and grammar changes have been made for an improved online reading experience.
About the author
Samuel D. Brunson is the Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development, and a Georgia Reithal Professor of Law, at Loyal University Chicago. He holds a JD from Columbia University and is the author of several publications related to taxes and nonprofits, including God and the IRS: Accommodating Religious Practice in Tax Law, Brigham Young and the First Federal Income Tax, and The Past, Present, and Future of LDS Financial Transparency.
Further reading
Learn more about Latter-day Saint approaches to building Zion in these articles:
- Brigham Young and the First Federal Income Tax
- Did Hugh Nibley Fake His Notes?
- King Follet Sermon: A Biography
- What Was Brigham Young’s Swift Pony Express?
- Who Were Joseph Smith’s Political Missionaries?
Approaching Zion resources
- Reapproaching Zion: New Essays on Mormon Social Thought (BCC Press)
- The Approaching Zion Project: Index (Times and Seasons)
- Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Vol. 9: Approaching Zion (Deseret Book)
- “We Will Still Weep for Zion”: Hugh Nibley on War and Wealth (BoM Central)
- Oman & Brunson, “Reapproaching Zion: New Essays on Mormon Social Thought” (Association of Mormon Letters)