Religions of the Future
Thoughts on The Disposition of Mormonism
Nate Oman’s essay offers three available dispositional stances, and argues that Mormonism best fits the conservative mold. The relationship between dispositions and politics is imperfect, Oman notes, and political conservatives—like those in power in the United States now—can sometimes make dispositional conservatives squirm. But the elective affinity between the theology of Mormonism and the conservative disposition is undeniable.
As someone with neither authority nor stake in interpreting Mormonism, I want to argue that Oman may anachronistically distort the alternatives to conservatism, and understate how dispositionally profligate Christianity (of which Oman says Mormonism is unquestionably some kind of offshoot) has been over two millennia. Let me explain.
Oman treats liberals and progressives as contractarians, at two points in his essay returning to how un-conservative they are in replacing covenants with contracts, and the choice they presuppose and liberation they sometimes sponsor.
But liberals have rarely been contractarians, and weren’t between the 1790s and 1970s. They could see individual freedom as itself the characteristic of a new form of society or the product of social evolution. The past had no inherent authority, but liberals insisted on regarding progress as emergent from social dynamics between past and future. (All the thinkers Oman cites as liberals were Anglophones, but the first time anyone called themselves liberals, long after Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and long before John Rawls, was in France and Spain.) To the extent this is true, liberals and progressives for the longest time don’t really fit Oman’s descriptions.
And the commitment to emancipation in history that they have shared—even if one group leaned conservative after the French Revolution and the other radical—reflected a Christian prehistory, as many liberals themselves have understood. Whatever may be true of Mormonism, Christianity made liberalism and progressivism imaginable, not least by casting history as a forum of Christian opportunity, especially in reformist variants to call on humanity to ready itself for redemption.
If all of this is true, privileging the conservative disposition that some religious tradition like Judaism or Christianity (and—who knows?—perhaps Mormonism too) supposedly best fits may efface that liberals and progressives have generally accepted that they exist between past and future, and inherited this stance equally as much from the religious past.
Obviously, none of this means that there isn’t a lot at stake in the comparison and contrast of the dispositions. But freedom and liberation need not traffic in the fiction of presuppositionless individual freedom, and religion has never functioned as an exclusively preservative force. Indeed, it made all the current options possible, and might not take sides among them, even if their followers need to do so. No wonder: liberalism and progressivism have always been religions of the future.
This essay, part of the forum How Mormonism Sees the World, was written in response to Nate Oman’s The Disposition of Mormonism, published May 1, 2025.
Samuel Moyn is the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University whose personal website can be found here.
Art by Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011).
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