Zionist & Mormon Connections
It starts with a word. Zion. Drop it into a room of Mormons and it means the New Jerusalem — a holy city to be built in America, a gathering of the pure in heart, a society perfected in the last days. Drop it into a room of Jewish Zionists and it means the ancient homeland, the return, the covenant fulfilled, Jerusalem restored. Drop it into a screening of The Matrix and it's the last human city — the refuge of the awakened, the free, the chosen remnant who escaped the machine. Drop it into Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and it becomes Golem City — a walled ghetto where the augmented are warehoused, managed, and contained.
The same word. The same cluster of ideas trailing behind it every single time: a chosen people, a sacred place of gathering, a messianic figure, a promise of transcendence. And in every iteration, when you look hard enough — a control architecture built around that very promise.
This is not a coincidence. This is a blueprint. And once you see it, you start finding it everywhere.
Part One
Most people think of Mormons and Zionists as occupying entirely separate worlds — one a 19th-century American religious movement, the other a Jewish national liberation project. But the connections run deeper, earlier, and stranger than the mainstream version of either history will tell you.
They both call themselves Israel. Not metaphorically. Literally. Mormon theology teaches that members of the LDS Church are physical descendants of the ancient Israelites — specifically the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh — making them not Christians who adopted Israel's story but actual Israel, continuing into a new phase of history. Everyone outside both communities — whether Mormon or Jewish — is referred to by both groups using the same word: Gentiles. Two separate covenant communities. Same language. Same framework. Same self-understanding as a chosen people set apart from the world.
"History unequivocally shows that the LDS Church was NOT neutral on the question of whether there should be a Jewish state in Palestine — it supported what became Zionism decades before Theodore Herzl drew his first breath."
— Jewish Journal, Mormon-Zionist relations essayMormons were proto-Zionists before Zionism had a name. In 1841 — more than 50 years before Theodor Herzl convened his First Zionist Congress — Joseph Smith sent a Mormon elder named Orson Hyde to Jerusalem with a specific mission: climb the Mount of Olives and dedicate the land for the return of the Jewish people. Hyde did exactly that, praying for God to make the land "abundantly fruitful when possessed by its rightful heirs." The LDS Church would later suggest that Hyde's prayer helped catalyze the spiritual awakening that drove Jews worldwide to begin returning to their homeland. Academic research has gone further, arguing that early Mormonism itself emerged from what one scholar calls "American proto-Zionism" — a current of 1820s New York movements aimed at Jewish restoration that directly shaped Joseph Smith's founding theology.
Both groups were persecuted, scattered, and forced to build new communities from scratch. Mormons were driven out of Missouri by government extermination order, expelled from Illinois, and marched across a continent to Utah. Jews were dispersed across two millennia, surviving pogroms, inquisitions, and genocide before building a state in hostile territory. Both communities came out of that crucible with identical cultural signatures: extraordinary emphasis on family, education, charitable networks, community cohesion, and what observers from both inside and outside describe as "disproportionate success" relative to their numbers. Both groups look at that history and see divine covenant. Both look at their persecutors and see Babylon.
Chosen people: Mormons claim literal Israelite descent. Zionists are the Jewish people — God's covenant nation.
Sacred geography: Mormons — Independence, Missouri (New Jerusalem). Zionists — Jerusalem, the original Zion.
Persecution narrative: Both groups were systematically persecuted and displaced before gathering to their promised land.
Messianic endpoint: Both await a messianic figure who will complete the gathering and inaugurate a new age.
Outsider label: Both call everyone outside their community "Gentiles."
Literal gathering: Both teach that the scattered must physically return to a specific geographic location.
The Encyclopedia of Mormonism has an entry on Zionism. BYU — the flagship Mormon university, owned and operated directly by the LDS Church — has a campus in Jerusalem. The relationship between these two communities is not incidental. It is theological, historical, and deeply structural. They are running parallel versions of the same operating system.
Part Two
Here is where most people's knowledge of Mormonism stops — and where the rabbit hole opens.
Mormon theology contains a doctrine that is radical even by the standards of fringe religion: humans can become gods. This is not metaphor. The LDS teaching of "exaltation" holds that God the Father was once a mortal man who achieved godhood, and that faithful Mormons are on the same trajectory — ascending through eternal progression toward literal divinity. The King Follett sermon, delivered by Joseph Smith in 1844, states it plainly: "You have got to learn how to be gods yourselves."
Now introduce technology into that framework. If the theological goal is godhood — omniscience, transcendence, perfected existence — and technology is rapidly producing tools that expand human cognition, extend lifespan, merge biological and digital intelligence, then for a Mormon transhumanist, these are not separate projects. They are the same project.
This is not a fringe interpretation invented by outsiders. It is a formal organized movement with its own website, leadership structure, and theological framework. The Mormon Transhumanist Association at transfigurism.org explicitly reconciles LDS theology with transhumanist goals — godhood through enhancement, human augmentation as spiritual progression, technology as the mechanism of the divine ascent that Mormon doctrine already promises.
BYU's stated mission is "to assist individuals in their quest for perfection and eternal life." The CEO of Neuralink — the company implanting chips in human brains — is a BYU graduate and Mormon missionary.
Jared Birchall, CEO of Neuralink — Elon Musk's brain-computer interface company currently implanting devices into human skulls — graduated from Brigham Young University and served two years as a Mormon missionary before entering the world of high finance and ultimately running the most invasive human augmentation company on earth. Neuralink's own stated mission is to "unlock human potential" beyond biological limits. BYU's stated institutional mission is to assist in "the quest for perfection and eternal life." The language is different. The destination is identical.
When you understand that Mormon theology already teaches humans are on a trajectory toward godhood — and that the Mormon Transhumanist Association is actively arguing that technology is how you get there — the presence of a Mormon missionary-turned-BYU-graduate at the helm of a brain-chip company stops looking like a coincidence and starts looking like a natural career path.
Part Three
The Wachowskis did not name the last human city Zion by accident. The Matrix trilogy is drenched in Jewish mystical architecture — Gnostic philosophy, Kabbalistic themes, Exodus narrative, messianic prophecy — layered so deliberately that the symbolism operates on multiple levels simultaneously.
On the surface: humanity enslaved inside a false reality, a chosen liberator (Neo — note: an anagram of "One") rises to free his people and lead them to Zion. It is the Exodus story running on future hardware. The machines are Egypt. The Matrix is slavery. Neo is Moses. Zion is the promised land.
But the Wachowskis embedded a second, darker layer. The Architect's revelation in Reloaded tears the mythology apart: Zion is not freedom. Zion is part of the system. The machines always knew where it was. It has been built and destroyed five times. "The One" is not a genuine liberator — he is a programmed function, a pressure valve, a necessary anomaly the system generates and then recycles. The prophecy of the messiah is itself a control mechanism. The people of Zion believe they are the awakened, the free, the chosen — and that belief is precisely what keeps the larger system stable.
Enslaved people inside a false reality. A chosen liberator. A promised refuge called Zion. Direct structural retelling of the Jewish Exodus — machine Egypt, Matrix slavery, Neo as Moses.
Neo as a constructed being deployed to protect his people — not fully human, animated by a higher code. Jewish mythology's Golem translated into post-human form.
Zion is permitted to exist by the machines as a release valve. The messiah is a programmed function. Liberation is managed. The awakened are still inside a system designed around their belief in their own freedom.
The Gnostic layer runs beneath all of it. Gnosticism — itself rooted in Jewish mystical tradition — holds that the material world is a false prison constructed by a false god, the Demiurge, and that liberation comes only through hidden knowledge, gnosis. The Matrix is a near-perfect cinematic rendering of Gnostic cosmology. The machines are the Demiurge. The Matrix is the false world. The red pill is gnosis. And Zion — in the Gnostic reading — is the community of the knowing, the small remnant who have seen through the illusion.
What makes the Matrix Zion so unsettling when placed next to the real-world ones is this: the film is asking whether the entire architecture — chosen people, promised sanctuary, messianic deliverer, covenant community — can be engineered from the outside as a management tool. Whether belief in your own liberation can itself be the cage.
Part Four
Deus Ex is not a game series that happens to touch on these themes. It is a game series built from the inside using Jewish intellectual tradition as its structural foundation.
Warren Spector, creator of the original Deus Ex, has stated directly that his game design philosophy — forcing players to question rules, argue with the system, form their own moral positions through dialogue — is what he calls "Talmudic." He credits his Jewish background as the direct source of the series' core design DNA. This matters because it means the Jewish mythological and theological elements woven through Deus Ex are not decorative. They are architectural.
In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, set in a near-future world of corporate-controlled human augmentation, one of the central figures is William Taggart — a Mormon character who leads the Humanity Front, the primary anti-augmentation movement. The writers deliberately placed a Mormon at the center of the debate over whether humanity should accept technological transcendence. On one side: corporations pushing augmentation as progress, evolution, liberation. On the other: a Mormon leader arguing that something essentially human is being lost. Both sides are framed as sincere. Neither is simply right.
The game's world includes a detailed fictional history in which Israel is attacked by a coalition of Arab nations, triggering a war that leads to the Illuminati tightening control over the Middle East — Zionist geopolitics mapped directly onto the dystopian future timeline. The series is running every thread simultaneously: Jewish mythology, Mormon theology, transhumanist aspiration, and Illuminati control structure.
In the sequel, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, augmented humans have been segregated into walled districts following a global catastrophe called the "Aug Incident." The most notorious of these is Útulek Complex — known as Golem City.
A Golem in Jewish mythology is a being constructed from raw matter — clay, earth — and animated by inscription. By language. By code. It serves and protects but has no soul, no autonomy. It is constructed life deployed by those who hold the secret of its animation.
Golem City in Mankind Divided is a ghetto. A walled containment zone for augmented humans — people who accepted the technological upgrade, who became more than human, and were then marked as different, dangerous, other, and sealed away. The parallel to Jewish ghetto history is not subtle. The augmented are the new persecuted minority, warehoused in a city literally named after a being created to serve, animated by code, without genuine freedom of its own.
The Golem symbol cuts in multiple directions at once. The augmented humans of Golem City were promised transcendence — they took the upgrade, became something new — and ended up contained. Named after a construct. Animated by the technology of others, for purposes they did not choose. The upgrade was the trap.
Warren Spector: Creator of Deus Ex — explicitly describes his design philosophy as "Talmudic," drawing from Jewish argumentative and ethical tradition.
William Taggart: Mormon character in Human Revolution — the face of resistance to forced human augmentation.
Golem City (Útulek Complex): Augmented human ghetto in Mankind Divided — named after the Jewish mythological constructed being.
Israel in the Deus Ex timeline: A "Six Month War" triggers Illuminati consolidation of Middle East control — Zionist geopolitics built into the dystopian timeline.
The series thesis: Who controls the upgrade controls humanity. Enhancement is never neutral. Transcendence and containment are two faces of the same system.
Conclusion
Here is what the data is pointing at: Zion is a load-bearing idea. Wherever the word appears — in religious texts, political movements, fictional universes, or tech company mission statements — the same superstructure assembles around it. Chosen people. Sacred geography. Persecution narrative. Messianic figure. Gathering. Transcendence. And underneath all of it, usually invisible until you look directly at it: a system that uses the promise of liberation to manage the liberated.
Mormon transhumanism is not a contradiction — it is the logical endpoint of a theology that already teaches humans are on a trajectory toward godhood. When your church's flagship university produces the CEO of the brain-chip company, when your theological tradition has been supporting the return of the Jewish people to their promised land for 180 years, when your concept of Zion rhymes structurally with every other version of Zion across religion, politics, and fiction — you are not looking at parallel coincidences. You are looking at the same pattern instantiated in different domains.
The Matrix asked the most dangerous version of the question: what if the awakened aren't actually free? What if Zion — the sanctuary, the refuge, the city of the knowing — is itself a function of the system that appears to threaten it? What if the messiah is a program?
Deus Ex answered it from the ground: the upgrade is real, the transcendence is real, and you still end up in Golem City — named after a being that was created, animated, and controlled by those who held the code.
The word Zion keeps appearing because the idea it encodes keeps being needed — by systems that require a population who believe they are the chosen ones, on the way to something greater, gathered in the right place, waiting for the right figure to complete the promise. That belief is extraordinarily powerful. And extraordinarily useful — to whoever is writing the code.
Sources and further reading: Mormon Transhumanist Association | Matrix Wiki — Zion | Deus Ex Wiki — William Taggart | Deus Ex Wiki — Útulek/Golem City | Deus Ex Wiki — Israel
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