Not 21st century Mormons, definitely, but is Far Cry 5 about Mormon Classic Flavor, from the 1830s and 40s? There’s two primary reasons I think this might be true: Firstly, their leader is Joseph Seed, who has the same first name and initials as the first Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, and second, Joseph Seed’s Eden’s Gate cult have their own special bonus book of scripture written by Joseph Seed, which is explicitly not the Bible even though it kind of looks like it. In the John Seed storyline there’s a mission where a regular preacher in the Resistance is being coerced into participating in a confessional ritual run by the cult, and pulls a switcheroo with the cult’s off-brand Bible with his own fake Bible, which is a real Bible that’s had a big ol’ hole cut through the pages to conceal a revolver in it. This is a reasonably practical thing to do when you’re in an armed resistance against an authoritarian theocratic doomsday cult, but narratively it is kind of garbled that the symbol of regular folksy Christianity cuts the Bible up to hide a gun inside while the fake cult just uses a different book in addition to the Bible (they quote Revelations a lot, so it doesn’t seem like Eden’s Gate has abandoned the Bible altogether). That’s not the only time the cult’s bonus scriptures come up, either, it’s low-key but Far Cry 5 does make a point out of how Joseph Seed’s own writings are considered scripture on par with the Bible by his followers.
There’s other things that line up, although in a way that would be much more easily chalked up to coincidence without the Joseph Seed->Joseph Smith parallel. They’re a vaguely Christian sect with secret practices who come to a place and take over, which is basically what the Mormons did in like three different towns. Of course, Eden’s Gate does this with automatic weapons and the Mormons do it because they were a sub-culture with high in-group trust who arrived en masse all at once, instantly creating a counterculture that was more economically successful and sometimes even more numerous than the original inhabitants. The people who came before them were understandably upset about the sudden overwriting of their own culture under the force of more economically successful outsiders, but it’s not like the Mormons committed any crimes (I mean, there was the pedophillic polygamy towards the end, but people were pissed at the Mormons way before then) and, y’know, the “original” inhabitants were like one generation removed from people who had seized the territory by force from the originaler inhabitants, so the fact that Missouri flipped the fuck out and legalized the murder of Mormons (technically still a law on the books!) isn’t painting them in the best light.
Eden’s Gate first puts down roots in the game’s setting of Hope County in the Henbane River region, so a lot of their original buildings and early history is concentrated there, and it does seem like this is how they were initially. Whereas the Fall’s End region, home to the largest still-inhabited town in the game, has lots of side quests about how Eden’s Gate cultists terrorized the locals, the Henbane River region has ltos of side quests about how they converted the locals. Like, obviously now you’re fighting a shooting war with Eden’s Gate and there’s not a whole lot of persuasion involved in the first person shooter mechanics, but your quest givers talk about how their friends and family defected, rather than being assaulted, driven out, or killed by unnamed Eden’s Gate cultists, who by implication are strangers (not necessarily outsiders entirely, though – Hope County is big, someone from two towns over could be native to the county but totally unfamiliar to you).
There’s also a quote from Henbane River’s primary antagonist, Faith “Seed” (she’s not actually related to Joseph Seed and she isn’t even the first Faith Seed – it’s not clear if either of the other two lieutenants are real family or not, but they all use the “Seed” name), that “we are all born in purity” and you can be pure again if you follow her. This is in direct contradiction to the doctrine of original sin, which is something the Mormon Church very explicitly rejects – the falsehood of original sin is one of their Thirteen Articles of Faith. On the other hand, Faith also has a sort of childlike purity vibe going for her, despite her backstory making it clear that she’s got to be at least sixteen or seventeen years old, and while I’m bad at reading age even on real people, let alone good-not-great video game models, Faith looks like she’s twenty-five. She has this giggling girlish barefoot-and-sundress vibe to her, though. It is, honestly, a really good portrayal of the creepy fetishization of childishness in women that often stems from (or gets justified by, chicken-and-egg problem there) an obsession with purity and virginity. And while I don’t think any religion is as direct in their rejection of original sin as the Mormons are, they’re definitely not the only Christian sect to reject it overall. It’s just usually something hashed out semi-formally in preachers’ letters from 1870, relegated to obscure trivia that only the most obsessive know about, rather than part of a list of articles of faith that congregants are expected to memorize like the Ten Commandments.
Also, the Mormons in Illinois had their own militia, the Nauvoo Legion, which ruled the city and its surroundings under martial law for a while when tensions got high, and in addition to Eden’s Gate generally being full of stormtroopers to shoot, one of the three lieutenants you take out on the way to Joseph Seed is the leader of that militia. But, I mean, it’s a Far Cry game. Obviously enemy militia were necessary.
It might just be because I live in Utah and there’s a bunch of Mormons here, but it does feel kinda like Far Cry 5 is a modern retelling of the Mormons being driven out of Nauvoo, Illinois told from the perspective of the non-Mormon Illinoisians, and propagandized so hard that they kinda forgot that the Illinois government was pretty firmly supportive of Joseph Smith. Like, yeah, the Nauvoo Legion was Joseph Smith’s own private army and turned out in the hundreds to prevent Smith from being arrested by Missouri authorities, but, like, the governor of Illinois was cool with it and the governor of Missouri was a fucking psychopath. When the Illinois authorities arrested Joseph Smith for siccing the Nauvoo Legion on a newspaper he didn’t like, he went quietly, and then got assassinated by a mob. The Mormons aren’t unambiguously the good guys here, but they look a Hell of a lot better than Joseph Seed does.
Less charitably, you could even call Far Cry 5 a retelling of the Mormons being driven out of Missouri, propagandized so hard that they’ve skipped over and conveniently ignore the massacre of more than a dozen Mormon men and boys that led to the raising of pre-Legion paramilitary groups to guard Mormon settlements.
But the main takeaway here is that canonically, Joseph Smith did in fact get killed by a mob, so there’s no fucking reason why I don’t get to kill Joseph Seed at the end of Far Cry 5, dammit.
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