Thanks for your informative post.

Anyone wanting to know more about the origin and modern-day workings of the Mormon Church would be well-served by reading Jon Krakauer's, Under the Banner of Heaven.

They might all be well-groomed, well-dressed, and polite to a fault, but from where I sit the Church of Latter Day Saints is nothing more than a cult, all the more spooky for their seeming "normality."  

They also believe every star in the sky is a planet populated by people.

It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.

   I don't want to answer for the film maker, who may well be rather simple minded on the issues. (He certainly wouldn't be the first or the last when it comes to Mormons; they seem to have provoked overreaction, to the point of violence, from almost the very beginning.) But when you get to the question, "how are ordinary people able to go ahead and convince themselves it's OK to massacre others", you can't go to far without seeing that certainty has a lot to do with it. Certainty to the point of killing non-soldiers has, too often, come from religion or plain insanity (or both.) So I don't see too much trouble speculating that there are similar explanations behind the Taliban executing women in public, and killing over 100 people for "profanity and rudeness."
    Oh, and the problem with the Mormons wasn't so much that they went out in to the desert looking for a new start, but that they had started trying to create their promised land in Missouri and Illinois first. Dreamers and idealists had been setting off into the American wilderness to create utopias before, but not on so ambitious a scale. (Remember the backlash when the Rashneeshis took over Antelope, Oregon, with an eye toward the entire county?) Move too fast, annoy your neighbors, have an openly ambitious leader . . you're just asking for trouble. Openly talking about secession on the eve of an upcoming civil war didn't help much either . . .
    Why not make a movie about todays fanaticism? I'd like to see that, and all Cain would have to do is buy the rights to some films that were hits in Egypt, Syria, Turkey, and so on, and get them translated. Would any theater in the US show  them? Aye, there's the rub; is it political correctness or profit motive that would keep these films off the screen? At least with a film about Mormons you can tout the research and historical recreation. Sure makes an easier pitch the studio executives, eh?

Ex ignorantia ad sapientiam; e luce ad tenebras

Does it really? Is it enough to to just blame "religious fanaticism," or should one try to examine the various political goals enmeshed with zealous religious messages?

Politics is the reason...fanaticism is the means.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

"so closely resembles the religious fanaticism the world is seeing today."

First question: Does it really?

Apparently so, gerry. Almost every review I've read has brought up the connection in some way. The critic for The Arizona Republic makes the claim that the film is about Islamic fundamentalists/terrorists as much as being about Mormons:

Movies have a long history of being about something else.

That is, Godzilla is really about Hiroshima; King Kong is a thinly disguised parable of White America's racial fears; The Thing is undergirded by Cold War xenophobia.

Some of these allegorical subtexts are intentional, some merely come from the oneiric cultural subconscious that movies can become - our fears sublimated.

    September Dawn recounts the story of the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre, when a band of Mormons killed about 120 men, women and children from a wagon train passing through southern Utah.

But its makers couldn't make any clearer that the film is really about Islamist terrorism. The religious zealotry of the film's Mormon pioneers substitute for the same thing in Islamic fundamentalism.

To underline this implied parallel, the filmmakers have Mormons actually quoting the Koran in support of religious blood atonement.

And, of course, the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre took place on Sept. 11: On-screen text reminds us of the fact.

Now, whether or not that was the film's intention, I've no way of knowing. It certainly seems possible, though maybe the critics are just being lazy and targeting the obvious contemporary comparisons...

Somewhere in my soul, there's always Rock -n- Roll... Joe Strummer