I was recently quoted in an article by the Canadian Press, who contacted me for my thoughts on the Book of Mormon Musical. For anyone who read the article and were desperate to read a long elaboration of my personal opinions, you've come to the right place! These are some (fleshed out) notes I compiled before, during and after my interview with the journalist, (whom, for the record, was very kind, sincere and deferential.)


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The Book of Mormon Musical
Some Thoughts for The Canadian Press

I’m not planning on seeing The Book of Mormon Musical personally. I recognize that it is difficult to speak with any credibility about a play I have not seen, so I won’t presume to discuss its artistic merits. I expect there will be some members of our Church who will be curious enough to buy tickets, but I suspect the majority of Latter-Day Saints will steer clear.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone are by all accounts quite gifted satirists, and their musical was certainly well-received critically, but I believe most members of the Church take more than critical acclaim into account when selecting entertainment. Those members who choose not to see the musical won’t do so simply because they are thin-skinned, or can’t take a joke; in spite of suggestions to the contrary, Mormons are generally self-aware enough to laugh at ourselves. I’m suspicious that the skewering of our faith is more vicious than good-natured, however.

But even if the portrayal of Mormon Missionaries is ultimately sort-of sympathetic, albeit condescending, as I have been led to believe it is, other vulgar elements of the production could turn off potential Mormon viewers on principle. In general, we prefer entertainment that is uplifting, and tend to avoid entertainment that contains a surfeit of crude sexual, scatological or violent content.

In addition, I would like to think that members of the Church would avoid this play regardless of what religion was being parodied, whether it was a different Christian religion, or Islam, or Judaism, or anything. Mormons hold the freedom of religion quite dear; in fact, one of our articles of faith states that “we claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.” We are sensitive whenever any religious group is singled out for derision.

When our faith, or the tenets thereof, are held up for ridicule it can be difficult to laugh it off, because occasionally the object of ridicule is something that we hold to be very sacred. Mormons have a long history of persecution that may contribute to our sensitivity in this regard. But you won’t see outraged protests or petitions, or official boycotts of the musical by members of the Church. This certainly doesn’t constitute the first time our religion has been mocked or ridiculed publicly, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. We aspire to an ethic of Christian civility in all our interactions, which includes turning the other cheek.

I was very impressed with the Church’s official statement regarding the Musical, which was succinct, unruffled, and brilliant, in my opinion: “The production may attempt to entertain audiences for an evening, but the Book of Mormon as a volume of scripture will change people's lives forever by bringing them closer to Christ.”

There is a tendency in popular culture to portray Mormons as either hopelessly naive, ignorant to the realities of the world, or as dangerous narrow-minded Christian fanatics. Both portrayals are reductive, and not particularly flattering.

With nearly 200,000 members in Canada, and 14 million around the world, active in our communities, and engaged in massive humanitarian undertakings worldwide, it will be increasingly difficult to convincingly pass off inaccurate depictions of Mormons, because people will know better.

The fish-out-of-water premise of the play, where two hapless rubes are let loose in Uganda, ill-equipped to deal with the realities there is very much out-of-sync with the insightful perspective our Church has on both the humanitarian and political realities that exist in African countries. An article in The Washington Post by the Church’s head of Public Affairs, Michael Otterson, details the phenomenal work the Church has done in African nations over the better part of the last decade.

I would just hope that anyone who watches the play would recognize that the Mormonism depicted is a fun-house mirror-distorted version of a much more nuanced and complex truth. And if a few viewers decide they’d like to find out what members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints really believe, they can go to mormon.org and get in contact with actual missionaries whom they will find bear virtually no resemblance to the missionaries of the musical. In fact, I suspect that anyone who knows members of the Church in their personal life will not recognize their caricatured portrayal in the play.

What is with Anti-Mormons?

Ugh, the last thing I want to do is make it seem like this is a place that people who are hostile to my beliefs can come for a fun debate. I can't imagine anything more tiresome, frankly. Let's just operate under the assumption that I am fully aware that people not only disagree with what I believe to be true, but are very sincerely convinced that my religion can somehow be "scientifically" proven false. I have seen much of this so-called proof, and suffice it to say, I find none of it compelling. There are places to debate this stuff, but I couldn't be less interested. So please anti-mormons, please take your ball and go play somewhere else.

I listened to Glenn Beck's conversion story in audiobook form. It's getting harder to dislike him as much as I'd like to, even though his opinions are still not my opinions. Then again, he's a multi-millionaire, and I'm just some dude.

I'm selling Mormon T-shirts at another website, and I've done my best to walk the fine line of humour, relevance, and respect. It's hard to make Mormon-themed t-shirts and avoid sacrilege. For instance, you cannot parody (that is, make light of) any doctrines, which leaves skewering Mormon culture as the only remaining option, which is boring and not-so-amusing.

I've looked at Mormon t-shirt apparel available online, and wow, it's terrible. I've found they fall into a few categories.




"I can't. I'm Mormon."
A subset of the humour category, this phrase deserves it's own category simply because there are so many versions of this ridiculous shirt.

Inexplicably Rude
The inexplicably rude category: You have to really get a thrill from shocking the normals with shirts from this category. For example, some genius figured out that putting the abbreviation for Utah (UT) after an abbreviated abbreviation of Salt lake city (SL) spelled a naughty word. It would be more clever if it didn't have to drop the 'C' from SLC in order to work, but if you're the kind of person who would wear that shirt and/or find it amusing, I'm sure you're not bothered by the logical contortions and cognitive dissonance necessary for the joke to work.

The Importance of Being Earnest.
There's also the painfully earnest shirts, the ones about families being together forever, etc. For people who want to wear their heart/testimony on their sleeve.

Virulently Anti-Mormon
And there there are a bunch of shirts that can only be described as anti-mormon. They are hostile to the Church and it's doctrines, and you've got to be a special kind of terrible person to design, purchase or wear a shirt from this category.

My shirts fall mostly into the humour category, although a few might be construed as earnest, I suppose. They're certainly not rude or sacrilegious, and none of them say "I can't. I'm Mormon." Take a look at my Mormon T-shirt store at MormonApparel.com, and until the end of the year (2010), you can use the coupon code GETOFFMYBACK to get 15% off your purchase.

Michael Otterson is the head of Public Affairs for the Church, and some time after my previous screed regarding Glenn Beck (and after I found out that everyone but me was well aware of his religious affiliations), I read Brother Otterson's article written for The Washington Post, "Mormon Voices in the Public Square and What to Make of Them". The article can be viewed here: http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/michael_otterson/2010/09/glenn_beck.html

I've consistently been very impressed with the job Otterson is doing in Public Affairs, and his writing, whether in editorials for the Washington Post, or in official statements from the Church, has always seemed to me to be eminently reasonable and excellently written. I admire him a great deal for his facility with words, and found his fair treatment of Beck in the aforementioned article quite reassuring.

So, no hard feelings.

Look, I don't represent the Church – my dumb opinions are my own. I should make that clear right off the bat. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and the right to express it, and that's why blogs exist. I understand that politics is a hot-button issue, (as is religion), but I don't see any reason why I should hide the fact that I think Obama is great, and that George W. Bush was an awful disgrace. That doesn't mean Obama hasn't made mistakes, or that Bush didn't accidentally get one or two things right.

I'm a Canadian, and while Americans (from what I can gather) generally ignore and/or are totally unaware of Canadian politics, I think it's fair to say that most Canadians follow American politics rather closely. I have no statistics or surveys to back this perception up, but it seems to be true. At any rate, it's hard to ignore the so-called war between the White House, and the comedy network called Fox News.

Whatever gambit Fox is making seems to be working, even though I couldn't agree more with the thought that it's probably in everyone's best interest to ignore the network altogether. I really find Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and their ilk distasteful, smug, and supremely irritating. (Keith Olbermann and Al Franken are also smug and irritating, but have a much superior batting average.) Glenn Beck has quickly proven himself to be just as absurd as O'Reilly et al., with asinine, knee-jerk, reactionary twaddle like the following inexplicable screed against the White House's charitable service initiative:



It's utterly perplexing, I know. I shudder to think who might count themselves among Beck's acolytes, but feel reassured that most wise, thinking individuals, regardless of political orientation, most likely avoid both republican and democratic pundits like the plague. The world would doubtless be a better place if Republicans and Democrats alike tuned out the white noise of punditry and relied on their own abilities to weigh issues and form opinions...

But back to Beck. In Beck we find a man whose opinions seemed to be generated exclusively by the polar opposite of everything that Obama says or does, regardless of how ridiculous that opposite extreme happens to be. This is the man, you may recall, who called Obama a racist. What? I ventured to Wikipedia to see what might have happened to make Beck the way he is, and was astonished to learn that he is, in fact, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. There's even an (aptly named) dvd about his conversion.

Obviously (and thankfully), his opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Church any more than mine do. But I found it fascinating that someone so vitriolic and personally distasteful to me, and with whom I disagree on virtually every point of politics, ostensibly shares my most personal and deeply held spiritual beliefs. I haven't seen the Deseret Books DVD of his conversion story. Perhaps I should. Knowing that "Brother Beck" is a fellow Latter-Day Saint has certainly been an interesting exercise in contexts, and a reinforcement of the Church's position that members are free to exercise their own agency when it comes to political opinions and affiliations.

I am aware that our Church membership tends to skew right, and there are likely many who did not bat an eye when they learned Glenn Beck was Mormon. Many Mormons would be proud, I suppose. So far, I'm not one of them. But I am more than happy to, as Joseph Smith said, "claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of [my] own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may." (That goes for pundits and politics, too.) If Glenn Beck found the answers he was looking for in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, I couldn't be more thrilled.

None of this matters anyway. I'm Canadian – I can't vote in US elections, and am hardly steeped in the day-to-day political machinations of our neighbour to the South, so take everything I say with a grain of salt.

Does so-called "Mormon Cinema" making a bid for mainstream acceptance make anyone else feel uneasy?

I like going to Apple's movie trailer page every week or so to see the latest round of trailers for upcoming films. A month or two ago I came across the trailer for a film called "One Good Man." I had never heard of it, so I began to watch the trailer. It became apparent fairly quickly that this was a film about Mormons. I felt the uneasiness I often feel when something like this comes around, watching to see if it was pro-Mormon, anti-Mormon, or in-between. It appears, in fact, to be a new entry into the burgeoning genre of "Mormon Cinema". (Or as it's unfortunately known by some colloquially: "Mollywood".)  Here it is:



Am I the only one who cringes a little at these things? I'm nervous when anyone attempts to encapsulate and sell the "Latter-Day Saint Experience", especially if it's being marketing to the world at large.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to the idea of a film that can demystify Latter-Day Saint beliefs, or send the message that we're a lot more normal than most people give us credit for. That's good. But I didn't elect these people to do it. I didn't get to vet their message, or approve their interpretation of how Mormons live. I know I don't have any right to complain, but if I'm going to be judged by a non-Mormon based on what they've seen in this film, I have some kind of stake in it. People who don't know anything about Mormons, but who happen to see this film may have their entire opinion about our beliefs and culture informed by it. I know this scenario is unlikely, but hypothetically speaking, if the film defies all odds and becomes a monster indie hit, (stranger things have happened) the ramifications of its success and (more importantly) its message would affect me personally in my daily interactions.

Again, I'm not (really) complaining, and I'm not even suggesting that the film is without merit. I'm just saying that when something like this comes along, I get a little uneasy. Like the first time you saw the trailer for Big Love. Whenever Mormons come up in mainstream popular culture, I just cross my fingers and hope they get it right. They frequently do not. I'm all for Mormons making films; it's a shame so many of them are terrible and embarrassing, but the instinct is sound. I just get nervous, that's all.

(Maybe this post would be better on the MormonFray.com site, but since I don't really deal with "Mormon Cinema" on that blog per se, it's probably better here.)

I'm a Canadian who grew up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I was raised in a Mormon family, and I served a two year mission when I was nineteen. I am still an active, faithful, believing member of the Church, so let's get that out of the way right now. Suffice it to say, I consider myself to be in the mainstream of the Church. I have a firm testimony that this Church is true, the Book of Mormon is the divinely translated Word of God, and that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Saviour.

Good. Now we can move on.