Last weekend, I watched Trey Parker and Matt Stone's The Book of Mormon on Broadway with my brother and sister-in-law. While I do consider myself somewhat knowledgeable of Mormonism, having read a few books on early LDS history, most of the mildly amusing trivia I possess on them was accurately jabbered off within the first few moments of the musical itself, as the ancient American prophet Mormon buries the plates of Nephi in Hill Cumorah for Joseph Smith to eventually discover. Thus, I will instead focus on the literary and theoretical underpinnings of Parker and Stone's oeuvre in my review.
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| "HELLO!!!!" |
Mormon follows the Elders Price and Cunningham, two young missionaries, as they embark on their two-year mission to northern Uganda for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Don't let the title "Elder" get anything twisted in terms of their rank-- Joseph Smith's dabbling with Freemasonry (see Fawn M. Brodie's No Man Knows My History) provides for many degrees and attainments for male LDS members, with children becoming priests at around 14 and church elders by 18. To become a bishop in your early 40's or so is also not unusual for the typical Mormon dentist.
We begin in the Missionary Training Center ("Hello!"), located in Provo, Utah, a city which Parker and Stone elide with Salt Lake City for the sake of the American geographical palette. Here, the missionaries are disciplined into reciting a script for door-to-door proselytizing. The MTC is, of course, the beginning of a classic Durkheimian rite of passage for LDS missionaries. They mortify themselves through a rigorous schedule of prayer, language learning, and collective ritual to prove their detachment from worldly concerns-- one's holiness is directly proportionate to one's abnegation, as Durkheim points out. Elder Price is disappointed in his assignment to the Uganda mission ("Two by Two"), having wanted to work the field of Orlando instead, and finding that the Ugandan mission has failed to convert anyone recently.
As a a bit of an Africanist with past research on Uganda specifically, I think this is a subtle plot hole. Uganda is a deeply religious society which warmly welcomes its extensive connections to Western religious organizations, particularly Anglicanism and Catholicism, although the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement has enjoyed profound success as well. The number of Ugandan LDS adherents is, nevertheless, somewhat slim according to available statistics at just over 20,000, but the indifference towards the missionary's overtures should be taken with some poetic license. Really, it is in secular First World locales like Orlando where LDS missionaries tend to get nowhere, being lucky to win a single baptism during their whole two-year mission, while less developed nations in Africa and Latin America are major vectors of new LDS growth outside of U.S. births.
The Ugandan villagers scoff at Price and Cunningham's cheery, Intermontane Western optimism by pointing out some of the problems confronting both Uganda and many other postcolonial states: political instability, war, famine, and AIDS ("Hasa Diga Eebowai") and curse god in explicit terms. Aside from the nonsensical pseudo-Bantu words in the chorus, I felt like this was a faithful rundown of the crises confronting Uganda, especially around the musical's writing in 2011 when Joseph Kony's militia remained highly active. However, in practice, Ugandans do not respond to these issues by saying "fuck you, god." As mentioned above, they tend to be fervently religious on any quantitative metric, as a Pew poll from around the time Mormon is set demonstrates, with 97% of Ugandan respondents claiming to believe in God.
As Marx points out, religion is the "aroma" of oppressive social conditions, the "sigh of the oppressed," and yes, "the opiate of the masses." Contrary to the stupid twitter marxists who want to downplay the atheist aspect of Marx in the name of some tired "mass line" idiocy aimed at religious people who they hope to flatter, Marx viewed religion as a thought error and essentially wrong. Following Feuerbach and the post-Kantian/post-Hegelian space of 19th century German discourse, religion for Marx is our misunderstanding of our own power and creativity. When we fail to recognize that humanity is an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent power, we instead externalize and alienate these qualities of ourselves onto an invented god, who then confronts us as an objective, alien force. That is why Marx deems activism and revolution necessary; simply pointing out that God is (obviously) not real is not sufficient to dispel such illusions because they are the continually reproducing superstructural consequence ("aroma") of an oppressive capitalist economy like Uganda's.
So, a second poetic license is taken here by Stone and Parker, although perhaps the Ugandans' apprehension is aimed at the preposterous ideas of Mormonism itself and not religion in general (although "fuck you, god" limits that recourse). When Elder Price expresses his doubts, the other missionaries teach him to consciously deny his instincts and continue on ("Turn it Off"), which does wonderfully capture the spirit of Mormon cognitive dissonance. As Durkheim observes, religion relies on social bonds, being as it is the product of the collective rituals of a community. It's no surprise that missionaries tend to lead not with theology but with the social, inviting recruits over for dinner or a social activity to establish a bond, utilizing parachurch organizations such as youth groups, social media, and summer camps to ensnare and integrate disaffiliated individuals. This makes otherwise implausible supernatural claims easier to swallow for the recruit, as he is already integrated into the social whole. Similarly, it is quite easy for LDS members to "turn it off" when confronted with evidence of Brigham Young's racism or the contemporary church's financial improprieties when the LDS church doubles for them as a source of welfare and rental assistance in a red state, job and career networking, couple matchmaking, and as a community center.
After their failures in enacting the approved script ("All-American Prophet"), Elder Price dejectedly leaves the mission headquarters, requesting a transfer to Orlando, while his companion Elder Cunningham stays behind to teach the newly interested Nabalungi ("Sal Tlay Ka Siti"), who has promised to gather her village and hear out the Mormons just as Price makes his exit. Cunningham, doubtful of his qualifications to teach anyone about the Gospel, decides to go out and do the lessons by himself ("Man Up"). After an initially muted reception, Elder Cunningham deviates from the script, claiming that God and Joseph Smith had pointed messages about AIDS treatment and female mutilation ("Making Things Up Again").
Here, of course, we see the stultifying and oppressive dogma of the Mormon church's bureaucracy shatter in the face of true religion, the truly religious impulse. By reinventing Mormon theology, Elder Cunningham exhibits what Weber would call charismatic authority. Charisma is an essentially revolutionary and subversive form of authority, as a charismatic leader like Cunningham can overturn both traditional leaders and modern legal-rational bureaucracies with his fresh perspective. Every new institution or movement is initially motivated by charismatic leaders who rewrite the rules, and after their demise, their charisma is diluted and routinized in the form of simpleminded and complacent bureaucracies throughout which their power dissipates. Look no further than the ossification of the CPSU after Lenin and Stalin or the sad state of the American left-wing, where no one has any charisma, and instead a bunch of listless bureaucrats drone on in the same routine, patterned scripts which they inherited from the last period of charismatic inspiration on the left (the 60's and 70's). Cunningham breathes new life into Mormonism with his creative appropriation of LDS vocabulary and teachings, sweeping away past rationalizations and striking into the noumenal world with true religious impulse, and the villagers start listening.
Indeed, any remotely interesting reading of Joseph Smith himself locates this prophet not in the world of hucksters or frauds, but as such a charismatic figure in the line of Jesus, Moses, and Muhammad. Smith overturned traditions and tore up well-worn cultural scripts surrounding theology, morality, family structure, and private property in the minds of his followers; by making things up about golden plates and angels, Smith offered an answer to the meaning of life just as accurate as any of the above Abrahamic prophets. Thomas Child's iconic sculpture of Joseph Smith's head on the body of a sphinx in Gilgal Sculpture Gardens captures this perfectly. The sphinx, the guardian of mystery and riddles, represents the noumenal world which we cannot hope to strike into, as Kant reminds us. Joseph Smith's head upon the sphinx represents the limits of rationality in answering any of those mysteries. While the key to the meaning of existence does not literally lie in the LDS priesthood, it should be no surprise that the fundamental poverty of rational thought perennially invites figures like Jesus, Muhammad, Nagarjuna, Zoroaster, and Joseph Smith to restate the ultimate truth of reality.
| Wow this is deep |
After being tortured by his guilty Mormon conscience for abandoning his mission ("Spooky Mormon Hell Dream"), Elder Price decides to redeem himself by confronting General Naked, the warlord terrorizing the village where their mission is headquartered ("I Believe"). Price enters the camp all alone in order to win the general to the Church; here we see the irreducibly irrational dimension of religion, and the very dimension which makes it such a powerful political force. When a duty or activity is elevated to a level of religious importance, it becomes an ethic which one carries out for its own sake, occupying a sacred place beyond the cost-benefit decisions of homo economicus. Weber argued that for Protestants, work itself became such an ethic, citing figures like Ben Franklin who wrote of thrift and industry as a moral duties. Juergensmeyer's classic Terror in the Mind of God finds this irreducible religious element the key difference between religious and irreligious militant groups; just as only something like religion can send a Mormon boy alone into a warlord's camp to preach the Gospel, people are much more likely to fight and die for something of cosmic significance.
Meanwhile, as Elder Price is brutally assaulted by the general after entering the camp, Cunningham and the other missionaries enjoy continued success. First Nabalungi ("Baptize Me") then the rest of the village are baptized into the LDS church under the influence of Elder Cunningham's novel reinventions of LDS theology ("I Am Africa"). Shocked by the sudden reversal of the Northern Ugandan Mission's fortunes, the Mission President arranges a visit to the village-- meanwhile, Elder Price returns and makes up with Elder Cunningham ("Me And You, But Mostly Me" [reprise]). The villagers put on an obscene pageant depicting early Mormon history in the Palmyra-Nauvoo period and the trek to Utah and the Wasatch Front ("Joseph Smith American Moses"). The narrative roughly follows the main points of the history with humorous detours around warlords and AIDS, representing the innovations introduced by Elder Cunningham during his ministry. Stone and Parker's take on the Mormon migration transforms the westward settlement from a literal historical event into a more archetypal exodus from oppressive conditions to the promised land of Salt Lake City. Of course, in contemporary LDS culture, this move is all but made, with Utah elevated to a quasibiblical place of sanctification and destiny, and its invasion celebrated annually on Pioneer Day (while the 4th of July is only halfheartedly used as a vehicle for another family gathering).
Disgusted by the performance, the LDS leaders storm off and shut down the mission, giving Nabalungi a crisis of faith ("Hasa Diga Eebowai" [reprise]), while she is then comforted by the other members of the village who assure her that "Salt Lake City is not a real place, it is a metaphor." This demonstrates the subtle perennialism I believe Stone and Parker intended to communicate with the musical from the start; the whole work reads like two atheists' love letter to the power of myth-making as a means to inspire and mobilize people. Reassured, the villagers confront General Naked as he comes to enforce his demand that all women be circumcised in the village. Price and Cunningham then return, and the general flees, believing them to have risen from the dead and being confronted by the village. The musical ends with a reprise of "Hello," as the followers of Elder Cunningham go out, two-by-two, to spread their new gospel. Religion is remarkably communicable; one of Durkheim's most sublime and underrated insights is the concept of the contagion of the sacred, where one sacred thing tends to infect profane things with its sanctification. For example, adding one drop of holy water to regular water renders all of it holy.
By disobeying the mission president and spreading the modified Mormon gospel, we see just how contagious the sacred is; and, like any other biological agent, it is also evolutionary, and its mutations speciate and populate where there is an opportunity to reproduce. Mormonism itself was a mutation of Methodist Christianity, rapdily spreading adapting to maximally exploit the conditions of the United States during the Second Great Awakening in the 1830's. And, of course, Methodism mutated from Anglicanism, which itself was a lab-leak of the Catholic apostolic succession, which in turn was an unintended speciation of Second Temple Judaism. Stone and Parker finish their opus by reminding us that books have their own fates; it really is irrelevant what the intention of spreading an ideology is, or how a book was meant to be read. What matters is how these cultural materials influence and combine with the social context they infect.
Well, that's all. Definitely give it a watch and/or a listen-- there's more I could cover, but I wanted to just briefly review the main themes here, with the hope that you find it somewhat interesting.
