Book of Mormon Musical songs may be profane, but that profanity has heart

 

Originally published by StandardBlogs in 2012.

(Note: I never managed to see Book of Mormon Musical. But I still listen to the score often.)

I haven’t seen “The Book of Mormon Musical” but if it gets to Utah I’ll pay the scores of dollars it will cost to see it. I enjoy listening to the DVD. It’s profane but profane with heart. Jon Stewart reflects the positive vibes by noting that the play spoofs a religion, yet also celebrates it.

I’ve listened to the CD dozens of times. As a returned missionary, I’m impressed by how satirists Matt Stone and Trey Parker can channel — even through the obvious farce — the yet-to-mature enthusiasm, scattered spirituality and fear-masquerading-as-confidence that defines most new missionaries.

When I was at the Missionary Training Center, we were taught the slogan “Keep the Gospel Simple Stupid.” We focused on learning the language, memorizing the missionary discussions, and force-feeding our spirituality to a high level. We adapted to a regimen that began at 6:30 a.m. and ended at 10:30 p.m. We learned to work, pray and study with a companion. My culture class — I was sent to The Peru Lima North Mission, including time in the Amazon Jungle — was curiously lightweight. From what I recall, it consisted mainly of a husband and wife dressed in touristy traditional mountain garb and llama sweaters.

In “Book of Mormon Musical,” missionary companions Elder Price and Elder Cunningham are sent to Uganda, where they find themselves all alone amidst warlords, clitoris cutters and people suffering from AIDS. Under these conditions, Elder Price, the strong alpha companion, wilts and leaves. That forces Elder Cunningham, the slow-witted junior companion, to “man up” and teach the natives as best he can. With sheer bluster, he achieves success teaching an “off-the-cuff” ludicrously obscene version of Mormon doctrine that involves Joseph Smith having sex with frogs and Brigham Young’s nose being turned into a clitoris. Meanwhile, Elder Price ends his crisis of faith, decides to just believe and storms back into the warlord’s camp preaching with Old Testament fervor. The play ends with the natives, now missionaries, teaching the bastardized, profane, obscene “Gospel According to Arnold Cunningham.”

The more interesting character is Elder Price, played by Andrew Rannells. In at least two songs, “You and Me, But Mostly Me,” and “I Believe,” he captures aspects of the missionary experience. In the first song, sung with the amiable fool Elder Cunningham, Elder Price is full of the faux confidence that’s packed with equal parts cockiness and fear. With a passive, worshipful lesser companion, he’s ready to achieve missionary greatness.

“It’s something I’ve forseen.
Now that I’m nineteen,
I’ll do something incredible,
That blows God’s freaking mind!”

Throughout the song, Elder Cunningham chirps how pleased he is that he can play second fiddle to Elder Price’s greatness. It’s a sentiment Elder Price is wholeheartedly in agreement with, as he concludes with:

“And there’s no limit to
What we can do
Me and you.
But mostly me!”

After a spurt of arrogant, fear-driven bravado, Elder Price suffers culture shock and dismay at how unenthusiastic most are to his message — a reaction, albeit to a lesser degree, for missionaries. Again, this is farce. In the real world, an inexperienced Elder Price would not be tossed, along with Elder Cunningham, alone as a pair into a dangerous environment. His reaction: He decides to take off to Orlando, where he feels the Lord should have sent him in the first place. After undergoing some heavy-duty guilt — a shared feeling for many active Latter-day Saints who try to live a religion that assigns degrees of salvation based on works — he surrenders to faith, and achieves his best missionary success with a full-throated, skepticism-be-damned testimony of various LDS doctrines, conventional or otherwise. An example from “I Believe”:

“You cannot just believe part way,
You have to believe in it all.
My problem was doubting the Lord’s will
Instead of standing tall.

I can’t allow myself to have any doubt.
It’s time to set my worries free.
Time to show the world what Elder Price is about!
And share the power inside of me…

I believe that God has a plan for all of us.
I believe that plan involves me getting my own planet.
And I believe; that the current President of The Church, Thomas Monson, speaks directly to God.
I am A Mormon,
And, dang it! a Mormon just believes!”

Being a missionary is hard work. It involves something else that was drummed into us at the MTC — the slogan “Capture the Vision”: Elder Price’s transition to successful missionary is to eliminate doubt, for at least two years. His fuel is faith; he thrives on faith. His optimism is the sizzle that sells the faith. He’s captured the vision.

A lot of Mormons have criticized “Book of Mormon Musical”; it’s inaccurate to a fault, it makes fun of LDS beliefs; it spoofs, for very vulgar laughs, doctrines and characters in LDS history that are treated with reverence by faithful members. But, Jon Stewart is right. It’s a simple, stupid, but profound declaration of how faith, and just believing, can bring meaning into many lives.

“It’s so good it makes me $%^%*&^ hate it,” Stewart told Stone and Parker, describing the message as “sweet.”

It is; faith is sweet; to believe with enough faith to touch lives is a good thing. To gain courage to change lives for the better is sweet. And that’s why “Book of Mormon Musical,” proudly R-rated, is worth listening to.

-- Doug Gibson

The Backslider reminds us that enjoying sex is part of the Gospel

It’s a pleasure to read Levi S. Peterson’s novel, “The Backslider” every year or two. It’s the tale of Frank Windham, a rural Utah young man in the mid-20th century who is a bit of a hell-raiser but heavily influenced by his Mormon religion. Frank is 20 and “one of those fellows who got bogged down making another man rich,” as Peterson writes on page 4 of the novel.

Out of spite, and soon after he is dumped by the college-gone girlfriend he loved, Frank seduces Marianne, the college-age daughter of his Lutheran employers, Wesley and his wife, Clara. When Marianne gets pregnant, she and Frank decide to get married, give the baby a name, and then eventually part. No one else really takes that pledge seriously except Frank, who has some real issues with enjoying sexual pleasure with a young woman, even if it is within the bounds of marriage.

“The Backslider” is a love story between Frank and Marianne, but it’s also a primer on how to love. Old-fashioned Mormon codes of sex, such as having relations with temple garments on, serve to bridge the old versus the new mores that Frank encounters growing up.

As the late Paul Swenson, writing in Utah Holiday notes, “Guilt, depravity and grace —, Cowboy  themes that Peterson finds fruitful to explore in The Backslider — are not exactly commonplace in fiction peopled primarily by Mormons.” 

“The Backslider” is a frank, sometimes comic novel with incredible depth, that gets into the guilts, resentments, pities, excitement, lust and exaltations that make up high and low points of our lives. Frank’s battles pit his desire to be pious versus his gut-wrenching need to hell-raise makes for wonderful reading, as does his struggle to accept adulthood and take responsibility of himself and his unexpected wife. 

Although Frank’s mother, Margaret, is a faithful Latter-day Saint, both Frank and his brother Jeremy have impressions of the church that are distorted, thanks in part to her, as well as the general culture of the novel’s setting, mid-20th century rural Utah. This leads to tragic consequences for Jeremy. One well-written, amusing passage involves Margaret’s uncomfortable observation that Frank and Marianne’s bed frame needs to be oiled to stop the loud squeaking at night.

Frank, badly affected by his brother Jeremy’s insanity and self-mutilation, finds it almost impossible to reconcile sex with his wife as anything other than a sin. Even her impending baptism doesn’t drive that obsession away until Frank receives a visit from a “Cowboy Jesus,” who tells Frank to stop worrying about these issues, that His atonement has paid the bill up in full. The Cowboy Jesus advises Frank to enjoy his wife and their carnal pleasures and comfort his mother-in-law, who is shook up about her daughter becoming a Mormon.

The whimsy of the final scenes underscore a serious message: pleasure is usually not a sin, although it frequently is assumed to be.

The Backslider can be purchased at many locations. The Signature Books website has it here.

-- Doug Gibson

Portions of this column were previously published in StandardBlogs.