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

Doubt, rather than knowledge is most compatible with faith

 

Michael Vinson, of Salt Lake City, a master’s graduate of the Divinity School of the University of Cambridge, has a fascinating essay in a past issue of Sunstone. Titled, “The Crisis of Doubt in the Church,” (read here) it offers the proposal that “we formulate a new view of faith and doubt, one that recognizes the latter as an integral part of testimony.”

As has been mentioned in media reports, there is a trend of apostasy in the LDS Church, including “some of the most educated and highest income earners,” as Vinson relates from anecdotal sources. I’d add, citing anecdotal evidence, that many others are young adults who spent their childhoods as active members of the church. Vinson notes that a misunderstanding between faith, knowledge and doubt can hinder efforts to counsel members whose faith is tried and are seeking questions relating to doctrine or LDS Church history.

To get to the nugget, Vinson is arguing that we need to give the acknowledgment of doubt more respect, and to regard it as a major component of faith, rather than a weakness. He writes, “The underlying problem is not the level of a member’s church activity but the fact that they have bought into a false dichotomy about the relationship between faith and doubt … suggesting that the effective exercise of faith requires that one have zero doubt.”

Vinson is on to something here. He quotes Alma 32:18, “for if a man knoweth a thing he hath no cause to believe.” In short, we are commanded to have faith, which is something not known. “As Vinson writes, “… if the truthfulness of the plan of salvation and the Church can actually be known, then faith is unnecessary. But since faith is the first principle of the gospel (and therefore necessary), we can conclude that it is certain knowledge, not doubt, that is the opposite of faith.”

Vinson suggests that members of the church embrace a union of faith and doubt, as a way to “believe something” via faith rather than “know something,” which really doesn’t take faith. He argues, convincingly in my opinion, that “it is our emphasis of testimony as a knowing experience rather than as a faith experience that causes our angst.”

The author also cites Mark 9:24, as an example of faith and doubt being in harmony. “And straightway the father of the child cried out with tears, ‘Lord I believe; help thou mine unbelief.’”

Knowledge, as well as perfection, are ends, not journeys. Faith is a journey that includes doubt and obedience. Christianity, and many other faiths, demand that we subject our will, and reason, to an unseen deity. In the LDS faith, we are asked to sustain men as senior representatives of Christ’s church. These are actions that cannot be proven. To say they can is deceiving. They demand faith. Even in times we may doubt there is a loving God or a man who speaks with God, I believe our faith in those things are more powerful than the rhetorical “I know” uttered for the same criteria.

If persons struggling with the claims of any religion, Mormon or otherwise, were told that these feelings are not a spiritual weakness, but a natural, and healthy, component of faith, there might be fewer apostasies. However, that requires tremendous patience, from parents, mentors, siblings and ecclesiastical leaders, such as bishops. Religious beliefs are so bedrock to many of us that to witness a loved one question those beliefs results in hostility. Even the late LDS prophet Spencer W. Kimball reached a point with his eldest son, Spence, a skeptic of Mormonism, where to maintain a relationship the father had to quit talking with the son about his church standing.

-- Doug Gibson

-- Originally published in 2013 at StandardBlogs.

LDS writer Carter’s essays exploit the tension between right and wrong

There’s a furtive thrill in reading honest Mormon writing because we encounter characters, or better yet, real people — who aren’t cliches or caricatures — wrestling with the same doubts that everyone experiences but is so rarely talked about in the three-hour block called church on Sunday. Part of the thrill is realizing that honest LDS writing is still frowned on by many who should know better.

Stephen Carter, the editor of Sunstone, has a book of essays published by Provo’s Zarahemla Books. “What of the Night” deals with many subjects, including death, Carter’s relationship with an inactive brother, non-member neighbors and fishing, mission experiences, and trying to come to terms with what having the priesthood means. The essays are effective because Carter doesn’t telegraph his intentions in advance. He’s not preaching to readers. He’s relating experiences to Mormonism, telling us how it went with him. Although readers will likely not have equal experiences, they will have had similar experiences that provided the same emotions. If an honest reader can stand honest writing, writer and readers can share empathy from the experiences.

I was particularly moved by Carter’s two-essay tribute on the final years of Mormon academic Eugene England’s life. My communication with England was not even as an acquaintance. As BYU newspaper editor, I used to get a lot of feedback from him and his family. The England that Carter knew well — intelligent, liberal, motivated, impulsive and with an eager knowledge of studying the Gospel — fits what I recall of the man.

Carter captures a lesson I learned from England’s example perfectly when he talks of “Gene’s commitment to Joseph Smith’s concept of ‘proving contraries.’ When one proves contraries, Gene always argued, you aren’t doing so to identify what is right and what is wrong but to experience the tension between them. It is the experience of dwelling in this tension that makes you wiser.”

The “tension” that Gospel questions provides my mind is what keeps me a believing member of the LDS Church. I fear that if I had avoided confronting the endless arguments against God or the LDS Church I would have left spirituality long ago. From England’s example, I realize that my outspoken atheist friends, or scholars such as Fawn Brodie or Will Bagley, are as important to my relationship with God and my spirituality, as The Book of Mormon, the Holy Bible, or the works of Parley P. Pratt. There’s a certain irony that a late friend of mine who spurned any independent LDS publications and took a special interest in vilifying England left the church while England himself died a faithful member. If tensions are not explored, little of value is learned, and whatever faith exists is soft.

It hurt to reads from Carter about England’s slow demise due to brain cancer, or the hateful comments he received from men he revered as representatives of Jesus Christ, but I’m glad he and many others provide us material to enrich our lives.

All of Carter’s essays are thought-provoking. I particularly enjoyed “The Weight of Priesthood,” that explores his feelings of doubt that he could provide power and testimony to others during his youth, mission, and post-mission life. Any priesthood holder who has been given the task of blessing a seriously ill person can understand the doubts and weight associated with such responsibility.

-- Doug Gibson

-- Originally published in 2010 on StandardBlogs