“Matt and Me (But Mostly Me)”*: A Conversation about _The Book of Mormon_ on Broadway

April 24, 2013 By 5 Comments

The Book of Mormon, the musical comedy co-written by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, went into previews on Broadway the week I turned in my dissertation on images of the Latter-day Saints in American culture from 1890 to the present. Sadly, this meant that while I quoted much of Parker and Stone’s work in my dissertation (South Park, Cannibal! The Musical, Orgazmo), I did NOT include a discussion of their Tony-winning musical in my work. Last week, I finally got to see the show, and because I so enjoyed my conversation with Matthew Bowman about Angels in America, I asked him if he’d join me here to help me think through my first encounter with Parker and Stone’s Book of Mormon.

MB: Why Mormons?  What is it particularly about Mormonism that makes it an appealing subject for a show like this—as opposed to, say, foreign service officers or the Peace Corps or Mother Teresa?

CHJ: First and foremost, we’re talking about Trey Parker and Matt Stone here. The creators of South Park have long had a fascination with Mormonism that goes at least as far back as their first film, a student project completed at UC-Boulder, Cannibal! The Musical (1993). Mormons also feature prominently in their first feature film, Orgazmo (1997), and several episodes of South Park.

Why not focus on other missionaries or foreign services? If some sort of foreign missionizing is your context, what’s more iconic and more immediately recognizable in American culture than Mormon missionaries? Peace Corps volunteers don’t all have a recognizable style of dress or accessory, but people recognize Mormon missionaries for traveling in pairs, for dressing conservatively (the young men’s “uniform” is especially identifiable), and for wearing those easy-to-spot black name tags.

And as for Mother Teresa… well, I’m not sure even Parker and Stone would take her on as an object of protracted ridicule (she has been featured briefly on South Park in the past). The audience wouldn’t stand for it. Mormons, on the other hand, are totally acceptable to most Americans as the butt of a good joke. [Read more...]

Filed Under: American society, Culture, diversity, Modern Mormonism, Protestantism, Race, Revelation Tagged With: 5 Comments

On Historical Sources, Mormonism, and the Pinterests of the new General Young Women’s President

April 8, 2013 By 6 Comments

I’ve spent the last three weeks carefully handling 18th century manuscripts housed in some of England’s most treasured and stories archives. Most of these sources fall into one of three general categories: journals, correspondence, or church records. The research is for my dissertation, and I’ve been doing this sort of thing for most of my adult life now: poring over records, considering their provenance and reliability, taking into account authorial point of view, comparing them with other accounts of the same or broadly similar events, attempting to contextualize their meaning, discerning their relative significance to a given question or subject, utilizing them as part of an argument, and then trying to write about my “findings” in a coherent and novel way. At least that’s how I conceive of my job as a historian. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Culture, Digital History, Gender, Modern Mormonism, Mormonism 6 Comments

How Mormons Read the Bible

March 11, 2013 By 8 Comments

A little more than a week ago, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released an update to its online edition of the Bible and other authoritative texts, with a print edition to follow later this year.  Some of these changes reflect better historical knowledge of LDS history, as well as improved study aids, and some historical contextualizing of some important LDS texts.  The new edition of the LDS Bible is incremental, offering a few minor spelling and punctuation updates to the King James Version, the official translation approved of by the Church.  The changes and the lack of changes have spurred some insightful reflection on the meaning of this new edition, including the supplemental resources it provides for study, but it is useful to consider at this junction just how exactly Mormons read the Bible.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Culture, Modern Mormonism, Mormon origins, Scripture 8 Comments

*Angels in America* at 20: Revisiting Tony Kushner’s Millennium — and His Mormons — in the 21st Century

February 20, 2013 By 3 Comments

2013 is the 20th anniversary of Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize for his groundbreaking play Angels in America, which first appeared on Broadway in two-parts in 1993. Kushner’s sweeping epic critiqued conservative politics in Reagan-era America and confronted the devastating realities of HIV-AIDS for the gay community. Along the way, Angels engaged with a variety of American identities, cultures, and issues, many of which are grounded in religion and spirituality. In addition to the obvious religious implications of the play’s millennial themes and of the Angel of America herself, main character Prior is identified as a New England WASP; Louis, Roy Cohn, and Ethel Rosenberg bring Judaism to the fore; Belize is a black former drag queen; Joe Pitt and his family struggle with what it means to be Mormon; and all of the play’s major characters struggle to reconcile sexual and religious identities.

Here on Peculiar People, Cristine Hutchison-Jones, author of “Center and Periphery: Mormons and American Culture in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America” (2010), and Matthew Bowman, author of The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith (2011), mark the occasion by reflecting on what Kushner’s representations of Latter-day Saints and their beliefs demonstrate about Mormons, Mormonism, and how non-Mormon Americans view the LDS community. [Read more...]

Filed Under: American society, Culture, diversity, Gender, Modern Mormonism, Mormon origins, Mormonism, Mormonism, politics, Romney, Priesthood 3 Comments

“It’s like Methodism, only more”: Mormon Conversion and Narratives of the Great Apostasy

February 4, 2013 By 13 Comments

A couple of weeks ago in Sunday School, a middle-aged woman shared her conversion story to Mormonism. Born and raised a Methodist, she noted that she always felt like something was lacking. When she discovered Mormonism, she explained, “it was like Methodism, only more.”

I smiled to myself as she said this, recognizing in her own conversion narrative a common refrain that dominates the autobiographical writings of her 19th century predecessors. Among the first generation of converts to Mormonism, roughly one-third of them came from Methodist backgrounds, including Emma Smith, Brigham Young, and John Taylor. Even Joseph Smith remembered being “somewhat partial to the Methodist sect” and feeling “some desire to be united with them” before his own visionary experience. He would later tell Methodist preacher Peter Cartwright, in words foreshadowing those of the woman in my Sunday School, that “We Latter-day Saints are Methodists, as far as they have gone, only we have advanced further.”[1] And Smith wasn’t alone in expressing such sentiments. Methodist converts to Mormonism  routinely portrayed their former faith as an important stepping stone on their path to discovering Mormonism, a sort of Elias that prepared the way for the fulness of the truth. [Read more...]

Filed Under: American society, Christianity, conversion, Culture, diversity, Modern Mormonism, Mormon origins, Mormonism, Mormonism, politics, Romney, Protestantism 13 Comments

Mending a Fractured World

January 30, 2013 By 2 Comments

In his Bancroft Prize-winning book, Age of Fracture, Daniel Rodgers tells the story of how, following the 1970s, America’s intellectual world fell apart. Ideas that were taken for granted during the mid-twentieth century, like national consensus, gender norms, racial identities, historical meaning, and market-based capitalism, fragmented into numerous directions. The social unrest of the 1960s (which challenged traditional assumptions), the end of the Cold War (which eliminated the nation’s most potent unifying rhetorical mobilization), and the culture war battles (which politicized and bifurcated cultural meanings) left Americans grasping to find some form of hegemonic basis to hold on to while all semblence of mainstream consensus fleeted away. (Such hegemony was never actually present, of course, but it had previously played an important public, if superficial, role in a perceived national consensus.) In short, the intellectual foundations of what “society” meant were coming unhinged. The key task for American thinkers in the last quarter of the twentieth century, according to Rogers, was to figure out what to do with the fractured mess that modernity produced. [Read more...]

Filed Under: American society, Culture, diversity, Modern Mormonism 2 Comments
« Older Posts