Catholics Need Their Own "Book of Mormon"

From: Patheos.com

Indulge me for just a second. Imagine the impossible. Let's agree for the sake of argument that the Catholic Church has a serious image problem where the world's concerned. To restore her to the public's good graces, a piquant musical comedy might be just the thing. It seems to be working for the Mormons.

Since its opening last week at New York's Eugene O'Neill theater, "The Book of Mormon" has been storming some well-fortified hearts. Times reviewer Ben Brantley declares it "an old-fashioned, pleasure-giving musical" and commands the public: "hie thee hence . . . and feast upon its sweetness."

On the surface, its plot, which plunks a pair of LDS missionaries into Uganda amid "a defeated, defensive group of villagers, riddled with AIDS," looks like a cheap shot at do-gooding and religion in general. This is exactly what anyone would expect from the show's creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone ("South Park"), and Robert Lopez ("Avenue Q"). But observers are finding in it an affirmation of faith and good works that is no less persuasive for being delivered with a backhand.

In the Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan writes that Parker and Stone, "seem to say as an empirical observation, we need a grander narrative; and if religion can do that, and bring compassion to the world, why should we stand in the way?"

Perhaps Sully, a believing Catholic, is an easy sell on this point. If so, that would place him squarely in the minority. At least until recently, the Church of Latter-day Saints was the most cheerfully maligned denomination in America. Before the 2008 primaries, Mike Huckabee asked, "Don't Mormons believe that Jesus Christ and Satan are brothers?" The question struck many as mock ignorance, calculated to scare evangelical voters away from Mormon rival Mitt Romney. A few months later, opponents of California's Proposition 8 aired a TV spot in which two Mormon missionaries steal a lesbian couple's marriage certificate. Whether the sticky wicket was real social conservatism or alleged doctrinal weirdness, marginalizing Mormons was the one activity that could get Left and Right singing "Kumbaya" in close harmony.


That mockery can bring about a PR coup for its subject might sound a little far-fetched. Indeed, truly mean-spirited mockery probably wouldn't. But "The Book of Mormon" handles its material with greater care, contrasting the missionaries' exotic religious zeal with their lovably human quirks. One of the elders, for example, seasons his exegesis with quotes from the Ring saga. Another falls in love with a native girl. In this, creators have made Mormonism the stuff of high camp, as Christopher Isherwood defines it. "You can't camp about something you don't take seriously," Isherwood explains. "You're not making fun of it; you're making fun out of it." In other words, Parker, Stone, & Co. are laughing with Mormons, not at them.

It turns out that many Mormons are willing, even flattered, to be laughed with. In the Times, Laurie Goodstein quotes Dustin Jones, a Mormon lawyer from Phoenix: "Now we've arrived, and we're on Broadway." Even some Mormons who reacted more viscerally admit the show portrays the truth of missionary life too well to qualify as hateful caricature. Recalling his own mission, and "the shock at the poverty and violence, the pressure from the mission president to baptize more natives," John Dehlin, a Utah graduate student, calls it "way, way too close to home."

In their range—from pained recognition to wry triumph—Jones' and Dehlin's reactions mirror those of Jews to the early fiction of Philip Roth. In Goodbye, Columbus (1959) and Portnoy's Complaint (1969), among other works, Roth depicted in gruesome comic detail both the anxieties that typified Jewish marginality and the licentiousness that often attended Jewish assimilation. Still reeling from the murder of 6 million by the Nazis, the Jewish establishment shuddered. "What is being done to silence this man?" wrote one rabbi, of Roth, to the Anti-Defamation League. "Medieval Jews would have known what to do with him."

Yet in retrospect, the success of Roth's fiction seems to mark the moment when American Jews had, to use Jones' word, arrived. With more awards than Audie Murphy, Roth has become the yardstick against which the establishment measures new hopefuls. Vivian Gornick might have been wrong when she sniffed that Roth's readership is "limited to the Jewish community center." Nevertheless, she was testifying to his work's place of honor in the American Jewish consciousness.
 
Where the Catholic Church is concerned, no word is more loaded than "arrival." It raises the questions of where she's been and where she's going. Citing an especially invasive police raid on a Belgian chancery, among other disheartening events, National Catholic Reporter's John Allen, Jr. pronounces "the collapse of Catholicism as a culture-shaping majority in the West. " That is, Catholics, despite our Church's claim to universality and our strength in numbers, now form a cultural minority—just like the Mormons.

In embracing this new, unwanted status, Allen predicts, Catholics will turn increasingly to "identity politics." These include "Emphasizing [Catholicism's] unique markers of identity, in order to defend itself against assimilation to the majority." We've already seen this siege mentality played out in the cultural sphere. Last December, William Donahue of the Catholic League protested the Smithsonian Institute's inclusion of David Wojnarowicz's short film "A Fire in My Belly" in its exhibit ""Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture." The video included footage of ants crawling on a crucifix. Donahue's protest succeeded; the Smithsonian yanked the film. But success in this case came at the price of hyperbole: Donahue had to condemn the footage as "hate speech."

Might I suggest there could be an ulterior motive to this new hyper-vigilance? Philip Roth put it best in an essay titled "Writing about Jews." "The cry 'Watch out for the goyim!' at times seems more the expression of an unconscious wish than of a warning," he writes. "Oh that they were out there, so that we could be together here!" In other words, stress or exaggerate the hostility of the environment, and you give Catholics an incentive to become more Catholic.

Paranoia expressed as cultural insularity seems to me a cheap substitute for authentic religious feeling. In my experience, it's entirely possible to hate the New York Times without loving God, so it follows that the reverse is true. And here, I think, is where a clever send-up of the realities of Catholic life could kill two birds with one stone. First, it could get non-believers empathizing, if distantly, with our commitment to this peculiar institution of ours. Second, it could help us adjust to our minority status with good grace and good cheer. As we learn to laugh at our own predicament, our view of the historic glass might evolve from half-empty to half-full.

As it stands, we reminisce futilely over the days when Pope Innocent III put all of England under interdict. A good musical could inspire us to warm ourselves noting that it's been a lot longer than 160 years since our founder was murdered by a mob. On this point, at least, we have it over the Mormons.

But how would the storyline go? Mel Brooks already covered the Inquisition in History of the World: Part I, so that's out. (To this day, I have never forgiven him for getting the Dominican habits wrong.) I'm open to suggestions, but so far I lean toward a topical, relevant rewrite of "Nunsense," where the Little Sisters of Hoboken have to hide the bodies of their poisoned fellows before the Apostolic Visitor shows up.