Making Fun of Mormonism

[rug]

Everyone’s doing it—planets! tablets! underwear!—but is it really so clever?

December 5, 2011
By Max Mueller

Sacred underwear, baptizing holocaust victims, gods of their own planets.

When some of America’s most celebrated pundits and public intellectuals talk about Mormons, these are the images that are summoned. Ironically in this “Mormon Moment”—signaled by a hit Broadway musical, polygamous housewives on TLC, and of course two Mormon presidential candidates—Mormons, long considered quintessential “outsiders” to mainstream American culture, today find themselves at the center of the American zeitgeist. Yet it is the Mormons’ supposed theological weirdness that is the centripetal attraction.

As Joanna Brooks has noted in these pages, the New York Times recently featured Harold Bloom’s musings on how a President Romney would govern a country, and a planet, from which he would in the afterlife depart, becoming the god of his celestial body. More planet talk happened just last week on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Brainstorm Blog.” Michael Ruse, philosopher of biology, asserted that it is legitimate not to vote for a presidential candidate whose theology is “totally barmy. We can become gods with our own planets!… No coffee and tea is bad enough. But the underwear!” In October, in a column called “Anne Frank, a Mormon?” Maureen Dowd offered (via Bill Maher and Christopher Hitchens) the full rundown of Mormon “weirdness,” from Joseph Smith’s uneasy reputation to the “Jewish dust-up”: the posthumous baptism of Jews.

Casual assertions of knowledge about Mormon theology have dismayed longtime scholars of Mormonism. UNC’s Laurie Maffly-Kipp recently told me that “while seeming to archly critique the evangelical and atheist attacks on Mormonism,” Dowd’s column in particular represented “one pithy stroke of ignorance masquerading as informed opinion.”

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/5462/making_fun_of_mormonism/