The Book of Mormon, a musical from the creators of South Park, won a Grammy for best musical theater album on Sunday, shortly after topping the Broadway box office for the first time. But in the following excerpt from his new book, The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith, historian Matthew Bowman argues that both The Book of Mormon and the recently revived Angels in America miss something crucial about the faith and its culture.
“Hello! My name is Elder Price, and I would like to share with you a most amazing book!” sings the actor Andrew Rannells to the audience of the Eugene O’Neill Theater in New York City. In March 2011 the tart musical satire The Book of Mormon opened on Broadway to largely rapturous reviews and sellout crowds. It received 14 Tony nominations and 9 wins. A recent Pew survey shows that many Mormons believe a gulf stands between themselves and American culture; after spending much of the 20th century finding ways to make America’s virtues their own, they discover by the end of the century that propriety, rectitude, and dogged cheerfulness seem not to gain them the admiration they once had. But in The Book of Mormon, the fresh-scrubbed diligence of Mormon missionaries is a mark of naïveté, repression, and foolish optimism. The childish buoyancy and faith of a pair of Mormon missionaries sent to war-torn, disease-ridden Uganda blinds them to how monumental the challenges they face really are, and their solution—the religion of the “all-American prophet” Joseph Smith, as one song labels him—seems hopelessly, even hilariously, inadequate.
