Acentury ago, it was once a simple matter to assume a norm for American culture and situate the Mormon well outside it. Polygamy was likened to slavery in the nineteenth century (as the first Republican Party platform did in 1856). Brigham Young was compared to an Asian despot. Mormon women were victims in need of mythic frontier heroes like Captain Plum and Buffalo Bill to save them. Even Joseph Smith’s martyrdom could be seen as the penalty for his violation of the right to a free press. Mormonism made available to the playwrights of the Great American Saga the heroes and antiheroes, the virtues and vices, of that dramatic self-creation.
But today, in fiction, in film, on stage and even in the academy, the Mormon has not only been assimilated into American society, but has become American society—“American to the core,” as Harold Bloom writes in The American Religion. “It is weirdly true,” he continues, “in 1991, that the Mormons are as mainstream as you are, whoever you are.” To borrow from novelist Cleo Jones, author of Sister Wives, a melodrama of pioneer (and polygamous) nineteenth-century Utah, the LDS Church’s flagship education institution, Brigham Young University, has become “the third largest supplier of army officers. Mormons were Howard Hughes’s right-hand men. And so on.” The stereotypical Mormon is successful, Anglo-Saxon, middle-class, suburban, in a traditional family with one working parent and a stay-at-home mother and five children. If Tom Clancy wants a shorthand way of creating a young, clean-cut, patriotic guy-next-door, he may simply make him LDS, like Hunt for Red October’s Randall Tait. (The fact that the Russians consider him “a religious fanatic” is presumably to his credit.) Similarly, Clancy’s hero in Clear and Present Danger says that Mormons are “honest and hardworking, and fiercely loyal to their country, because they believed in what America stood for.”
Read Full Article »