The Book of Mormon raked in nine Tony Awards yesterday. I haven’t seen the play, but anything that puts “Joseph Smith” and “South Park” in the same sentence is OK by me. To, uh, commemorate — “celebrate” is perhaps too strong a word, considering I find divine revelation via golden plates no more convincing than a God who speaks through a burning bush — the occasion, a roundup of recent Mormon-themed news coverage:
At Newsweek, Tina Brown attempts to establish some sort of cultural meme with an issue dedicated to “The Mormon Moment.” The feature article, “Mormons Rock!” claims to reveal “why Mitt Romney and 6 million Mormons have the secret to success.” The key to LDS world dominance remains as much a secret as the oft-maligned special underwear, however. Beyond name-checking Stephanie Meyers (of unreadable Twilight fame) and Glenn Beck (late of Fox News, currently accepting gold bullion and most major credit cards for content on his own website), the article doesn’t offer much new information. However, the observation that Mormons believe in ““eternal progression,’ which means both that God himself was once a human being and that we can follow his example to evolve into gods ourselves,” does bring to mind the thetan creepiness of Scientology. Overall, the article is little more than a textbook retread of Mormon history, with references to Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman thrown in to freshen the whole thing up.
For a less obvious take on the Mormon “secret to success,” one must turn to Businessweek, which ran “God’s MBAs: Why Mormon Missions Produce Leaders” in its June 9 issue. Caroline Winter’s article offers valuable insight, though most of her conclusions — a second language gives former missionaries an edge in business and politics; 10-hour days of proselytizing teach perseverance, salesmanship and people skills — are pretty common-sense. Winter’s inside look at the life of a missionary is, if not revelatory, at least informative. The rigors of the experience are startling: “Missionaries aren’t allowed access to news and are only permitted two phone calls home each year, on Mother’s Day and Christmas.” I came away from the article convinced that the success of many Mormons depends less on the “industrious beehive” stereotype and more on the skills inculcated in Mormon youth from an early age. Winter points out that Mormons make good managers: “Kids age 12 through 18 progress through hierarchical rings of youth groups, each of which has two or three appointed leaders who learn to hold meetings, take responsibility for their groups, and check on members who aren’t attending church regularly.” As distasteful as I find the Christian drive to spread the Word of God to all us poor, benighted sinners, I can also see how maturity is prized pretty quickly out of any twenty-something dropped into a foreign city and expected not only to be self-sufficient but to produce a steady stream of converts.
Over at the New York Times, Timothy Egan writes about Jon Huntsman, whom he calls “The Reluctant Mormon.” The real message here is that Huntsman is sane (or at least was sane, considering his about-face on issues like cap-and-trade) in spite of his religion. America may not be ready for a Mormon president, but Huntman’s religion is actually beside the point. The truth is, America may not be ready for a rational Republican president. Egan praises his pragmatism:
“All I know is that 90 percent of scientists say climate change is occurring,” he told Time magazine. “If 90 percent of the oncological community said something was causing cancer, we’d listen to them.”
The benefit of Huntsman’s religion, Egan suggests, is that “he’s already a renegade. Why not take the next step?” Why not, indeed. The GOP could certainly use someone dutiful and respectful enough to serve a Democratic president, someone who isn’t looking for the next social-conservative bombshell to drop at CPAC. Someone, in short, to bring the party back — or, really, since it never had much of a claim on reality in the first place, to introduce it — to Planet Earth.
. . . So Well Read. . . 