Living Words, Curated Images

Living Make-Belief Field Trip

OK this week is going to get pretty personal but still totally on topic. I belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (frequently called Mormons) and I’ve been thinking over the past week about how the ideas I’ve been covering from Living Make-Belief connect to my own faith tradition. This amateur anthropology should help to make the ideas we’ve been discussing more concrete (it does for me).

If you’d like to learn more about the faith, no problem we bring it to you, or you can come check it out! If you’re grossed out by hearing about religion (or even just mine), then peace out I’ll catch you next week, otherwise read on; I promise you’ll learn more than by watching Under the Banner of Heaven, Devil in the Family, Heretic¹, American Primeval, and The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives back to back².

Use of Ritual

Latter-day Saint life has three core anchoring rituals. The first is prayer, which usually occurs many times a day in individual, family, and group settings, and which is always-ish spontaneous and based on the needs and circumstances of the moment. The second is the sacrament of the Lord’s supper, providing a weekly opportunity to reflect and recommit.

The third is worship in the temple, often done between weekly and monthly; most commonly participating in the temple endowment, which includes participation in a ritual drama that uses stories from Genesis and elsewhere as a model for our lives and place in the universe³. The latter two are always done verbatim; the words of the sacrament prayer enforced by reading, and the words of the endowment (until very recently) transmitted orally and learned by memorization.

All three of these rituals parallel the methods and practices of hunter-gatherer societies.

Oral Tradition

The other pre-literate practice in Latter-day Saint tradition is oral transmission of doctrine, principles, and counsel. Last weekend was General Conference, a twice-yearly weekend-long event comprising 9 or 10 hours of addresses from church leaders, music, and prayer. Not only is the spoken word the primary way that meaning is communicated⁴, but the words have an organic expiration. They are considered to essentially be “scripture”, but also the most current conference is studied at probably 10x the rate of prior conferences. Themes and ideas recur and grow in importance when they are requoted over time. If you go far enough back, you can find any number of cringeworthy things that leaders said, but it’s not what has stuck.

This is a very different view of scripture than you’ll find from the sola scriptura folks, and, similar to Jim Dator’s observations about Jesus’ reliance on the spoken word in the seventh chapter of Living Make-Belief, puts primacy on the idea of a “living word”. In the same way, weekly meetings involve lay members addressing the congregation or discussing ideas together in classes. Both are intended to be largely focused on synthesizing and making connections with relevant selections of texts, but largely consist of telling stories and sharing feelings.

Similarly, Mormon folklore builds up over time, such as the story of the seagulls saving the early pioneers, in the same way legends morph and grow as they are passed through generations of storytellers. All this may seem childish or offensive to people whose worldview is wholly shaped by the logic of Industrial or Information Societies.

Printed Text

The faith was founded at the edge of the industrial world, in upstate New York in 1830. When Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon in 1829, he had a manuscript written by scribes, but without the recently completed Erie Canal, it’s unlikely there would have been a printing press anywhere nearby to print the 5,000 copies that served as the core of the first missionary efforts. Probably the peak of the Modern worldview for the Church was in the 80s and 90s, when the Tabernacle Choir sang at Reagan’s inauguration and was dubbed “America’s choir” and President Hinckley was encouraging members to adopt traditional middle-class values and be respectable⁵.

Which brings us to the scriptures themselves. Latter-day Saints accept the Bible and add the Book of Mormon and other scriptures to the list. These are canonical in the sense that they form the “standard works” against which ideas and even new guidance is to be judged. In addition, Latter-day Saints are encouraged to study from the scriptures daily (studying the current General Conference is also encouraged but is a lower priority).

But there’s a tension here with the oral tradition model. There are many important issues the scriptures are silent about, others where the advice is bad (slavery and the rules of war stand out as the top two, but Paul’s sexual ethic is probably high on the list), and (clearly, given the explosion of denominations) plenty that’s left ambiguous, or where different authors communicate conflicting views on important topics. These “dead words” need someone to breathe life in them. In Latter-day Saint tradition, Church leaders can provide authoritative meanings. Joseph Smith even started a project to revise the Bible, trying to harmonize things that felt out of place. Similarly, the canon isn’t closed; new revelation is occasionally added to the scriptures, and teachings and emphasis change over time. This is why the question “what is the Church’s doctrine?” has a complicated answer (and that answer itself is not really doctrine…).

The Church also uses a single handbook that lays out for all leaders how to effectively run things day-to-day across the globe, as well as stating official positions and policies on a number of relevant issues, from bringing weapons to church (don’t) to medical marijuana (listen to your doctor, don’t smoke it). In many ways this reflects an Information Society paradigm: it’s almost like a computer program, specifying a complete set of instructions for consistent administration, and updated electronically when anything, like whether funerals can be recorded, needs to change. Now if only people would read it…

Dream Society

It’s worth mentioning that Latter-day Saint history and lore is replete with actual dreams and visions as a method of gaining divine understanding, from Lehi’s dream in the Book of Mormon, to the visions of Joseph Smith and successive prophets. These visions serve as an image-story-performance to teach larger truths about our purpose in life, and there’s often a sense that the receiver is unable to fully communicate in writing what they’ve experienced.

But the larger idea of a Dream society is of image and performance as a way of creating meaning and value. This is the one common thread that many recent pieces of popular media about Mormon culture get right: high standards and spending so much time together creates a culture of performance. We feel pressure to curate a view of our family and our own spirituality that meets a very high and specific standard; the canonical form of this is having all your children in coordinating outfits with perfect hair at Sunday morning services. It’s not hard to see how people in this culture have outsize influence on social media platforms, leading to things from #MomTok to Ballerina Farm; we’ve been doing this our whole lives!

Don’t get me wrong: on the whole, having a cohesive community with high standards overwhelmingly creates people who strive for that standard and are better for it, but the shadow that comes from hiding the gaps or imperfections can get pretty dark. I definitely see efforts from local and general church leaders to address the perfectionism, deception, and judgment that cause this focus on appearance (similar to Jesus’ denunciations of “whitewashed tombs”), but it’s an ongoing challenge.

On the flip side, the Church’s own attempts at feeding an image- and performance-centric society have been mixed so far. For example, it recently put out a video series of scenes from the New Testament. I don’t much care for them, because they are so committed to being a video representation of what happens in scripture (ie text), it’s kind of lifeless - when Peter cuts off the servant’s ear, everyone kind of just stands there, because Matthew didn’t provide any stage directions⁶. I think the prior set of red-headed Jesus videos, ethnic representation aside, were better; they were oddly focused on reenacting famous paintings of Christ, but at least that was still a visual medium being adapted.

So this is how I make sense of these ideas among my own people. I’d love to hear about your own subcultures and how/whether you see each form of society in them. My biggest fear in writing is that maybe these concepts are so slippery we can cram anything into them and they don’t have much explanatory power.

1. Side note: I find this film fascinating because of what people take away from it: many people walked out saying it was a damning critique of religion, but I, much like McKay Coppins, saw a story about the horror of being trapped in a room with someone who has “done his own research” on religion by watching Zeitgeist.

2. I guess I’m glad we make such compelling television? Or, at least, some popular imagined version of us does.

3. And which, to hit this theme again, connects/rhymes with Eve theory of consciousness; the link here is to a Dream-Society-esque imagining of the theory in AI-generated comic Ghibli-esque form, connecting it to the hottest trend last week has to offer.

4. Everything is written down and published in the Church’s magazine and online, but video is definitely the primary medium.

5. This is an interesting gap in Hines’s ConsumerShift - if values drive so much of society, what are the forces trying to intentionally steer values in the population, and to what, and how effective are they?

6. It also suffers from “British Jesus” syndrome. The Chosen does all of this infinitely better, at least in the first season (after that it often drifts into being about the Bible instead of about Jesus).