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Searching for the Quotidian in TV's Latest Mormon Moment

2024; Volume: 11; Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/21568030.11.05

2156-8030

Suzanna Krivulskaya,

Pentecostalism and Christianity Studies

since its inception, mormonism has confounded the interpretive imagination of American pop culture consumers. In June 1830, less than three months after the publication of the Book of Mormon, the fledgling human-interest press set out on a clumsy mission of discrediting the new religion. Newspapers, whose editors presumably did not bother to read past Joseph Smith's preface, decried the tome as “evidence of fraud, blasphemy and credulity, shocking to the Christian and moralist.”1 The content of the sacred volume was dismissed as fantastical, even as the news of the text's arrival seemed to merit extensive reporting. Four years later, Ohio editor Eber D. Howe reprinted two anti-Mormon woodcuts—a kind of nineteenth-century meme—in one of the first book-length denunciations of the new faith.2 For visual objects designed to dismiss Mormon dogma, the woodcuts were surprisingly detailed, if disparaging, in their retelling of the religion's origin. Protestants were invited to behold Mormonism—and then, having read Howe's devastating takedown, urged to look for orthodoxy elsewhere. Ever since, the paradox of Mormon representation in popular culture has continued to reside in the uneasy marriage of its compelling particularity and its (apparently) bewildering incomprehensibility for a public perpetually vacillating between titillation and repulsion.Evidence of Mormon illegibility abounds. A 2022 representative survey of 1,157 Americans found that most respondents knew very little about Latter-day Saints.3 Only 34 percent, for example, correctly answered that Latter-day Saint men could not live with more than one wife, while 20 percent admitted to knowing nothing about the religion in general. In an unsurprising marriage of ignorance and intolerance, the survey found that those who knew the least about Mormons disliked them most. Given that only 21 percent of respondents derived their information from friends and family, the second most relied-upon set of sources came from Facebook (12 percent) as well as TV and movies (12 percent).Since the entertainment industry makes money by emphasizing the more sensational aspects of any group's history, it is not surprising that, with the introduction of TV's Mormon moment in the last few years, popular expertise in all things Mormon remains deficient. The proliferation of content has not translated into increased literacy. Between true crime shows focusing on child abuse, theft, and murder, fictionalized series purporting to correctly distinguish between the good and bad kinds of religiosity, and reality television indiscriminately conflating polygamy with Mormonism, the public remains unconvinced of the purportedly mainstream features of the community. On TV, Mormons continue to be represented as at once well-meaning and dangerous, naive in their kindness and menacing in their potentiality. In rare instances of deviation from this pattern, film and television creators linger on the humanity of their Mormon subjects, but nuanced portrayals of the quotidian and the unremarkable remain exceptions in the broader landscape of Mormon representation.One of the most anticipated Mormon series in 2022 was the FX adaptation of Jon Krakauer's bestseller Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith.4 Krakauer, an unabashed critic of the faith, used the 1984 double homicide of Brenda Lafferty and her infant daughter Erica by two extreme fundamentalists as evidence of Mormonism's inherent incompatibility with the respectable secular liberalism that the author himself espouses. Despite the book's commercial success, scholars of religion have criticized Krakauer's understanding of the faith as woefully reductive and dangerously dogmatic.5 Whereas more sophisticated observers located the cause of the Lafferty murders in extremism, Krakauer placed the blame on Mormonism writ large. In his crass and unsophisticated analysis, the religion was always unreasonable and violent, corrupting the better angels of people's search for meaning and coercing them into submission to unearned charismatic authority.The 2022 television adaptation of Under the Banner of Heaven attempts to take a more measured approach but ultimately fails to do the Lafferty case—or Mormonism—justice by unconsciously (in a generous reading) reproducing much of Krakauer's polemic. The series, created by Dustin Lance Black, who won the 2009 Academy Award for best original screenplay for the film Milk (2008), is a fictionalized account of the Lafferty murders investigation. Like the book, the seven-episode arc meanders between Lafferty family history and the broader Mormon story, but Black introduces a new central character through whom viewers are invited to understand both the case and the faith. Detective Jeb Pyre, played by Andrew Garfield, is supposed to stand for “good” religion, with his picture-perfect Latter-day Saint family; a nice, if modest, house; and its manicured lawn on which the children play with their adoring father while his wife labors inside the home. In contrast, the Lafferty family, with their abusive patriarchal father, the power struggles between the brothers, and their docile and unquestioning wives, is fraught with danger. Theirs is “bad” religion: it is too earnest, too insistent on close readings of prophesies, too demanding of its adherents. Viewers are led to understand that, in this context, it is hardly surprising that the two Lafferty brothers who would murder their sister-in-law and niece were the perfect candidates for gradual radicalization into fringe fundamentalism.6As in Krakauer's book, Black's juxtaposition of good/bad religion in the series feels reductive. The screenwriter, who grew up Mormon and came out as gay in college, thinks deeply about the faith, but his attempts to explain the religion's complexities to the broader public often feel awkward and forced. There is a scene in which Ron Lafferty, one of the brothers responsible for the double murder, is baptized into fundamentalism in a hot tub. The rebirth is immediately followed by a gay kiss, which introduces the altogether speculative and not terribly original associations of the “worst” kinds of fundamentalism with closetedness. It is true that the fundamentalist commune that actually baptized Lafferty experimented with unorthodox sexual practices, but this fictionalized moment seems gratuitous. Perhaps Black sought to humanize Ron Lafferty by adding this element of quasi-queerness to the many other struggles that would lead him to kill, but this detail feels sloppy and out of place.7The series is also saturated with overly didactic meditations on the role of women in the church. Emma Smith, Joseph Smith's first wife, is invoked time and again in flashbacks as a kind of beacon of Mormon femininity. Her resolve and relative power are juxtaposed with the abuse contemporary fundamentalist women suffer at the hands of their extremist husbands. In episode 3, the grieving Allen Lafferty, who is still detained as a suspect in the homicide of his wife and daughter, delivers a jeremiad about women's predicament in Mormon families, disguised (not particularly convincingly) as a conversation with Detective Pyre. “Our sweet wives,” Lafferty complains, “all being told that by having dozens of children that somehow would make them more holy, more righteous. Lately I'm starting to wonder, isn't that just another surrender that we push them into in the name of God? And I certainly didn't see it like that at the time—you know, that I was building Brenda a new cage, a prison . . . But I was, wasn't I?”8 The detective seems to agree. He realizes in that moment that the marriage system he takes for granted may, in fact, be loaded with danger. At the end of the series, Pyre returns to his perfect (as in not too extreme) Mormon home ready, presumably, to imagine a more equitable future for his wife and daughters.In the end, Black's Under the Banner of Heaven commits the same sins as its bestselling inspiration—mistakes that Black presumably was trying to gently correct by introducing the likable moderate detective as his central protagonist. Black's solution to the problem of religious extremism is to find reasonable men who would make reasonable decisions about their reasonable wives and daughters. Mormonism is not all bad, Black sheepishly offers; good religion is possible through restraint. In upholding this unnecessary and unhelpful dichotomy, Black's show perpetuates the most harmful stereotypes of Mormonism's imagined existence on the edge of extremism.9In contrast to the scripted series, Black's 2022 autobiographical documentary Mama's Boy is a deeply moving and thoroughly nuanced story about the meaning of faith and love. Black's late mother Anne was a survivor of polio who faced innumerable challenges as a person with a disability throughout her life. Strong and independent, she taught her son the meaning of perseverance, the importance of activism, and the courage of being oneself. As Black navigated his relationship with his Mormon faith and his budding sexuality, his mother stood by him despite the supposed incongruity between Latter-day Saint dogma and queer identity. When Black is not operating with the forced dichotomy of good versus bad religion inherited from Krakauer, Latter-day Saints in his documentary are allowed to emerge as full-fledged human beings with competing desires and complicated commitments—and not as stereotypes tied to manufactured ideas about correct and incorrect ways of being religious in the world.The documentary genre has been perhaps the most successful at portraying Mormonism in ways that are at once compelling and complex. In the 2022 documentary The Mission, director Tania Anderson follows the journey of four young Latter-day Saint missionaries as they travel first to the missionary training center in Provo and then, ultimately, to Finland where most of them serve the rest of their term. (One of the protagonists—notably, the most seemingly outgoing and gregarious of the four—is sent home after bravely admitting to struggling with anxiety and depression.) The film unfolds slowly—as does, no doubt, one's time in an entirely unfamiliar and occasionally hostile environment. While the pace has been criticized by viewers conditioned to resonate with a swiftly moving plot, it is a beautiful meditation on adolescence, commitment, and faith. The Mission masterfully captures the awkwardness of the missionary endeavor as the protagonists attempt to learn Finnish, adapt to new companions, and politely try to persuade a few unfriendly Finns that theirs is the true gospel. Upon their return, the missionaries have grown up in ways that their non-Mormon friends will never understand, yet the casual viewer is allowed a glimpse into this process and at the losses and joys associated with such growth.The 2022 documentary series Mormon No More is similarly poignant. Across four episodes, the ABC News Studios series tells the stories of former Mormons who left or were forced out of the church because of their sexuality. At the heart of the series are two women: Lena Schwen and Sally Osborne. Both were once devout Mormons who had married men, had children, and attempted to live the lives prescribed to them by their community. When they met at a church gathering, they felt a connection that somehow surpassed all the above. Falling in love meant dissolving their marriages and creating a new family: with the combined grand total of seven children, whom the women continue to co-parent (in one case amicably, in another with still unresolved conflict and apparent pain) with their former husbands.As the series zeroes in on Schwen and Osborne's unusual romance, it also provides a helpful background for understanding the predicament in which the women found themselves—and why walking away from the version of their faith which they had embraced for years was just as painful as falling in love was easy. Religion and sexuality are often uncomfortable bedfellows; both demand something of their subjects. When presented as incompatible, the choice to give up one to accept the other is profoundly painful. This holds true for other former Mormons featured in the series, all of whom chose to give up something important to claim a more honest existence. The series’ careful focus on the sacrifices involved in walking away from Mormonism presents this tension in a way that might make even the harshest critics of the faith recognize what might be compelling about it.Unlike these thoughtfully constructed documentaries, true crime television featuring Mormons delivers some less well-rounded portrayals. Perhaps the genre's popularity and commercial success depends on crass caricatures for survival, so the documentaries and series produced under this particular banner leave out the complexity of Mormon lives for the expediency of titillating sensation. In 2021 and 2022 alone, streaming services produced five series and one film documenting various criminal episodes in recent Mormon history: Murder Among the Mormons (2021), LulaRich (2021), Sins of Our Mother (2022), A Friend of the Family: True Evil (2022), Keep Sweet (2022), as well as a different but similarly titled Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey (2022).10 Covering multilevel marketing schemes, document forgeries, child sexual abuse, and child murder, the true crime genre highlights trite sensationalism without pausing to interrogate the worthwhile questions: how something as quotidian as commitment to one's community might lead well-meaning people to tolerate unorthodox practices, or why unwavering belief in celestial prophecy might cause one to do the unthinkable in the earthly realm. To point to the complexity of what leads people to commit crimes despite—or because of—religious commitments is not to excuse criminal behavior. Future true crime series would benefit from a deeper analysis of how people might over time grow to tolerate criminal behavior in their midst or, more often, among their leaders. As it stands, true crime portrays Mormons as alternatively hopelessly naive or menacingly dangerous. The dichotomy might propel the plot of crime stories, but it hinders any attempt to make Mormonism legible to a public predisposed to regarding the religion as fundamentally alien.Despite having at best a tenuous relationship to its eponym, reality television has managed to deliver more sophisticated portrayals of Mormonism. Before the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City ever premiered in 2020, Bravo's franchise connoisseurs expected to dive deep into Utah's Mormon culture. In actuality, the show features a profoundly diverse cast of characters with similarly divergent backgrounds: Jewish, Muslim, Pentecostal, Mormon, and ex-Mormon. Among the Mormon contingent, there are Lisa Barlow, a Jewish convert who practices a looser kind of religious adherence to doctrine (she drinks alcohol and owns a tequila company); Whitney Rose, a formerly pious believer who walked away from the church following a torrid affair with her now husband; and Heather Gay, a divorced descendant of pioneers, whom the church excommunicated after the show aired and who had felt judged by her community due to her divorce long before her ties with Mormonism were officially severed. By no means do the housewives represent typical Mormons—or even typical people. Bravo's empire makes its money by featuring outlandishly wealthy women with complicated histories and often limited self-understanding. Still, casting practicing and former Mormons alike, and talking honestly about both the joy of community and the pain of separation, are refreshing choices for a franchise generally concerned with more shallow matters. During the show's first reunion, when host Andy Cohen asked Rose and Gay about being separated from their religious community, the women teared up—betraying both the joy they must have once felt in Mormon belonging and, recognizing the limits of their community's acceptance, the pain of exile.Separation has also been the theme of the longest-running show about one fundamentalist Mormon family: the Browns on TLC's Sister Wives. Since 2010, viewers have followed the journeys of Kody Brown, his four wives, and their eighteen children. The Browns belong to the Apostolic United Brethren, a sect of the fundamentalist movement that sanctions plural marriage. Despite the family's commitment to the lifestyle, by the end of 2022, the head of the Brown household was married to just his fourth wife Robyn, after the other three women left in rapid succession.The departures were not unexpected. It had long been evident that the family dynamic shifted dramatically after Kody married Robyn in 2010. Five years later, the first wife, Meri, began an online affair with someone who turned out to be a woman who had catfished Meri into falling in love with an entirely invented character named Sam. The second wife, Janelle, and Kody had a relationship that could best be understood as friendship—or perhaps a business partnership. Christine, the third wife, felt the most rejected by Kody's final marriage. When he admitted to falling out of love with Christine, she was the first to leave the family, with Janelle and Meri making the same decision soon after. And while all the above is certainly dramatic and worthy of reality television coverage, the series is compelling precisely because it reveals Brown family dynamics to be paradoxically quotidian.In season 17 of Sister Wives, the ordinariness is the draw. The entire plot is centered on Christine's departure from the family. While the development was breaking news in the world of reality television, the way the story actually unfolded—over multiple hour-long episodes—was nothing short of delightfully dull. There were questions about mortgages and the sale of Christine's house that needed to be resolved, several family meetings about the dissolution of the marriage, and many, many shots (some self-filmed) of packing up the house, loading the boxes into the moving truck, and finally—mercifully—driving away only to return a few weeks later to tie up loose ends. As the action remained in the realm of logistics, the main characters provided commentary on the nature of marriage, the disappointment of not being able to sustain multiple unions, and the bitterness of divorce. In these moments, despite the ostensibly sensational background underpinning the Brown family saga, the protagonists come off the most human, the most sincere, the most ordinary.Still, if recent coverage is any indication, Mormonism's latest TV moment continues to mostly be sustained by the sensational. In contrast, the most compelling portrayals of the faith emphasize stories of incongruity, conflict, and failure—not sanitized morality tales about the merits of “good” religion. In true crime and scripted television, the sensationalism of religious violence overshadows any attempt at investigating the pervasive dangerous impulses undergirding many religious (and secular) communities. Mormonism is no exception. The best stories about Mormons highlight tensions between tradition and rupture, community cohesion and individual flourishing. These are, of course, the same dynamics that have characterized so much of the broader American culture, yet they continue to be treated as other by storytellers who misunderstand just how American Mormons really are. Film and television producers who feature Mormon stories ought to recognize that the most successful portrayals treat their subjects as fully human. As it stands, the stereotypes perpetuated in the currently profitable genre of true crime continue to dominate the cultural discourse—rendering Mormonism as foreign despite the proliferation of stories that reveal Mormons to be as American as anyone who has ever felt the pull between community and self.