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By Terryl L. Givens

Editor’s note:  This article, which will run as a three-part series, is excerpted from the BYU Studies special issue “Mormons and Film.” Get this double-sized issue at byustudies.byu.edu

Concerning the development of the cultural identity of pre-Constantinian Christians, Graydon Snyder writes, “It took over a century for the new community of faith to develop a distinctive mode of self-expression.” [2] That is about how long it has taken Mormonism to exploit a cultural medium for self-expression that first appeared in the late nineteenth century — the motion picture.

In 1869, C.C.A. Christensen began painting the monumental canvasses that would first chronicle the Mormon experience as heroic American saga. The Tabernacle Choir entered upon the world stage, singing distinctive Mormon hymns and anthems, at the Columbian Exposition in 1893. Mormon literature saw its first golden age in the 1940s, with Virginia Sorenson, Maureen Whipple, and Vardis Fisher making valiant attempts to render the Mormon epic into the great American novel.

But it is only at the present moment that we can see a distinctive Mormon cinema showing signs of burgeoning greatness. And it is perhaps this relatively late development that has enabled Mormon filmmakers the perspective to provide especially provocative insights into the tensions and paradoxes of Mormon cultural identity.

Defining Mormon film (or Mormon literature or music), like defining artistic categories linked to any ethnic or religious or cultural group, is a difficult and contentious enterprise. In part, this is because Mormon culture itself is impossible to pin down when so many are so far from consensus on how to classify Mormonism itself.

While it is still a new religious community compared to the great world faiths and even Protestant denominations, many factors have conspired to foster its status as a community with a distinctive worldview, a powerful cultural cohesion, and its own forms of artistic and intellectual expression. But this cohesion by no means should imply that Mormon culture is homogenous or static.

In this regard, it may be especially useful to consider the words of Frederick Barnard, who points to Herder’s observation that a people “may have the most sublime virtues in some respect and blemishes in others ... and reveal the most astonishing contradictions and incongruities.” Therefore, Barnard writes, “a cultural whole is not necessarily a way of referring to a state of blissful harmony; it may just as conceivably refer to a field of tension.” [3]

Such dynamic tensions give cultural expression much of its vitality; in fact, Mormon film, in much the same way as the other arts, has come into its own to a large degree as a consequence of its serious engagement with the paradoxes and contradictions in Mormon culture. In this regard, we see affirmation of Herder’s implication that artistic culture is the exploration — both sober and playful — of tensions, rather than the glib assertion or imposition of a fragile harmony.

In Mormon culture, at least three tensions seem to be especially rich and fertile and have inspired recurrent and sustained engagement on the part of writers, artists, and thinkers in the Mormon community. Obviously these three do not comprise all the paradoxes one could locate in Mormonism’s intellectual or artistic or cultural heritage, and they are hardly manifest in every instance of Mormon cultural expression. But they provide an effective framework to explore a substantial sampling of several chapters in the history of Latter-day Saints’ efforts to make sense of their place in the world and to orient themselves to new concepts of humanness and their relationship to the divine.

Even a brief survey of contemporary Mormon film will reveal the recurrence of these paradoxes and their capacity to generate rich, artistic treatment.

Searching and Certainty

The first tension emerges from a fundamental paradox in Joseph Smith’s religion-making — a perennial but uneasy coexistence of searching and certainty. The Prophet emphasized in his religious thinking the right to epistemological assurance even as he outlined a vision of salvation that is endlessly, frustratingly, at times dishearteningly deferred.

For many observers, the supreme confidence and amplitude of Mormon pronouncements upon their own faith smack of spiritual arrogance and self-complacency. But these tendencies operate in tandem with a powerful countercurrent: salvation is for Mormons an endless project, not an event, and is therefore never complete, never fully attained. It is not an object of secure possession in this life. It is, in a word, agonistic — predicated on a process of ceaseless struggle.

Like Faust in his dispute with Mephistopheles, who insisted, “Once come to rest, I am enslaved,” Joseph saw dynamic transformation, not static bliss, as the existential condition of humanity and destiny of the righteous. [4]

Joseph’s crowned Saints are no angelic choirs passively basking in the glory of their God, but Faustian strivers endlessly seeking to shape themselves into progressively better beings, fashioning worlds and creating endless posterity, eternally working to impose order on an infinitely malleable cosmos, “learning” salvation, and “beyond the grave” at that.

Perpetual, painful self-revelation and inadequacies ameliorated only through eons of schooling, standing in stark contrast with confidently expressed certainties about theological truths and spiritual realities, certainly result in one of Mormonism’s most dynamic paradoxes. Latter-day Saints presume to positively know where they came from, why they are here, and where they are headed.

But such confidence is paired with the sometimes disheartening personal recognition that salvation itself must wait upon the laborious acquisition of an unfathomable scope of knowledge and the complete personal transformation into a godly individual. Mormons are sure of what they know, and personally and institutionally it is beyond compromise or negotiation. But that which they do not know will occupy them in the schoolrooms of the life beyond, says Joseph, for “a great while after [they] have passed through the veil.” [5]

It is no wonder that Mormon culture expresses itself in inconsistent bursts of the pat and the provocative, the clichéd and the astonished, the complacent and the yearning. “Art is born of humiliation,” said the poet Auden, and it may be in that very space between security in the possession of precious certainties and abject smallness before the magnitude of an almost unquenchable ignorance that Mormonism finds a tension capable of producing a genuinely religious art and intellectual expression. Mormon film, at its best, can be a meditation upon the uneasy balance of such opposites.

The Disintegration of Sacred Distance

The second paradox examines one of the most culturally — and theologically — potent innovations of the Mormon worldview, one that appears more as a collapse of polarities than a tension between them: the disintegration of sacred distance. “When I saw Joseph Smith,” Brigham Young declared, “he took heaven, figuratively speaking, and brought it down to earth; and he took the earth, brought it up, and opened up, in plainness and simplicity, the things of God; and that is the beauty of his mission.” [6]

With God an exalted man, man a God in embryo, the family a prototype for heavenly sociality, and Zion a city with dimensions and blueprints, Joseph rewrote conventional dualism as thoroughgoing monism. The resulting paradox is manifest in the recurrent invasion of the banal into the realm of the holy and the infusion of the sacred into the realm of the quotidian.

Much of the early ridicule as well as persecution directed against Mormonism was clearly provoked by this unseemly blending and blurring of sacred and secular categories. As the editor James Gordon Bennett noted wryly, Joseph’s doctrine — like Brigham’s subsequent Utah kingdom — blurred all categories. The Mormons, he declared, “are busy all the time establishing factories to make saints and crockery ware, also prophets and white paint.” [7]

Mockery of Joseph’s name (“‘Smith!’ said Miss Priscilla, with a snort. ‘That’s a fine name for a prophet, isn’t it?’”); of his undignified deportment (“habitual proneness to jesting and joking,” fumed one defector); of the concrete, historical details of his alleged scripture (“It furnishes us with the names and biography of the principal men ... with many of the particulars of their wars for several centuries. But seriously,” mocked one reviewer); and of his introducing Pentecost into his modern planned communities (“Visions in an age of railways?” laughed Dickens); [8] these and other complaints pounded home the fact that Americans were not ready to disregard the boundaries that kept heaven and earth apart.

It is possible, of course, to see Joseph Smith as expanding rather than contracting the sphere of the sacred. All that is certain is that by collapsing heaven into earth, as Young described Joseph’s essential mission, the young Mormon prophet effected a paradigm shift that undermined traditional theological constructs predicated on the opposition of the two spheres. Those inhabiting the theological universe he created find themselves in a place where the sacred, the human, and the divine find new meanings and require new orientations.

Isolation and Integration

The third dichotomy, Zion as paradise and Zion as exile, the pride of election and the yearning for integration, vie for dominance in the Mormon psyche. Belief in their chosen status appears to provoke among Mormons both pride and alienation; and the opposing movement toward integration into the larger world they have fled has been fueled by both a longing for inclusion and an imperative to redeem the world.

From its earliest days, Mormon converts embraced a sense of themselves as people of covenant, peculiar, chosen. Casting others outside the fold as “gentiles,” their rhetoric of difference together with a history of persecution and geographical remoteness compounded their isolation into a virtue and sign of blessedness. But their art and literature reveal a recurrent unease with such difference. Isolation is often felt as a burden of exclusion and is frequently transformed into a quest for outside connections. Mormons insist on the need for a gospel restoration but then feel the sting of being excluded from the fold of Christendom they have just dismissed as irredeemably apostate.

But this Mormon sense of uniqueness and exile is counterbalanced with theology, rituals, and educational programs that aspire to universal integration. When he revealed that the “same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there” (D&C 130: 2), Joseph was affirming that heaven is constructed out of a web of human relationships that extend infinitely in every direction. By the time his work was done, he had laid the groundwork for men to be sealed to their wives across the eternities, for parents to be sealed to their children and children to be sealed to their parents across infinite generations, and for friends to be bound to friends in a great assembly and Church of the Firstborn.

The implications of these three tensions are especially urgent for cultural expression, since art, literature, and the life of the mind can suffer from both embracing too much and embracing too little. In balancing covenantal obligations with life in Babylon, dangers lurk in both directions. Exclusivity can produce pride, self-righteousness, and spiritual sterility. At the same time, to accept and esteem everything is to value nothing.

In the dispensation heralded by Joseph Smith, the Saints were, like the Hebrews before them, commanded to “stand independent above all other creatures beneath the celestial world” (D&C 78:14). At the same time, as Brigham declared, “We believe in all good. If you can find a truth in heaven, earth or hell, it belongs to our doctrine. We believe it; it is ours; we claim it.” [9]

So like their exiled predecessors, without the benefits of social stability, abundant resources, or a prosperous prehistory, Mormons were surrounded by the cultural riches of a host culture that offered both temptation and promise. Once again, the challenge would be to exploit the accoutrements of a host culture without suffering contamination or loss of mission and identity in the process. The difficulty in “spoiling the Egyptians” has ever been the same — to turn the plundered gold into temple adornments rather than golden calves.

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Terryl L. Givens is Professor of Literature and Religion and is the James A. Bostwick Chair of English at the University of Richmond. His new book is People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture published by Oxford University Press. Dr. Givens’s other publications include Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy and By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion (both published by Oxford University Press).

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