Across the street from Voodoo Donuts in downtown Portland sits a can’t-miss-it wall painting that reads:
“KEEP PORTLAND WEIRD.”
I’ve heard it claimed that Austin, Texas actually originated the “KEEP [BLANK] WEIRD” meme, but no matter, Portland has certainly made it its own–and would that all the Lord’s cities gloried in their weirdness! Indeed, when a friend of mine moved from Portland to Salt Lake, her chief gripe about the place was that in Utah, people said “Weird” like it was a bad thing! Such is not the ethos of Portland.
Nor, frankly, should it be of Utah; and the differing attitudes of Portland and, say, Provo towards “weirdness” speaks volumes of how far the latter has shied away from what we should be most proud of.
Cause everywhere I turn these days, I see the Faith of my Fathers trying to normalize itself every which way, what with all those “And I’m a Mormon” ads giving way towards erasing the word “Mormon” entirely, yet both with the nominal goal of “normalizing” Mormons in the broader culture. And while I certainly applaud any and all attempts to make the Church more accessible and approachable, I fear we lose something special when we try to hide our weirdness under a bushel.
For as much as I found The Book of Mormon musical soundtrack to be (like everything South Park) facile, juvenile, offensive, and reductive, I nonetheless must give Trey and Matt thanks, for reminding us that, despite all our marketing campaigns to the contrary, we are a weird people–and quite frankly we should embrace that!
Did not Peter declare that the Saints are to be “a peculiar people?” Does that not signify that we should mayhaps be, well, peculiar, nay, weird? And don’t tell me about how our abstinence from coffee, drugs, booze and extramarital sex is what makes us “peculiar,” plenty of faiths have similar proscriptions. No, let’s remind all our Utah-HQ’d MLMs and pyramid schemes how both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young established communitarian societies of no-rich-no-poor in the Midwest and Rocky Mountains respectively–and that, moreover, these were not mere experiments, but the actual economic order we believe Jesus Christ will personally administer (indeed, that no other system is acceptable before Him) during the Millennium! How very Portland.
In fact, let’s talk about the near-heretical physicality of our religion—almost more Native American than Western–what with a Holy Spirit that is not mystically immaterial but is rather a more refined material (D&C 131:7)that speaks straight to our senses, for there is no difference between the temporal and the spiritual; of the special undergarments we wear beneath our clothing, and the elaborate ceremonies of our Temples that we construct at great expense for very little other reason than to redeem the dead; of the real, physical olive oil we place on each others’ heads for blessings of health and comfort; of our insistence on a God who inhabits a corporeal body, who exists in space and time; how the Garden of Eden has a GPS co-ordinance in Missouri; how we all existed before we were born, and that God’s plan for us is not only for us to return to him but to become like him!
These are all, by the way, high heresies as far as most of “traditional mainstream Christianity” is concerned–and thank heaven for it! I hope we are never traditional and mainstream, I pray we remain forever the Portland of Christianity.
A recent ByCommonConsent post lamented how the Gospel Topic Essay “Becoming Like God” was no longer live on the church’s website (though the Gospel Library App still had it); many speculated that this was more than a mere broken link, that the Church was actively distancing itself from our strangest beliefs, the ever-quoted/ever-mocked “Get your own planet” misused and abused from The Godmakers to The Book of Mormon musical. The only comment that remotely made my heart sing was: “So if someone asks, do you get your own planet? The more honest and complete answer (according to Mormon teachings), is a loud YES! But wait, there’s more! Not only do you get your own planet, you get your own galaxy, and more galaxies, and on and on and on. You get to spend eternity creating worlds and populating those worlds with people you create. There is no end to the number of planets and children you will get to create and govern! You are exalted! You are a god! And you create and rule, create and rule, create and rule forever!” Amen and Amen! The way to silence the haters–indeed, perhaps the only way to inspire and uplift them–is not to shrink from our strangest doctrines, but to sing them from the rooftops, and accuse our critics of a critical lack of imagination!
Not only should we just own our weirdness (it’s not like others will ever stop reminding us), but our weirdness is very often our actual appeal! Novelist Jane Barnes explained as much in her 2012 pseudo-memoir “Falling In Love With Joseph Smith.”
I read the book several summers ago after a review of it read: “This is the strangest book about Joseph Smith you will ever read.” Barnes is she who helped produce the PBS documentary on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints a few years back, and had even met with the missionaries herself–in fact, she almost converted! Didn’t obviously, for reasons she explains more in the book; but what struck me about her fascinating story is that what most attracted her to Mormonism, what caused her to seriously consider baptism at one point, was precisely the weird things that we don’t even like to talk about anymore!
For Barnes, it was Joseph Smith translating the Book of Mormon from a stone in a hat–so often mocked by South Park et al–that had the sure touch of divinity for her. It was the wildness of Joseph Smith, his playfulness, his chutzpah, his audacity and even his cheekiness, the very qualities that caused some early converts to apostatize and be offended at this behavior “unbecoming the dignity of a Prophet of God,” those moments in his biography that continue to drive members from the Church to this day–these are the things that she found most inspired!
It wasn’t the calm, meek, dignified Joseph Smith of our official media, but the passionate, reckless, revolutionary Joseph Smith of the best biographies that most resembled an authentic Prophet of God to her–like some wild-eyed Elijah, or John the Baptist, or Enoch, “a wild man hath come among us!” That is, it was the weirdness of Joseph Smith that most attracted her–and I deeply suspect she is not alone.
For just why do we shy away from how wonderfully human Brother Joseph was? Is it not comforting to know that God deals with actual human beings, in all of our flaws and short-comings and passions, and not saints? I don’t know about you, but I take great comfort in the thought that if God can do something with rambunctious Joseph Smith, then maybe He can do something with me!
A much more recent example: writer Andrew Kay published a retrospective on the final Hill Cumorah Pageant in 2019 entitled “Mormonism’s Sci-Fi Swan Song“, but don’t let the tongue-in-cheek title fool you: this is a warts-and-all love letter from a secular humanist to our hokiest of Church productions, because he keenly understands what the appeal is here–indeed, what’s all at stake here. Some key excerpts:
“It wasn’t ‘depression,’ exactly; it was spiritual, a staleness that, as an irreligious person, I’d fought with all my life. Except this time was different: I was glimpsing it all around me — in my students especially, college kids to whom I taught writing. The boy with the 142 IQ who went full Brian Wilson and stopped getting out of bed one day. The girl who confessed to me, in chillingly dispassionate tones, that she saw no point in living out the rest of her days. Something was afoot: some gathering despondency, strongest in the young, that had no shortage of worldly causes — planetary, economic — and yet exceeded these. It was a ghostly deficiency.”
He notes how most Churches, “hemorrhaging members”, were failing to rise to the challenge; they suffered this same “ghostly deficiency”. Hence why his ears perked up at the Hill Cumorah pageant: a native-upstate-New Yorker himself, he’d never been all his years growing up, and finally decided to check it out, because “it struck me that they were the antithesis of what afflicted me and those I knew. Something in their door-to-door deportment, their earnestness and brio, seemed a soft rebuke to my own disenchantment.”
Despite enjoying a thoroughly irreligious upbringing, “At night I lay awake, brooding on eternity. The worldview of Where Did I Come From, however clear-sighted, reduced human life to biology alone; there were no sequels entitled Why Am I Here? or Where Am I Going? What dogged me most was the endlessness of death: an electric shock coursed through my body when I tried to grasp the infinitude of it, how all the eons I could think of were, joined together, the briefest prologue to whatever lay beyond the grave. How was everyone I knew just going about their affairs — talking on the phone, dawdling at the mall — when it was obvious they were hurtling toward that blankness? Shouldn’t they be screaming?”
Suddenly we can understand the radical appeal of the fourth missionary discussion! Nibley was fond of declaring that the secularists and the sectarians alike only ever offered descriptions of the set; Joseph Smith is who finally offered the plot: “People found themselves in a Copernican universe far vaster and more impersonal than the biblical heavens, and one way to react to this new normal was to discover in space itself — its stars and planets and imagined denizens — the stuff of religious awe. So in science fiction, the wonder and terror long inspired by the Judeo-Christian God, and by angels and devils, gets remapped onto aliens; visitations become visitors. In Mormonism, God is an alien; we are all incipient aliens, bound up in a project of collective deification.”
To be clear (and this is the crux of my point), the so-called sci-fi elements that we shy from so often, that we are somehow vaguely embarrassed to defend or define, was exactly what astonished and attracted him: “What did I or my friends — secular, overeducated, climate-terrified yet basically inert — have to rival that?”
What indeed? And here a different Jane makes an appearance for the kicker: “In order for people to abandon their self-interest and commit to a grand cause, writes Jane Bennett in The Enchantment of Modern Life, something has to happen to their aesthetic being — that part of them that is sensory and emotional. They have to fall in love. ‘One must be enamored with existence,’ she writes, ‘to be capable of donating some of one’s scarce mortal resources to the service of others.’ Put baldly, ‘You have to love life before you can care about anything.’ Enchantment turns out to be the precondition for committed political life together — a way of charming people toward self-transcendence with a vision of existence that pulses with animacy and purpose. Ethical codes are stillborn without such visions; they can’t catch unless people are inflamed by some story of their lives capable of drawing from them, again and again, virtuous performances.”
Folks, not to put too fine a point on it, but if we don’t let our faith pulse with “animacy and purpose”, with a vibrancy quite literally not of this world, then we are as spiritually deficient as the rest of the churches. Only a willingness to be apologetically weird–to again, be in the world, not of it–can accomplish that.
(Incidentally, just try not to feel the Spirit at his finale: “Still, I brought my hands together and asked — to be more inspired, surprised, tuned to a godly frequency that as yet I hardly heard — and felt something unfamiliar: a peace that was either grace itself or the relief of giving up control.”)
On a similar note, an astrophysicist friend of mine told me that for him, it’s all the totally weird stuff in LDS history and cosmology that is the strongest argument for its authenticity: for between Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity, it turns out that the Universe itself is an incredibly weird place. Serious, with each new discovery, we find that the wildest speculative sci-fi still has not even touched the total weirdness of the Universe. It’s a very exciting time to be a astrophysicist, he assures me!
Hence, if LDS Church history, theology, and doctrine is going to feel authentic and true, then it’s going to have to be as weird as the Universe! And the Lord be praised, it is! Despite the best efforts our own members, the Gospel of Jesus Christ continues to be the weirdest thing in the world. And why shouldn’t it? It should be absolutely other-worldly, for the next world is what it is preparing us for, which will be a life far more alien and strange and wondrous and weird than anything we can conceptualize here.
In fact, the Celestial Kingdom of God is described by Joseph Smith as “a sea of glass and fire,” which, to me, sounds like someone trying to describe something he doesn’t have the words for; imagine, say, a time-traveling George Washington trying to explain 21st-century America, with all our freeways and internet and airplanes and space programs, to the First Continental Congress–what words could he possibly use that wouldn’t strange from his own mouth? The next life will feature no Rococo toddlers strumming harps in clouds, no, it will be beyond imagination. Does that description sound weird to you? Good.
I once lived in Iowa, and I can assure that nothing is more dreadfully dull than “normal” places. Give me the “weird” lands every day of the week! Don’t say “weird” like it’s a bad thing, no: embrace the weirdness! For to say something is weird is in fact to say it’s awesome! Portland taught me this.
In sum:
Keep Mormonism Weird!