Mormonism's Cultural Defecit

[_dartagnan]

Interesting topic...

I guess a good example of this failure to adapt to other cultures, while expecting other cultures to adapt to Utah-style living, can be seen in the humorous exhibit of Tongan members in California wearing their traditional skirt like trousers while sporting a white shirt and tie.

Only in an LDS Tongan ward could you see such a fashion disaster.

Some LDS go absolutely nuts if you go to Church without a tie. They let me get away with it while I was an investigator for a couple of years but after that they really started expressing their discontent. I hated wearing shirt and tie, but I eventually conformed.

[_Pokatator]

It should be rebranded McMormonism

Vegas.....that was sweet!! Says it all about as concise as humanly possible.

[_Yoda]

I would have gone Catholic for the music.

Have you ever heard the hymns at mass?

Give me Isaac Watts and the Wesleyan hymn tradition any day.

Of course, Schubert's Mass in G and Mozart's Requiem and such things are wonderful, but you won't hear them on a typical Sunday at the local parish church -- which, incidentally, should not be unrealistically idealized: There's some marvelous Catholic architecture, but most parish churches are at best mediocre and some are positively awash in interior kitsch.

I'm by no means an anti-Catholic. Far -- very far -- from it. But let's not indulge in fantasy here. And more than a few Catholics feel somewhat the same way. See, for example, Thomas Day's Why Catholics Can't Sing: The Culture of Catholicism and the Triumph of Bad Taste.

Astonishingly, I find myself agreeing with harmony for once: I'm not convinced that Mormons are exceptionally bland. They share, for better or worse, in the culture around them. Unfortunately, I don't think anybody's likely to confuse contemporary American culture with Renaissance Florence or classical Athens. But I know plenty of Latter-day Saints with good taste in literature, music, and art, who think deeply and well.

Have you ever been to a Catholic church on Palm Sunday? I visited with a friend once and was blown away by the pageantry and the music. I love LDS music as well...I've just always had a soft spot for some of the choral music that seems to be typical to the Catholic culture.

[_Mercury]

I have it on good authority that non-Mormons never gossip.

Ever heard Betelehemu, performed by the BYU Men's Chorus or even by the Tabernacle Choir? Great Nigerian carol.

I'll admit that I've struggled with some elements of Mormon culture over the years. But I don't think it's nearly the wasteland that you seem to think it is.

One of our close Mormon friends is an excruciatingly avantgarde composer, another is a professional cellist, yet another is an internationally famous linguistic theorist, still another is a political philosopher and an accomplished translator of French thought, one of my sons is very seriously into the very most extreme forms of jazz, I have a very large library of classical music and a much larger library of books in various languages. My very Mormon neighbors include a retired nuclear chemist, a retired economist for the state of California, a professor of statistics, innumerable doctors, a professionally trained choral conductor, a psychologist, several engineers, etc., etc. No shortage of readers or exotic travels. Speakers of German (at least five in the immediate neighborhood), Norwegian, Spanish, Finnish, French, Japanese, Danish, Arabic, Portuguese, Korean, Thai, etc. My wife and I haven't missed the Utah Shakespearean festival in roughly twenty years, and we never miss the Utah Opera or the Utah Festival Opera -- and we regularly meet neighbors and friends there, too. (In Logan, for example, over the past two days, we ran into our former bishop, as well as the fellow to whom I used to be an assistant in the high priests group leadership, in addition to a former dean of mine, and their wives.) We're not all that unique.

I read from time to time about the narrow cultural horizons within which I'm supposed to live as a believing Latter-day Saint, and about my Church-mandated blandness, but I can't really say that I feel the truth of the charge.

I hear, sometimes, that we're just "white bread" and boring, but, to be candid, even though I'm a professional student of a very non-white-bread culture for which I have enormous respect, I have never understood why the term white men is supposed to connote lack of interesting culture. Nietzsche, Michelangelo, Sophocles, Bach, Emerson, Dante, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Sartre, Beckett -- "white men," all.

I note this list of cultural "landmarks", and yet I also cannot help but notice how "safe" and "classical" all of these names are.... Where is Lolita? Last Tango in Paris? Portnoy's Complaint? These things the Good Professor mentions are all "Brethren-Approved" works.

Fear and Loathing on the Wasatch Front?

[_harmony]

I have always been impressed by homes that sport pictures of loved ones, family members etc. It's been a good thing in our home. Some of the artsy "family of one heart" and "love at home" has been ok too. "Return with Honor" has really lost it's meaning though - I would prefer just "be honorable".

But even before my disaffection, I really had a disdain for certain pictures:

Olsen, Friberg and Kinkade (and we still have them because my wife won these battles).

My mother loves Thomas Kinkade. Her presents are always easy to buy... just add to her Kinkade collection.

On my walls, I have pictures of my family (lots of them), extended family, some Monet copies, an original Robert Redbird of a Kiowa chief, a John Sorenson print, an original oil of a landmark in my neighborhood, some framed cross-stitch by my daughter, a punch-stitched still life from my father, and DH and my high school senior pictures. My college diplomas are on the wall of my office, along with a Diane Hynn print and poster of the sea lions at Sea Lion Cave.

Hardly generic. The only thing on my walls that I made in RS is a framed gold leafed picture of Joseph and Mary. I love it, and I don't care if everyone else has one too.

[_Daniel Peterson]

I note this list of cultural "landmarks", and yet I also cannot help but notice how "safe" and "classical" all of these names are.... Where is Lolita? Last Tango in Paris? Portnoy's Complaint? These things the Good Professor [sic] mentions are all "Brethren-Approved" works.

I don't judge art by whether or not it's "brethren-approved" (neither as a plus nor as a minus) and, anyway, I'm unaware of a Mormon Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

I freely admit that my tastes incline toward the classical -- I majored in Greek, after all -- and that I prefer Milton to Updike, and Shakespeare to Didion. I've never confused Portnoy's Complaint with the Divina Commedia, nor even Last Tango in Paris [!] (talk about the triumph of the middle-brow) with Rashomon.

I don't particularly crave -- and will, in any case, never receive -- Scratch One's imprimatur for my literary adventurousness, but I'm more than willing to compare some of my recent reading (e.g., Charles Baudelaire, Nikos Kazantzakis, Tayeb Salih, Albert Camus, Friedrich Nietzsche, Andre Malraux, Karl Marx, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre) to his on his inane "safety" scale.

[_KimberlyAnn]

I don't particularly crave -- and will, in any case, never receive -- Scratch One's imprimatur for my literary adventurousness, but I'm more than willing to compare some of my recent reading (e.g., Charles Baudelaire, Nikos Kazantzakis, Tayeb Salih, Albert Camus, Friedrich Nietzsche, Andre Malraux, Karl Marx, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre) to his on his inane "safety" scale.

So you've read Sartre, Marx, Dostoevsky...that's all well and good, but have you read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? That is the pinnacle of literary achievement on this board!

KA

[_barrelomonkeys]

So you've read Sartre, Marx, Dostoevsky...that's all well and good, but have you read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? That is the pinnacle of literary achievement on this board!

KA

teehee! :D

[_harmony]

What about Deathly Hallows and Lean Mean Thirteen? Surely that counts for extra points!

[_Daniel Peterson]

So you've read Sartre, Marx, Dostoevsky...that's all well and good, but have you read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? That is the pinnacle of literary achievement on this board!

I confess that I've never read a line of anything by J. K. Rowling, though my wife has. I just envy her royalty checks.

My recent biography of Muhammad hasn't even cracked the million-dollar mark yet.