**The Book of Mormon, **currently playing to packed houses on Broadway, delivers an irreverent, raunchy blow to traditional religiosity. It has been acclaimed as the funniest musical - ever!It is funny, but it was not the humor that struck me most. Rather, it was the hard edge of the adolescent male antics (what else would you expect from the creators of South Park?) that got my attention.
The writers, recently interviewed on local radio, said it was not their intention to ridicule the Mormon church. Instead they wanted to highlight the bizarre realities behind the church’s practice of sending out naive American boy/men to politically, socially and economically complicated African countries - in this case, Uganda.
The innocent zeal of these young missionaries is starkly contrasted to the staggering complexity of the issues facing many African societies, which only highlights the fact that these young men are evangelizing not much more, for them, than a nice philosophy. They have merely inherited a world view from their parents and community. The precepts they so readily espouse have not been transmuted, through daily living and application, into a practical truth.
The humor of the play largely centers around the struggle of these cultural and religious novices to hop, skip or jump over the myriad irrationalities that pepper their (and all) faith. When they are pushed to explain these leaps of logic, faith and belief, they have nothing. So they resort to literally making things up - rather as the writers suggest Joseph Smith, the church’s founder, did.
Truth must be experienced before it can graduate from mere belief. We are spiritually equipped as never before in this era to live accordingly. The time for priests, gurus and unquestioned dogma is rapidly fading.
Gone is the day when we should believe something just because someone else tells us it is so. We now have the means - the social and cultural maturity and intelligence combined with the technological resources - to discover for ourselves what constitutes truth.
**The Book of Mormon **is a clever spin on the overarching institution of church which has traditionally formed part of the bedrock of our modern western society. It strikes a prescient blow at practices which, I believe, have little relevance today, and even less for the future.
In this respect The Book of Mormon acts as a harbinger of the new age.
