The Implicit Mormonism in Arcade Fire

 Enough interviews and on-line sources have casually mentioned that Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler was raised in a conservative Mormon household (and that as a mere biographical footnote), that I think I can safely assume it a fact, and not just another of those Steve-Martin-hometaught-Christina-Aguilera type urban legends.  Nevertheless, the point need not be belabored that Arcade Fire is very obviously not a Mormon band, neither sympathetic with nor openly antagonistic against the LDS Church, or even making passing mention to it. [They take neither the Brandon Flowers nor the Tyler Glenn approach.]  Now, Arcade Fire is a band clearly preoccupied with religion generally--their second LP is called Neon Bible after all--but whether or not Butler is merely non-practicing nowadays or straight-up ex-Mormon is largely irrelevant to enjoying the music of Arcade Fire.

However, to paraphrase Nabokov on Joyce, Butler may have left his religion but not its categories.  I hope I am not projecting myself too much here when I say that, to my conditioned ear, there are moments in Arcade Fire's lyrics when his childhood Mormonism peaks through--even if only to critique what he was once taught--yet still it's there, and I think an understanding of those distinctly LDS allusions may help to further flesh out one's appreciation for Arcade Fire's music.

Take for example their hands-down most iconic song, Wake Up:

In this anthem, which eulogizes the inevitable angst and heartbreak and euphoria that comes from growing up, the climactic line declares, "We're just a million little gods causing rainstorms/turning every good thing to rust!"  I can't help but hear in this line what is (to my knowledge) the very unique LDS belief that all human beings are children of God in the most literal sense, "and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him" (Romans 8:17)--that is, our eternal potential is to become Gods as well.  

I believe that Butler here is cleverly interrogating this belief by noting that if we are all "a million little gods"--in embryo, if nothing else--then our potential to create is matched only by our infantile ability to destroy all that is good around us (as God Himself says, "Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil" -Genesis 3:22; emphasis added), with our human weakness invariably leaning towards the latter.  And as sad experience has shown, maybe he's right.

But the really meaty LDS allusions for me come in Neon Bible, particularly on my personal favorite track Antichrist Television Blues:

The song is a story about a self-declared "God-fearing man" who pushes his talented singer of a  daughter into show business (the working title was purportedly "Joe Simpson Blues").  The narrator spends most the song trying to convince himself that by doing so he's fulfilling God's plan ("I just gotta know if it's part of your plan/To seat my daughter there by your right hand"), all the while fearing he's not ("Lord, would you send me a sign/Cause I just gotta know if I'm wasting my time"), building up to the final line where he passionately pleads, "O tell me Lord, am I the antichrist."  Now, this song, like so much of Neon Bible, speaks to anxieties common to most religions; it's in the details, then, that his Mormon upbringing peeps out:

For example, the line "My lips are near but my heart is far away" is a direct allusions to Isaiah 29:13; in Mormonism, this is the scripture cited by Jesus Christ Himself to Joseph Smith, when He explains to the boy prophet why he is not to join any existing church.  Thus, in Mormonism, to say that "My lips are near but my heart is far away" is to make an abject confession of complete apostasy, to feel one's self terribly withdrawn from the presence of God.  It is a scripture that Butler would have been familiar with growing up, and he most likely understood its full passionate import when he used it here.

Likewise, "You'll always be a stranger in a strange, strange land" alludes to Hebrews 11:13, and is often cited in Mormonism to express our belief that we existed Pre-Mortally as spirits (another unique LDS belief), that we are in fact strangers and pilgrims upon this Earth; and "I'll be your mouthpiece" expresses the Mormon belief that the Prophet is the mouthpiece of God--but with this caveat, that in Mormonism, one cannot wish to be His mouthpiece, for God must choose a Prophet for Himself.  Therefore, to aspire to Prophethood, to presume to tell God who He should pick, is to sin in Mormonism.  Thus, the singer's fear of being the antichrist is derived in part from him seeking an honor that he is expressly forbidden to seek for himself.

The rest of Neon Bible likewise feels littered with small LDS moments: the full name of the LDS Church is of course The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which name expresses an expectation for the imminent Second Coming of Christ, an event of which even the angels know not "that day and hour" (Matthew 24:36)--or, as in the lyrics to Keep the Car Running, "they don't know where and they don't know when its coming/oh when, but its coming"; Intervention repeats Christ's warning from the Sermon on the Mount that once in prison you cannot pay even one farthing, for "I know no matter what you say/There are some debts you'll never pay"; that same song likewise interrogates the demands Church service can make on one's family (we have no professional clergy, with all ecclesiastical duties fulfilled solely by the lay membership--which, while making our religion more participatory, can also make brutal demands on the spare time of many of our members), as he sings of a soldier "Working for the Church while your life falls apart."

Furthermore, he critiques the LDS doctrines of Free Agency with Ocean of Noise's "Now who here among us/Still believes in choice/Not I", and of the necessity of the body and the spirits' union for a fullness of joy with My Body is a Cage "that keeps me from dancing/with the one I love"--and I don't think he would've engaged with these ideas if he hadn't been raised hearing all about them; My Body is a Cage also sings "I'm living in an age/That calls darkness light", another Isaiah reference oft used in Church talks and rhetoric (The Book of Mormon is crazy with Isaiah; Christ specifically says therein to "search the words of Isaiah").

The Well & The Lighthouse, with its line "Resurrected/Living in a lighthouse/If you leave the ships are gonna wreck...The lions and the lambs ain't sleeping yet" accomplishes the following: 1) it references belief in the resurrection; 2) expresses the anxiety of being responsible for another's salvation if you don't warn them (a common theme in Mormon missionary talks) by appropriating the lighthouse imagery from the hymn "Brightly Beams Our Father's Mercy"; and 3) frets that though we await it, the Millennial day has not yet arrived when "the lion and lamb shall lie down together" (yet another Isaiah allusion!).

Leaving the scriptures and focusing more on general LDS cultural mores, there is currently a blight of far too many American Mormons being seduced into Summer Sales, pyramid schemes, get-rich-quick scams, and a general, self-defeating desire for wealth (I've published about this phenomenon here).  I therefore can't help but hear Butler (quite justifiably) sing against such specific hypocrisies in lines like "It cares not for your pyramid schemes" (Black Mirror), "I don't want the salesmen knocking at my door" (Windowsill), and "never trust a millionaire quoting the sermon on the mount" (City With No Children from The Suburbs).

Their most recent album Reflektor also can't help but creep in some references to Butler's childhood faith; there is of course the "praying to the resurrector" (which "turns out it was just a reflector") on the album's title track.  And I hope I can be forgiven for hearing in "just a reflection of a reflection/of a reflection of a reflection/of a reflection" the sealing room (or marriage room) inside an LDS Temple, which always contain two mirrors opposite each other, reflecting back endlessly, representing eternity--you literally see yourself a reflection of a reflection of a reflection of a reflection therein.

And then there's the line "If this is heaven/I don't know what it’s for/If I can’t find you there/I don't care", which is a sentiment I actually once heard from a Bishop, who, in an unguarded moment one Sunday, as he spoke of his great love for his family, said if he made it to the highest heaven, the Celestial Kingdom, but the rest of his family didn't...then he didn't want to be there.  These are not ideas alien to LDS doctrine.

Then there's the dance number Here Comes the Night Time, which contains the line: "The missionaries tell us we will be left behind."  Granted, the "left behind" rhetoric is far more Evangelical than LDS, nevertheless "missionaries" generally are far more identified with the latter than the former.

But it's another, less obvious line from the same song that I would like to especially focus on: "If there's no music up in heaven/then what's it for?"

For if Butler really was raised in a conservative Mormon household, then he and I probably have the same experience: that of being made to feel vaguely guilty for loving music with non-Church-related content.  Not that the LDS Church is anti-music or anything--we have the incomparable Mormon Tabernacle Choir after all--but throughout much of our childhoods, American Mormon youth are  "encouraged" by our manifold Seminary and Sunday school teachers to "only listen to music" that is "uplifting" and "edifying" and that "doesn't offend the spirit," and other such lazy adjectives that are meant to guilt us into enjoying the insipid Saturday's Warrior soundtrack more than a Beatles or Queen album. 

(Oh yes, I remember many a Church youth dance where the chaperones wouldn't let us play our favorite song--"Intergalactic," say--not for any profane lyrics or themes mind you, but because it didn't fit in blandly enough with the approved playlist of Will Smith, late-90s boy bands, and YMCA!  Then they had the nerve to wonder why so few kids attended their dances.)

The typical criteria for "worthy music" was never whether or not a song resonated deeply and profoundly with your soul, or helped you heal in moments of passion and crisis, but only if it was "inoffensive"--which ironically is the most offensive music of all!  But if this music is good, and "every good gift comes from God" (a key line from the Book of Mormon), and we are to "lay hold of every good thing," then why resist what we feel is good?  Why make us doubt our own good feelings?  Does religious conversion happen any other way?  Does the Spirit speak in any other manner?  If this music isn't in heaven, then what's it for indeed?  I of course don't know why Win Butler drifted away from Mormonism, but I can make an educated guess as to at least one of the reasons why!  

For of course there will be music in heaven; that's what it's for.  I'm sorry he felt taught otherwise.

[Addition and Expansion added on 3/24/18, after a presentation at MHS/AML, wherein this post was presented as a paper entitled "'We're just a million little gods': The Gospel According to Arcade Fire"--an opportunity I was grateful for, not because it allowed me to include Everything Now, but because I think it finally provided me with a real conclusion of sorts]

The LDS references aren’t nearly as explicit on their most recent LP, last summer’s Everything Now—although the deep-cut “Put Your Money One Me” does contain suggestive lines such as “Trumpets of angels call for my head”, and “Sitting on the carpets of the basement of heaven/We were born innocent, but it didn’t last a day” (which could potentially reference the 2^nd Article of Faith, rejecting the doctrine of Original Sin while still acknowledging how little that actually helps us). Likewise, "Good God Damn"  hints at some hopeful, wrestling agnosticism.

As for the title-track and lead-single, which you have perhaps heard at a Barnes & Noble or Starbucks (because everything that was once independent and marginal is now gentrified and corporate...): The lyrics appear to indicate that “Everything Now” is an interrogation of how overwhelmed we all feel by our collective, immediate, and total access to all media at once in our hyper-digital age. Of course, that title can also be read as an exclamation for how overwhelmed we feel at everything happening in the world right now. I would like to suggest that there is a third potential reading of that title: that we are overwhelmed by Everything Now—that is, with the restoration of all things, we now have spread before us all principalities, a powers, thrones, kingdoms, worlds without numbers, from all eternity to all eternity—and that frankly frightens us. As Hugh Nibley once said, we have the feeling that it is all too good for us—because it really is all too good for us! How low, vain, and trifling have been our conversations, said Joseph Smith from Liberty Jail—but we have kept them low, vain and trifling because we prefer it that way.

But that limited vision is not how the Church came into being, nor is it why people join--though it may in fact be at least part of the reason why some people leave. To once more paraphrase Nabokov, Win Butler may have left his religion but not its categories--and the category that defines his music through all its many permutations, is his will-towards-transcendence. From "Wake Up" to "Windowsill" to "Mountains Beyond Mountains" to "Supersymmetry" and even "Infinite Content," this pull towards the transcendent has weaved its way through the collected works of Arcade Fire. Again, when he sings "I guess we'll just have to adjust"--that is, compromise, resign ourselves, settle into the thousand petty concerns of adulthood--he never actually finished articulating the word "adjust," because deep down, he doesn't feel like we should. There are greater and better things out there for us.

Why does any of this matter, anyways? Because with the plateauing of growth that has occurred in the Church lately, I would argue that part of the problem is that we have lost sight of precisely that which perhaps makes our religion most attractive: the promise of the infinite and eternal, which is something that in our summer sales and pyramid schemes we will scarcely face up to ourselves. We’re just a million little gods, but shrink away even from even being that. And when our own youth in turn aren't made to feel those the grandeur of those promises and possibilities, they will look elsewhere for it--or at least explore other modes for expressing a desire and/or frustration for it. Perhaps if the music of Arcade Fire does nothing else, it reminds us of what those who leave the faith are aching for—and, quite frankly, what we ourselves should be aching for as well.