Keep Mormonism Weird

Across the street from Voodoo Donuts in downtown Portland is a glorious 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 and clean-shaven crew-cuts at the BYU and and whole websites dedicated to "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 churches have similar milquetoast proscriptions.   No, let's remind all our wannabe-Mitt-Romneys about how both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young established communist 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 that speaks straight to our senses; 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 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.

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 pseudo-memoir "Falling In Love With Joseph Smith."

I read the book last summer after a review of it said: "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 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!

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; like 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 fat Rococo toddlers strumming harps in clouds, no, it will be beyond imagination.  Does that description sound weird to you?  Good.

I currently live 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!