Snippets from James Fenton's review (NYRBlog) of the South-Park-inspired musical "Book of Mormon":
To the perhaps prosaic mind of Michael Otterson, a satire that turns on the supposed irrelevance and ineffectiveness of the Mormon mission to Africa is very much wide of the mark. After all, as he pointed out to the Post’s readers, in the seven years that it had taken the creative team to put together and mount The Book of Mormon, the Mormon Church in Africa had been responsible for bringing clean water to more than four million Africans, getting wheelchairs to 34,000 legless children, and so on. Why should Otterson pay $200 for a ticket to be “sold the idea that religion moves along oblivious to real-world problems in a kind of blissful naiveté”?
He has a point. The comic situation of The Book of Mormon is perfectly serviceable as comedy, but it has no interest at all as satire on the Mormons’ African mission. We are in Uganda, but we might as well be in Kazakhstan, or any kind of nightmare Abroad. From the point of view of the Mormon missionaries, the attitude of the natives toward Almighty God is crudely dismissive, and expressed in language which causes gasps of tickled outrage from the audience. But it is impossible to reconcile this happy-go-lucky indifference to the Supreme Being with what we have encountered in recent history when the African churches have had their say on the future of, for instance, the Anglican church. What often comes back at us out of Africa, by way of Christian culture, is a sharp Victorian rebuke for our back-sliding. It has nothing happy-go-lucky about it.
And about the Mormon church's willingness to make adjustments (cf. Russell, "The Mormons had a divine revelation in favour of polygamy, but under pressure from the United States Government they discovered that the revelation was not binding.")
This willingness, admirable in its modest way, to jettison or modify revelation in order to conform to public opinion, has been characteristic of Mormonism since the long dispute over polygamy: in the end, it would seem, they get the point. They listen to criticism over the decades. They make some furtive adjustments. They clean up their act. [...] In the context of the musical, the openness to ragging, the patience under blasphemous attack, become less mysterious. It is as if they understand the ridicule that they are currently undergoing at the Eugene O’Neill Theater to constitute a sort of hazing. To get through the ordeal they must keep their good humor, and it is worth doing so because, at the end of the hazing, their reward will be a greater acceptance in society.
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