Mormons and Music

This post will probably apply to Mormons and any field of the arts, but for now I'll just focus on music.

To refresh my memory on the church's specific stance on music, I've been referring to the For the Strength of Youth PDF. Here's an excerpt:

Choose carefully the music you listen to. Pay attention to how you feel when you are listening. Don't listen to music that drives away the Spirit, encourages immorality, glorifies violence, or uses foul or offensive language, or promotes Satanism or other evil practices.

That's actually not too bad, at least on the surface. But let me attempt to break those criteria down, in ascending order of how much they piss me off.

1. Glorifying Violence
I assume this was probably targeting rap music. I don't know that the General Authorities are aware of Cannibal Corpse, Anal Cunt, and all those other grindcore/horrorcore/gorecore/rapecore/whatevercore crazy offshoot death metal bands out there. But I can totally agree with this. I don't believe violence is a good thing. I don't listen to music that tells me to kill people. But there is plenty of violence in music that does not glorify it. And even a lot of those weird grindcore songs are supposed to be tongue-in-cheek and funny. It doesn't match my sense of humor, but the musicians don't actually think that "Domestic Violence is Really, Really, Really Funny." (That's an actual song title, yes.)

2. Promoting Satanism or "Other Evil Practices"
I doubt the First Presidency is a fan of the band Deicide. And I don't think I've ever even heard any overtly Satanic music. But I do think that there are many music scenes that are extremely misunderstood and quickly judged by outsiders. When people see a guy with a guitar, long hair, and that weird black metal facepaint style, I guess they just assume that he worships the devil.

What worries me more is this "other evil practices" thing. Does that mean Mormons shouldn't listen to "Renegade" by Styx? The protagonist leads a life of crime and then goes on the run from law enforcement...those are evil practices. I'm not into violence and I'm not into Satanism, but trying to keep people from listening to anything that has something bad that's not cast in a negative light is absurd.

3. Encouraging Immorality
This one's easy to joke about. "Well, that means they can't listen to Kesha, so they're really not missing out on anything, amirite?"

I don't really have any stock in the artistic value of, say, Kesha. The seemingly innumerable pop songs about finding love (or finding sex) bore me. And the sexual content of some of these songs is probably not suitable for younger listeners. However, if you've taught your children as well as you think you have, you shouldn't have to stop them from enjoying a good tune even if it contains lyrics you disagree with. I've sung along to Queensryche's Operation: Mindcrime album dozens of times even though I don't agree with the political themes behind the premise.

4. Using Foul or Offensive Language
This is just stupid. I understand that some people (including Mormons) find swearing to be offensive. But swearing is a way to convey strong emotion. There are some fantastic pieces of music that contain swearing...because the best music contains strong emotion. This emotion doesn't always have to be expressed with swearing, but sometimes it's just the best way to do it.

Swans' God Damn the Sun curses the sun as a perfect conclusion to a song of deep sadness. It's a heartbreaking portrait of depression in which the narrator's blasphemous swearing intimates the depth of his suffering. It's a song that has made me cry and allows me to see my own problems as comparatively minor. It's bittersweet and cathartic, but Mormons will never feel that catharsis because Michael Gira says "god damn."

Pain of Salvation's Cribcaged drops 20 F-bombs to express the desperate rage against people who neglect their children in favor of greed and materialism. The sheer number of F-words in such a short time drives the point home and illustrates how much damage these parents can do. It's a good point and an important message that Mormons would agree with...but they'll never hear it because they disagree with the way the point is being presented.

If I had more time, I could find countless more examples. Disregarding music because of swearing is silly...you can miss out on some truly beautiful, artistic, and inspiring pieces of music.

5. Driving Away the Spirit
This is kind of another catch-all for a wide variety of music that the church leadership disapproves of. I think is geared toward loud, heavy or energetic music that doesn't allow you to hear the "still, small voice" of the spirit.

I remember a family home evening lesson I had in high school in which my dad counseled me not to listen to any music that "excites" me. He wasn't talking about sexual excitement. He was talking about normal, "hey, this is pretty awesome!" excitement. At the time, I was starting to stray away from my musical roots (hymns, Disney songs and a little family-friendly country music) and discover popular music and hard rock. I'd been listening to some 3 Doors Down and some Nickelback and I'd recently gotten hooked on a few songs by Breaking Benjamin. I think he was worried that Breaking Benjamin was too loud, too heavy, and too fast to allow me to hear the promptings of the holy ghost. So he made sure to warn me against hard rock without ever telling me a specific genre to steer clear of.

Boy, am I glad I didn't listen to him. Breaking Benjamin became an obsession of mine for a while. It led me to heavier music, a realm in which I discovered Dream Theater. Dream Theater opened the door to the world of progressive music, which I have been exploring ever since. It's world which I consider to contain a huge amount of great music, on musical, lyrical, emotional, and inspirational levels. Listening to only calm, quiet music is like eating only grains: there's a lot of good stuff in there, but you're not realizing your diet's potential to be well-rounded and healthy.

On a closing note: there's a lot of good entertainment out there and there's a lot of bad entertainment. But by excluding these five different kinds of music, the church is failing in its aim to shut out the bad. Just as much good has become off-limits with the bad, and there's still plenty of crappy music left that meets their criteria of acceptable listening. I think an open mind and a good head on your shoulders is a much better guide to finding good music than the For the Strength of Youth pamphlet.

And that doesn't seem right to me.

(Oddly enough, I've had "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" stuck in my head for the last five or six paragraphs.)

1 Nephi 2: Modern Comparisons

Visions Galore!
God does a lot of talking. He tells Lehi (in a dream) that he needs to take his family and run. Then His voice comes to Nephi and gives him a six-verse speech about his brothers and how their descendants and his descendants are probably not going to get along well.

Keep in mind that in the previous chapter, we had Lehi seeing choruses of angels and "One descending out of the midst of heaven." We're like four pages in and God's throwing visions and pillars of fire and his likeness and his voice around like it's no big deal.

Considering the recent change to the church's Gospel Principles (scroll down to chapter 14) that now omits the implied claim of the church's current leadership having personally seen God...it doesn't seem like Nephi and Thomas S. Monson belong to the same religion. Perhaps too much doctrine has changed since the Book of Mormon was written.

Joseph Smith's Accidental Irony
Verse ten makes me smile:

And he also spake unto Lemuel: O that thou mightest be like unto this valley, firm and steadfast, and immovable in keeping the commandments of the Lord!

I'm betting Joseph Smith didn't really know anything about Pangea or plate tectonics or anything like that. That kind of research and discovery came around after his time. Which is funny, because otherwise he would have known that valleys--and all geographical features--are slowly changing over great periods of time. That valley was not as firm and steadfast as Lehi thought it was.

Appropriately enough, however, Lehi unwittingly aligned himself with one of Mormonism's habits--slow change. Little by little, the church has whittled away at its less popular aspects. The Adam/God doctrine...polygamy...no blacks in the priesthood...these and many other things have disappeared one by one, like the gradual shifting of a continent as it effaces a valley and raises it into a smooth plain.

Ironic, right?

1 Nephi 1: The Cold Open

Kick Things Off With a Bang!
Nephi begins his account of his experiences by describing the situation in his hometown of Jerusalem, circa 600 BC. He says that there were "many prophets" warning of the city's imminent destruction, apparently excluding his father from that group. So Lehi, apparently just a normal merchant guy, prays about these prophecies and BAM--epic vision time.

We're just six verses into the Book of Mormon and we already have full-on pillar of fire action. This seems a little bit like modern storytelling. I'm no expert about how people told their stories back in the days of oral traditions, but grabbing the reader's attention with a miraculous vision on the first page is the kind of thing that's taught in a creative writing class. This isn't necessarily suspicious, but I think it's worth mentioning. I mean, the Old Testament, for example, starts off with a bunch of boring stuff about God creating the world. This is all very important, of course, but it's pretty repetitive and not very interesting to your average reader.

So it's interesting to me that the Book of Mormon begins a little bit more like a modern novel than it does like a book of ancient scripture.

I Tawt I Taw a Vision!
The pillar of fire is followed being overcome with the spirit then by hosts of singing angels, and Lehi even "thought he saw God sitting upon his throne, surrounded with--"

Wait. He thought he saw? This whole running off into the desert for a few years and then sailing across the ocean to start an entirely new civilization on the other side of the planet deal is all because Lehi thought he saw God? No...wait, he's pretty sure it was God. It had to be. Yeah. Right?

That's not weird at all.

The True Meaning of the Book of Mormon
Nephi closes the chapter by sharing what is often considered to be the "thesis statement" of the entire Book of Mormon: that "the tender mercies of the Lord are over all those whom he hath chosen, because of their faith, to make them mighty even unto the power of deliverance."

It's a fair point--Nephi had a lot of faith. He and his family successfully escaped Jerusalem and some of its inhabitants who wanted to kill them, survived for years in the desert, built a ship and sailed across thousands of miles of ocean, and became a leader in a new, flourishing civilization in a previously uninhabited land. I'd say he was pretty mighty and he was delivered from a lot of difficult circumstances.

But...his brothers also rebelled against him and eventually broke off to form a rival group that would clash with Nephi's descendants in centuries of bloody battles. So I guess the real thesis statement of the Book of Mormon is that Mormonism creates rifts in families, tearing them apart in violent, irreconcilable ways.

Awesome. Who wouldn't want that for their loved ones?

The Book of Mormon, Blow by Blow

There are a lot of things about Mormonism that seem pretty shady to me.

At one time or another, I've questioned and criticized lots of different aspects of the religion, but it's difficult to collect all the thoughts I've had over the last decade and put them into a coherent form, let alone remember them all.

So I did some brainstorming in an effort to find more topics to write about...and I realized that the best place to go to discuss Mormon doctrine is Mormon scripture. And I also realized that the last time I read the Book of Mormon all the way through was during a time when I believed it to be the inspired word of God. How trippy would it be now to go back through it with my ex-member perspective?

So I'm going to attempt to look at the Book of Mormon chapter by chapter and let Mormon scripture bring up topics for me to mull over and muse upon. I'm actually kind of excited to see what I uncover that I hadn't noticed before.

So, someday soon...here comes First Nephi, chapter one.

The Pride of Peculiarity

Mormons consider themselves to be "a peculiar people."  They're proud of the way they stick out in the modern world, separate and identifiable from the rest of the masses.

This was always a point of pride for me--I wasn't like the other kids in high school.  I was from a better background, with a superior lifestyle and a higher, purer level of morality.  The rest of the kids were just directionless rabble, sinful in their ignorance.

The church leadership encourages the sentiment, as it helps the members identify more closely with the rest of the organization.  Psychologically, it reinforces the members' voluntary membership by making them feel more gifted and more important than their peers.  Members who are already deep in it are cemented by this feeling of superiority.

But for the individual member who takes pride in it without considering it a hook from the leadership, it comes off as a bit...immature.  It reminds me of high school.  It reminds me of those kids who used to preach about nonconformity.  It reminds me of kids who'd say they wanted to be rebels or skip class or wear ridiculous clothes or whatever because they were expressing their individuality...but in reality they were only conforming to a different label.  They were hypocrites and they had no idea.

It's a similar mindset--they feel validated by a claim to superiority.  They can consider themselves better because they've made a choice to make their own choices.  But the reality is that they've only aligned themselves with a different goal, consigned themselves to an adjacent fate--but not elevated themselves above those who have given up the ability to choose.

And that doesn't seem right to me.