..Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho) is not Mormon. Terry Mattingly, over at GetReligion.org, notes that every person he’s queried (in Washington DC) has assumed that Craig is Mormon because Craig’s from Idaho. Nope. Just sayin’. ..bruce..
[UPDATED 09/09/07 - 0752 MDT: Someone else has noticed possible parallels between the Utah War and the US invasion of Iraq. In the meantime, "September Dawn"has now vanished entirely from Denver theaters after just two weeks.]
[UPDATED 08/30/07 - 1742 CDT: The 'Rotten Tomatoes' score has rised to 16% (from 15%), and I've noted that change below. However, estimated daily grosses for Monday through Wednesday have been $64,000, $65,000, and $54,000 respectively, still for 857 theaters, which means that each theater is getting about 10 people/day to see it. I suspect this film will lose a lot of theaters this coming weekend.]
[UPDATED 08/28/07 - 2342 CDT: I've had to revise the box office figures down even more -- all of the original weekend estimates (~$1 million, $635K, $615k) were too high.]
[UPDATED 08/27/07 - I've updated the box office figures [twice now] and made a few other edits.]
The film “September Dawn“, purporting to show the events of the horrific Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857, appears to have crashed and burned, both with the public and with most movie critics. In limited release (857 theatres) and with heavy advertising (there was a full-page ad for it in Friday’s Rocky Mountain News), it still only managed an anemic $702/venue this past weekend, for an opening-weekend total of $601,857. Critics were not all that kind, either; the film has managed only a 16% ‘fresh’ rating at Rotten Tomatoes, while the (LDS Church-owned) Deseret News published a round-up of scathing comments by critics.
From what I can tell, the flop status is well-deserved. The director (and co-screenwriter), Christopher Cain, appears to have made the presentation so one-sided (evil Mormons!) as to induce incredulity even among film reviewers who have no reason to be sympathetic to Mormons. The polemics led Roger Ebert to state in the Chicago Sun-Times, “The Mormons are presented in no better light than Nazis and Japanese were in Hollywood’s World War II films. Wasn’t there a more thoughtful and insightful way to consider this historical event?”
Ebert’s last statement there points out the real missed opportunity. The Mountain Meadows Massacre happened and is an horrific blot on LDS history. Contrary to some claims by film critics (probably based on promotional materials from the film), the events have not been covered up until recently; the classic historical work on the subject, The Mountain Meadows Massacre, was written and published over half a century ago (1950) by Juanita Brooks, who was a BYU graduate and an active Latter-day Saint. Mormons have been wrestling with this event ever since.
In the hands of a skilled screenwriter and director, these events could have made for a very uncomfortable and thought-provoking film. Consider the historical events leading up to the massacre:
Richard Bushman is probably the great LDS historian of our generation, much as Leonard Arrington was of his. Under the auspices of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, Bushman sat down with a group of journalists to try to explain, from a historical perspective, LDS interaction with society and politics. His comments, as always, are insightful, informed, and honest. A sample:
Joseph Smith was nominated as a protest candidate in February of 1844. Like other protest candidates, he began to warm to his work and got quite excited about it. He may have dreamed for a moment that through some strange concatenation of events, he would get elected. Every candidate has to dream such things.
His involvement in politics was manifested in a political platform of which he was very proud. He would bring it out whenever he had visitors and read from it. It is an interesting document because it represents a man whose world had been his own people, whose own project had been to create a kingdom of God, and who now had to turn his mind to politics.
He began by citing the Declaration of Independence, the famous passages about all men being equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, which of course could be a lead-in to religious rights. But he didn’t use it that way. Instead, in the very next sentence, he talked about the obvious contradiction: “Some two or three million people are held as slaves for life because the spirit in them is covered with a darker skin than ours.” His platform called for the elimination of slavery, proposing that the funds from the sale of Western lands, a major source of revenue along with the tariff in those days, be devoted to purchasing slaves from their masters in order to avoid the conflict that would otherwise ensue.
Josiah Quincy, soon to be mayor of Boston, visited Joseph Smith in the spring of 1844 when this platform was in circulation. Much later, Quincy wrote about that visit, saying that Joseph Smith’s proposal for ending slavery resembled one that Emerson made 11 years later in 1855.
As Quincy put it, writing retrospectively in the 1880s, “We, who can look back upon the terrible cost of the fratricidal war which put an end to slavery, now say that such a solution of the difficulty” – Joseph Smith’s and Emerson’s – “would have been worthy a Christian statesman. But if the retired scholar was in advance of his time when he advocated this disposition of the public property in 1855, what shall I say of the political and religious leader who had committed himself, in print, as well as in conversation, to the same course in 1844?”
I cite this example to illustrate the radical tone of Joseph Smith’s political thought, which seemed to carry over from his religious radicalism. It extended to prison reform and better treatment of seamen, big issues in the 1840s and 1850s. Smith seemed to identify with all of the underdogs in society. I think that was why he thought he might get elected – because the little people, the beat-up people, would rise and select him.
Read the whole thing. Hat tip to Meridian Magazine. ..bruce..
As a response to both on-going silly postings on the net and the PBS broadcast “The Mormons”, I’ve wanted to write about several subjects, including:
The challenge is that they are all interrelated, which is why you get so many goofy and misinformed postings about the LDS Church and its doctrine (as a parallel example, try to write intelligently on the Catholic doctrine of the immaculate conception of Mary without reference to original sin, St. Augustine, or the Fall). I’m not quite sure yet how I’m going to tackle all this — except that I may just pick an arbitrary starting point and go from there. ..bruce..
This article in the Deseret News (Salt Lake City, Utah) about a poll taken by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research tries, I think, to draw a bigger distinction between the public vs. college faculty results than I think the results justify:
Results of a two-year study released this week show one-third of university faculty nationwide have an unfavorable impression of Latter-day Saints, while an equal proportion of the general population holds a favorable view.
I guess I’m just not sure that statement has a lot of real information in it. If you sum up the results, you get the following:
The only real conclusion is that the faculty members surveyed are less neutral, that is, more have an actual opinion, and that that the non-neutral faculty members divide a bit more evenly on the “warm”/”cold” rating than the public at large — not surprising given the general secular/liberal nature of university faculty. In fact, I’m a bit surprised that “warm” respondents outnumber “cold” ones at all. ..bruce..
Via Hugh Hewitt’s website, comes this choice sound bite from the Reverend Al, apparently during a debate with Christopher Hitchins:
“And as for the one Mormon running for office, those that really believe in God will defeat him anyways, so don’t worry about that, that’s a temporary, that’s a temporary, uh, situation.” [laughter from audience]
Being from California, my general attitude to such comments is summed up by my all-time-favorite bumper sticker, which first appeared there some 30-40 years ago: “I used to be disgusted, but now I’m just amused.”
The PBS show “The Mormons” discussed the excommunication back in 1994 of several so-called “Mormon intellectuals”. While I think the incident itself was a fair one to raise, I thought the segment was both far too long and very unbalanced for a number of reasons, which, of course, I’ll now discuss at length.
I watched this earlier this week when it was broadcast. My overall grade for the show is a “B”. I give it an “A” for production values, a “B” for effort, and a “C” for overall balance and accuracy. Case in point: referring to the various polygamous sects in Utah as “fundamentalist Mormons” is about as accurate as referring to the Church of England a century after Henry VIII as “fundamentalist Catholics”. I may post a more detailed critique of the show (which I recorded) later; I do intend to post on some of the specific issues raised. ..bruce..
[UPDATED 06/15/07 - 2036 MDT]
Since I seem to be getting a steady stream of people coming into this post (usually via Google), here are two follow-up posts I have written on the PBS special, “The Mormons”:
And here are a few other posts that, while not directly responding to the PBS special, do address some of the issues raised therein:
And, finally, here’s my own background and qualifications to write about all this.
Welcome to the site; I hope these posts are useful. ..bruce..
