Mythed
By Stephen Carter on Feb 5, 2007
Reading Robert Rees’s “The Cost of Credulity: Mormon Urban Legends and The War on Terror,” in the most recent (and very hip) Sunstone, made me realize what a gullible kid I am.
The article dissects some of the Mormon urban legends that have been popping up during America’s invasion/liberation of Iraq, including tales of a battalion of Mormons that marched, stripling warrior-like, through impossible war-time situations unscathed, gathering converts (and capturing Saddam Hussein, looking like some ancient Hebrew prophet) as they went.
As Rees points out, every group of people loves to hear and tell stories about its chosenness, about how they are most favored among men. And it doesn’t stop at groups; the same applies to individuals. We constantly interpret our lives as having worked out according to some plan. We see the hand of fate directing our paths.
I have some of these stories myself. For example, it was like a month after my wife and I had gotten married when I got a call from the media center at the college saying they wanted to interview me for a job I’d applied for. But I had a job I liked installing alarm systems and I told them to give me a pass.
But after I hung up I sat there for a few minutes thinking, and then said to myself, “You need to go get that job.” So I went over and got it. One thing led to another and I got a job writing web courses for the college, which led me to editing the news section of the college paper which gave me the contacts I needed to get a job at a local daily paper, which gave me the experience I needed to get into an MFA program, which led to contacts that got me into a Ph.D. program, which led … It goes on and on and on, eventually ending in that most coveted of positions: the Sunstone permablogger.
I like this story. It makes me feel like my life is cohesive. Like life isn’t actually chaos.
And you know, I’ll bet that the Mormons who are worried about the action in Iraq are feeling the same way. It’s chaos over there. Really, we have no idea if what we are doing is right. There’s significant dissent about the matter in D.C., which provides the perfect workshop for casting the chaos into story molds we’ve grown up with. Stories that insist on God’s active intervention in the lives of his chosen.
But it seems to me that the reasons these stories pop up full of larger than life heroes, is because we want something more. We don’t just want to be taken care of; we want to bring great things to pass. We want to fulfill prophecies. We want to stand with the great people of the past who have changed the course of the world.
This desire is a subset, I think, of the basic American drive to change the world. It’s manifest in thousands of ways, from young teachers diving into poverty stricken schools, to the peace corps volunteers in Mongolia, to the businessmen who sink their lives into making the next Yahoo! or Microsoft. We want our actions to COUNT.
That’s why we love shows like 24. Because 24 is full of people who’s every move counts. There’s only 24 hours to stop the bomb from detonating in downtown LA. So even the keystrokes of the desk jockeys and the meetings of the managerial staff are of the utmost importance.
We like to see ourselves in their shoes. Not because we’d actually like to be there, but because we relish the idea of being the agent of such huge change. To have our lives be irrevocably important.
I admit that this desire is in me too. I dream about writing books that sweep across the world, changing the landscape of contemporary thought; of purveying compelling stories that really make a difference; of creating that environment where deep communication occurs.
So what are my urban legends? The legend of Wayne Booth, University of Chicago professor of distinction. The legend of Zadie Smith, her first novel “White Teeth” published when she was 25.
Sometimes I think these stories hijack my actual life. I’m so invested in trying to reach these heights that every time I come short, I feel worthless. I consider myself a member of the clan of possible college professors and authors, and so when I hear stories of their triumphs, as trumped up as they undoubtedly are (and my mind probably trumps them up even more), I feel both a sense of pride and a sense of failure.
It’s always other people who are finding Saddam Hussein. The modern stripling warriors are always in different places than I am. Which makes me think that Rees has a point at the end of his article, where he points out that being too gullible and swallowing these stories as gospel truth actually diverts us from what, in actuality, matters.
As Rees writes, “[Christ] values Palestinians as he does Israelis, inhabitants of Darfur as those of Detroit, Sunnis as Latter-day Saints, our neighbors as ourselves.”
It’s an idea that I think would do me, and my fellow gullible Mormons, a lot of good. To be willing to cultivate our very own unique story, without insisting on pressing them into the Procrustean bed of our cultural myths. Cultural myths are for cohering cultures, not for dictating the lives of individuals.
So I’ll let go of my Wayne Booth and Zadie Smith myths if you’ll let go of yours.
I wonder how much of us will be left?
I really enjoyed this article, too. There was one other dangerous aspect of these types of urban legends that I wish would have been addressed, though: Spreading exaggerated or anecdotal, falsified stories – however inspirational they may be – cause people to build faith on an artificial and fantasy-driven foundation. I think it is unfortunate when we make decisions based on less-than-accurate sources. Whether someone believes/places faith in something because of a legend, or stops believing/placing faith in something because of a legend, the decision is founded on inherently faulty information. Spreading these types of stories in any religion seems to cause faith (or lack of faith, depending on the story) to be based on something weak instead of something real.
On a side note, I remember seminary teachers telling us we had been more valiant than our parents, and our children would be the spirits who had been even more valiant than us, all because of that well-circulated idea that we had been the generals in the war in heaven. I also remember when they actually read an official statement during sacrament meeting asking every one to stop using the “our generation consists of the valiant generals from the war in heaven” quote. It was quite a disheartening let-down to all of us teenagers who thought we were going to usher in the second coming any day and that we were the chosen generation.
Comment # 1 by Elise | Feb 5, 2007 | Reply
Well, if you think about it, the rhetoric has only changed slightly. I still hear at every conference that the current youth are the greatest generation. I thrived on that sort of stuff when I was young, but now … I expressed my disillusionment when I wrote an editorial for The Sugar Beet called “Well, So Much for My Generation.”
The whole general in heaven thing also shows what happens when people start taking their metaphors literally. As far as I’ve heard, the war wasn’t a literal blood and guts war. It was a war of ideas. So maybe it would have been more accurate if they had said, “The youth were the pundits and radioshow hosts during the war in heaven.” But that’s not nearly as inspiring, is it?
Comment # 2 by Stephen Carter | Feb 6, 2007 | Reply
I don’t have much to add except to tell Stephen that this was another of his typical great pieces of writing.
I’ve had Zadie’s “White Teeth” and “On Beauty” on my short list to read for a long time. My “short list” is about 150 books long these days.
Rees’s Sunstone article was a good read. I liked his conclusions on the various ways such urban legends both uplift and undermine faith and understanding.
I’d never heard of anyone revoking the oft-repeated “this generation was more righteous than the previous generation” idea from the stand. The myth is still alive and well in my ward. Only four months ago one of the kids in my Sunday School class asked me if I thought Christ would come during his lifetime. I told him I didn’t know, but I doubted it. I asked him what he thought. He thought it highly likely, and cited that particular teaching as one of his supporting arguments.
In closing, I would highly recommend everyone see Pan’s Labyrinth. It is a beautiful and eloquent argument for the power and (sometimes) necessity of myth.
Comment # 3 by Matt Thurston | Feb 6, 2007 | Reply
Great post, Stephen!
I had a great experience working with this article. Not only was it insightful but fun. And I have to add props right up front to Sunstone’s managing editor and designer/layout dude Allen Hill and our unofficial artist and Sunstone cartoonist extraordinaire Jeanette Atwood for both the magazine’s cover and the inside illustrations that resulted in a very cool look. Their ideas totally. I just happily signed off on it all.
You’ve asked some great questions in this post that I hope will continue to elicit discussion. Of the issue of chosenness, I have to say that I can’t remember coming across a more inspiring way to think of what that might mean than what Rees offers in the concluding paragraph:
I used to really run from ideas that had any hint of my someday losing my identity through a meld with something larger (for instance, the Eastern idea of the drop of water returning to the ocean), or of not being special in some way. (Not that this I just said was exactly your point–or Rees’s, for that matter!) But somewhere along the line in the past several years, the focus of the idea of merging with something huge such as God and has shifted from an emphasis on MY perspective being somehow lost in this process to my all of a sudden gaining access to ALL perspectives. It’s led to a more hopeful perspective….
Comment # 4 by Dan | Feb 7, 2007 | Reply
The statement that was read in my ward dis-crediting the generals in the war in heaven quote can be found here. It looks like it came out in spring 2001, which is about when I remember it (right at the end of the high school period of my life). I was just wrapping up four years of seminary, and I remember all of my seminary teachers using this quote on a regular basis.
Comment # 5 by Elise | Feb 7, 2007 | Reply