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A musical deriding Latter Day Saints – sweetly or sourly – pulls every religion down with it
All around me, people are on their feet, cheering and clapping. They are young, rather than old, suitable celebrants of judgment day (deferred). And their favourite anthem is Fuck You God. Welcome to The Book of Mormon (coming from Broadway to a theatre rather closer to you next year).
Maybe ecstatic reviews in the Guardian and the Observer have warned you what to expect. Two Mormon missionaries out in Uganda; one's priggish and bumptiously earnest, one's shambolic and needy. The natives are restless, complaining about "maggots in their scrotums" and much else. There's a parody warlord who wants to bump them off. But, 18 rocking numbers later, everyone's very happy; and no target, with the Church of the Latter Day Saints first in line, has been left standing. Is that Joseph Smith, the holiest prophet of the Mormons, copulating with a frog? Well, he would, wouldn't he?
But calm down, dear, it's only a thumping good show; and sanctified "sweet" by the New York Times. Its authors are the men behind South Park and much other freewheeling stuff. "I grew up amongst Mormons, and I've never met one I didn't like," vows one of them, Trey Parker. Which is a world where acid baths and warm baths of molasses meet and mingle.
This world is full of Jewish jokes, but can you imagine The Book of Tanakh as natural successor here – or The Qur'an: the Musical ("Shia heaven", the New York Post, "Keep your Sunni side up")? Can you, for that matter, think of a straightforward song and dance around born-again Christianity getting such sweetened passage? No: there's something about Mormons, as there is about Scientologists, that makes it a suitable repository for effing, blinding and every jibe under the sun. I mean, who is this Angel Moroni creep with his golden tablets? Did our Lord really take a trip stateside in 1820 to set Joseph Smith writing his King James Bible parody texts?
Let's deal with facts we can all agree, though. There are a lot of Latter Day Saints around these days – well over 14 million as I write, their number growing almost exponentially. Over 6 million of them are in the US (which makes them bigger, say, than the Methodists). There are 12,000-plus congregations in America, and 60,000 missionaries at work round the world. This is not some puny sect. It virtually rules in Utah. Salt Lake City is Mormonopolis, superintended by gliding elders in eerily dark suits, with loads of cash and property in their portfolios. Two Mormons – Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, Obama's ambassador to Beijing – are high on the rather desultory list of Republicans who might bid for the White House next year. And when commentators brood over Romney's chances, it's his medicare reforms not his beliefs that seems to weigh him down.
So the Latter Day Saints are a serious force. Why, then, can they be so easily derided, not just for their funny clothes and eccentric rituals but as followers of a supposedly ludicrous faith? Remember Jerry Springer: the Opera and Christian Voice clearing its throat very noisily outside a quavering BBC. Here, perhaps, we go again. And Trey Parker's defence isn't likely to flourish amid a forest of furious placards. "It's no sillier than any other religion," he says, "just newer and more American, which means it's easier to research." All religion is bunk, in short: but religions barely 190 years young are bunkier than most because everyone knows that proper saviours only came to rescue us long, long ago in a time of papyrus rather than iPads.
And here's where you start to wriggle in your seat as the encores begin. Is the Angel Moroni any more, or any less, imposing than the parting of the Red Sea? If Joseph Smith started preaching today, how would he fare in St Peter's Square? What would the Saudi royal family make of Brigham Young's wives? Thank you and good night, Harold Camping. When The Book of Mormon mocks one religion it – sweetly or sourly – pulls every religion down with it. Does that sound like fine West End entertainment – or a pending splutter on Thought for the Day?