The Ultimate South Park and Philosophy (20 page)

8
.
Seven
, dir. David Fincher, 127 min., New Line Cinema, 1995, DVD.

9
. Consider the general misery and injustices of various kinds of totalitarian regimes, both past and present, where there is limited freedom of speech and expression. See, for example, Michael Halberstam,
Totalitarianism and the Modern Conception of Politics
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).

10
. J.S. Mill,
On Liberty
(London: Penguin Books, 1974), 97.

Roberto Sirvent and Neil Baker

A sacred religious text turning into rectal blockage? Mormon angels descending from the starship
Enterprise
? Sounds like blasphemy to most people, but for Trey Parker and Matt Stone, it’s business as usual. When we heard the news that the creators of
South Park
were bringing their take on religion to Broadway, it was music to our ears.

The Book of Mormon
begins as missionaries Kevin Price and Arnold Cunningham eagerly await a location assignment for their two-year mission. The wide-eyed and ambitious Elder Price just knows that he’s destined to do something incredible, and his partner, rotund and a bit gauche, is thrilled to be have been paired with him. Now Elder Price has been praying to go to his favorite place in the whole world, Orlando, Florida, but “Heavenly Father” seems to have other plans. Instead, Elders Price and Cunningham are charged with bringing the good book (of Mormon) to poverty-stricken Uganda. Still, they’re consoled by the thought that if Africa is anything like what they remember from
The Lion King
, it can’t be all bad.

As you can probably guess, the situation in Uganda xhtm isn’t like
The Lion King
at all. Nevertheless we get the feeling that no amount of evidence to the contrary will be enough to convince these Mormons that there’s something fundamentally wrong with their Disney-drenched worldview. Even as Elder Price prepares to confront a hardened Ugandan warlord, we find him belting out:

I believe—
That the Lord God created
           the universe
I believe—
That he sent his only son
           to die for my sins
And I believe—
That ancient Jews built boats
           and sailed to America
I am a Mormon, and a Mormon just believes!

So why pick on Mormons? The temptation is to take
The Book of Mormon
as a blanket criticism of the Mormon Church, or even of religion in general. But while Elder Price’s conviction that the Garden of Eden was in Jackson County, Missouri, may strike us as odd, it doesn’t seem to be his belief
itself
that rubs us the wrong way so much as the
way
that he holds it. What is at once amusing and concerning about the “courage” that Elder Price musters in his anthem “I Believe” is that it’s defined by an absolute unwillingness to question what clearly seems questionable. This sort of unabashed dogmatism is often associated with
religious fundamentalism
, and in this chapter we’ll be giving it some thought. Here’s where philosophy can help us. Unlike fundamentalists, philosophers love to ask the difficult questions, and in the pages that follow we’ll be letting
The Book of Mormon
and
South Park
get us started asking a few good philosophical questions of our own.

Religious fundamentalism is the real problem that
The Book of Mormon
and
South Park
usually have in mind when they tackle the topic of religion. When we use the word “fundamentalism” we’re referring to a certain style of thinking, and so by “religious fundamentalism” we mean only to talk about this intellectual style within a religious context. We’re not holding any particular religious movement in mind. The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce ­(1839–1914) famously coined the phrase “the fixation of belief” to describe a phenomenon familiar to anyone who’s ever been in a heated discussion on religion or politics: people don’t seem to change their minds all that often.
¹
This is what happens whenever someone tries to remain so absolutely certain about something she entirely refuses to admit that her beliefs could be wrong. Throughout this chapter we’ll see
The Book of Mormon
and
South Park
expose this way of believing for what it really is: a naive and arrogant approach to God, the world, and what it means to be human.

Abandoned by his mission companion, Elder Cunningham has no choice but to convert the Ugandan village on his own. But there’s a problem. He’s never actually read
The Book of Mormon
. In fact, it isn’t uncommon for adherents of the religions “of the book” not to have read the book. (In a society with compulsory primary education we easily forget that throughout history, illiteracy has been the rule.) Nonetheless, given his upbringing, Elder Cunningham does know a thing or two about the story of Joseph Smith. His most difficult project then becomes finding some way to make a story about ­nineteenth-century America relevant for an audience in twenty-first century Africa. Waltzing into your back yard to dig up golden plates left behind by ancient New England Jews might make for a great American success story, but in an African culture that has to deal with the horrors of AIDS and female circumcision, it’s really not all that interesting. As one villager puts it, “Christ never said nothin’ about no clitoris!”

In the song “Making Things Up Again,” Elder Cunningham’s solution is to “fill in the gaps” of the Mormon story using details from the culture in Uganda and his own experience. He’s convinced that even though he can’t recall anything about female mutilation in the story of Joseph Smith, the practice goes against the will of Christ. Thinking quickly, he “reads” that just before a group of men in ancient New York were about to perform circumcision on a Mormon woman, Jesus teamed up with Boba Fett to stop them (and, naturally, turn them into frogs). In response, his father and Joseph Smith come together to scold him for “making things up again.” He was doing far too much “interpreting.” But what’s ironic about Elder Cunningham’s way of bridging the culture gap is that it offers a surprisingly accurate analogy for what almost always happens when religious traditions are transposed into new and different contexts.

Fundamentalist groups tend to understand the world entirely in terms of their “fundamental” or unquestionable beliefs. Now, as the super-intelligent sea otters of the future make clear in the
South Park
episode “Go God Go XII,” there are many fundamentalist groups out there that have no particular religious affiliation at all. (In this episode, an atheist leader is quoted as saying, “Our answer to the question is
the only
logical answer”—a telltale sign of fundamentalist thinking.) Where religious fundamentalism is concerned, however, fundamental beliefs will usually originate in sacred texts. But a fundamental can’t be a fundamental if it’s open to multiple interpretations. For this reason, fundamentalists will insist that there is
only one legitimate way to interpret their scripture
. This one “correct” reading might be dictated by a prominent religious leader, or the group may claim to have determined the author’s original meaning in an objective sense. In any case, fundamentalist groups use their sacred texts to pin their faith down into a neat set of dogmas. This kind of thinking lies behind the accusation leveled against Elder Cunningham that in trying to make his Mormon faith understandable and applicable in a new setting, he’s “taking the holy word and adding fiction.”

This kind of thinking is also what makes the fundamentalist’s strategy for interpreting texts both naive and arrogant. First, let’s look at the naivety of the religious fundamentalist. In essence, if I believe that I possess the “true” meaning of a certain passage of scripture, what I’m saying is that every alternative interpretation is just that, an interpretation. The word “interpretation” is a red flag to many fundamentalist groups because it seems to imply that the reader has neglected to simply read what is there. In fact, philosophers who study hermeneutics, or the theory of interpretation, refer to this mindset as “naive realism.” A big problem with this approach is that the naive realist has fooled herself into thinking that she can somehow rid herself of all her cultural preconceptions and prejudices and just “see” the objective meaning of the text. Philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) is famous for arguing that our particular place in ­history and the world will not just
sometimes
but
always
direct our interpretation.
²
This isn’t to say that some interpretations aren’t better than others; we’re probably right to ask just how Boba Fett made his way into Elder Cunningham’s story. We can, however, recognize the naivety of the fundamentalist’s assumption that there is some objective “essence” behind the text that’s the same for everyone, regardless of their cultural background and life experience.

Already we can begin to see the arrogance of fundamentalist interpretation wrapped up in its naivety. Joseph Smith is convinced that the truth of God has been corrupted by Elder Cunningham’s extra cultural “baggage,” and so he doesn’t hesitate to condemn the elder. But what exactly might the “pure” gospel look like? The answer is simple enough for Elder Price, and we find it in the song “All-American Prophet.” There Price informs his potential converts that God’s favorite prophet “didn’t come from the Middle East like those other holy men.” In fact, it just so happens that God’s truest voice in history was a white American—just like Elder Price! And if Africans want to reach God, they’ll have to start looking more like Elder Price, too.

Here of course Parker and Stone are poking fun at how the pictures of God that religious fundamentalists pull from their scriptures almost always end up turning into self-portraits. Elder Cunningham’s sin helps us see that the naive conviction that there’s only one right way to interpret a sacred text leads to the arrogant assumption that God shares all of our particular interests and goals. This sort of attitude once brought the renowned German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) to quip that “religion never appears in a pure state.”
³
By taking
their
truth as
the
truth, religious fundamentalists arrogantly ignore the fact that their interpretations, like everyone else’s, are driven by their own presuppositions and values.

Elder Price is struggling with doubt. Why would God choose to send him to Africa when clearly a missionary of his caliber belongs somewhere else? Orlando, Florida, comes to mind. Luckily, Elder McKinley has plenty of experience battling doubt, and he’s more than happy to give his fellow elder some advice. You see, throughout Elder McKinley’s life he’s struggled with difficult feelings of his own—difficult
homosexual
feelings. But these kinds of feelings go against what all Mormons know to be God’s design, and Elder McKinley has discovered the secret to beating them:

When you’re feeling certain feelings

            That just don’t seem right

Treat those pesky feelings

   Like a reading light

   And turn ’em off!

Simple enough, right?

The playful tone here belies the frightening reality that Elder McKinley’s absurd suggestion is actually a very common “remedy” in religious communities around the world. Most Christian churches teach their members that it’s a good thing to respect God’s “original design” for the creation, but exactly what this “design” might look like is another issue entirely. Only in communities characterized by religious fundamentalism do people claim to have direct access to the
precise content
of God’s plan for the way people ought to live their lives. Let’s call this kind of thinking
moral fundamentalism
. The moral “fundamentals” that these religious groups impose on themselves and others most often originate in their sacred scriptures. And while fundamentalist groups occasionally admit that their rules are difficult to apply in some specific cases, they’ll insist that, where the big moral questions are concerned, what they preach is God’s timeless and unchanging will, the “gospel truth.”

It’s not hard to see the naivety and arrogance involved with moral fundamentalism, but Parker and Stone make it impossible to miss. Keith Ward, a contemporary philosopher of religion, has suggested that when it comes to the relationship of scripture to moral reasoning, what’s more important than blind and dogmatic obedience to an ancient text is the difficult work of interpreting and applying the moral principles of scripture that aren’t always clearly stated. Many times a certain principle will need to be reformulated or rethought in order to make sense in a new situation. In other cases we might even need to reconsider the moral quality of a particular text in light of new perspectives on human nature and the natural world.
⁴
For these reasons it’s important to recognize that appealing to scripture when discussing morality in a contemporary context involves a complex process of interpretation. Some of the funniest and most profound moments from
South Park
and
The Book of Mormon
comment on the insanity that results when religious communities try to skip over this tough process.

Elder McKinley’s ridiculous idea that he can simply “turn off” his sexual orientation has already introduced us to the naivety of moral fundamentalism. Does he
really
think that this will work? Parker and Stone ask us the same question in the
South Park
episode “Cartman Sucks,” where Butters is sent to Christian conversion therapy because his father suspects he may be “bi-curious” and “confused.” There, an ex-gay (but distinctly flamboyant) speaker announces, “With Jesus I can just say no, and not be confused anymore.” Of course, Butters is much too young to understand the controversies surrounding sexuality, and if he’s confused it’s because he doesn’t know exactly what it is that he’s supposed to be confused about. The real irony, however, lies in the fact that despite his age and innocence, Butters is probably one of the least naive characters in the episode. Like Elder McKinley, the adults of
South Park
cling to the childish notion that determining the moral choice in life’s difficult questions is a simple matter of asking what the Bible says.