One of my favorite sections in C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves is not actually one of the titular four loves at all. In the introductory chapter “Likings and Loves for the Sub-Human,” Lewis includes a perceptive discussion on the nature of patriotism. He delineates what he calls five ingredients of patriotism, but I think they are more productively thought of as stages because they seem to proceed from natural to unhealthy to destructive.
I find this section very useful in light of modern American politics. Over the last decade, we have seen what damage has been caused by both the abandonment of patriotism and the overindulgence in what Lewis calls “demoniac patriotism.” Like many loves, patriotism is both the sustaining force of a relationship (in this case, the unity of a nation) and also the force which may tip it into unhealthy nationalism and jingoism.
But Lewis’s arguments don’t have to apply just to a nation; they can apply just as well to any kind of in-group, out-group loyalty. This time through the book, I thought about the application of Lewis’s arguments to our identity as members of a church. Since I have called in a previous post for Latter-day Saints to re-embrace church culture, I think it’s important to clarify what I mean (and what I don’t mean), and Lewis’s stages of patriotism provide a clear framework for doing just that.
I’ll keep this summary short since it’s April and all the grad school papers are due in a couple of weeks. During March, I presented at both the BYU English Symposium and the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. You can read my notes about ICFA over here.
Since I was already in Florida, I also took the chance to slip away by myself to Epcot without kids. I ate way too many snacks at the Flower and Garden Festival and spent my time in line listening to books for class on headphones, but a break is a break!
Obligatory picture with the giant golf ball at Epcot
Over on the podcast, I highly encourage you to check out our exploration of Pride and Prejudice adaptations featuring the wonderful Katherine Cowley, author of The Secret Life of Mary Bennet mystery series. We’re hard at work on some fun episodes that should come out with greater frequency once winter semester ends.
February was a busy month outside of school. My presentations at LTUE 42 went well and I had fun meeting up with old friends. I read from my essay “Through the Wardrobe: Inhabiting the Divine Story” at the Wayfare issue 3 launch party; I’m always impressed by the quality of writers they find, so I’m very humbled to be among them. Check out the previews of issue 3 (including this amazing art combining The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe and the Kirtland temple that was commissioned to go with my piece) and consider subscribing to get one of the beautiful print copies.
Close up of art by Jessica Beach
This month I’ll be presenting a paper on using CS Lewis’s interpretation of Spenser’s Faerie Queene to understand the poetry of another early modern poet, Amelia Lanyer, at BYU’s English Symposium. I’ll also be travelling to Florida to attend the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts and read my paper on Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi and using speculative fiction to cope with trauma. So many conferences this semester! Remind me to limit myself to one next time.
The podcast has been a little dormant due to grad school, but we did release a short today on a short Pixar film called Self. The episode is twice as long as the film itself; we do some interesting twisting of the short into a religious reading that the filmmakers certainly didn’t intend. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy it, and we’ll get back to more regular episodes soon.
I also made a concerted effort this month to revive my non-school related reading. I find that reading for school becomes more interesting when I have things from my own interests to connect with it. So even though February is a short month, I’ve got 10 book reviews for you. Let’s jump to it!
I often hear people complain about church culture, with the implication that we ought to get rid of as much of it as possible and live the pure gospel. “Let’s get rid of Latter-day Saint lingo; it’s confusing to investigators.” “Trek is such a weird thing; can’t we stop doing it?” The simplifying of church programs. And then there are also those scary stories people tell about Utah culture.
Part of this is what I recently heard Christopher Blythe call the “self-loathing Mormon,” the need to distance ourselves from the culture we know so many of our more sophisticated friends distain. We worry that liking Saturday’s Warrior or admitting to having read all the volumes of The Work and the Glory will make us look like backward yokels. Additionally, the move towards fewer church activities seems like a good idea because it helps us focus exclusively on the gospel, on Jesus, rather than the church and its many traditions; and besides, we have so many other things to be busy with.
Eugene England tried to counter this exalting of the gospel at the expense of the church in his famous essay “Why the Church is as True as the Gospel.” He pointed out that only in interacting as a community can we truly practice the principles that we are learning through the gospel. Learning and intellectually assenting to gospel principles is irrelevant if we don’t practice them on those around us. Our wards are the ideal gym through which to practice love and charity by close association with those who we might otherwise avoid, practice leading and following without compulsion.
I love Brother England’s point, but I’d like to approach the necessity of the church from a different angle: the need for culture. Wherever humans are, this strange amorphous thing called culture develops. To misquote scripture, “where two or three are gathered,” there culture will be, that amalgamation of unique vocabulary, folklore, rituals, traditions, and activities, not to mention my favorite part, stories.
We can’t eliminate church culture any more than we can eliminate language. It’s something that’s going to happen either way. But what we can do is weaken it, starve it, actively suppress it. We can cancel traditional activities in favor of simplifying our ward’s social calendar. We can stop publishing fiction featuring contemporary LDS characters at our bookstores. We can take our distinctive Latter-day Saint music with its strange references to missions, pioneers, and the Book of Mormon, and water it down into something that would be unobjectionable to a nondenominational Christian. (Guess how I feel about the modern FSY albums…)
The key word here is unobjectionable, which I think is a synonym of undistinctive. All that has resulted from efforts to downplay LDS culture is culture that is almost not there because it is so bland. The issue is that the culture at large that we swim in is hardly likely to do us the same courtesy.
When forced to choose between a culture of thin translucence and a culture of vibrance and interest, we will tend to go with the stories in our hearts rather than the doctrines in our heads. Our beliefs have less to do with the arguments and theology than they do with the people we want to be around. As Arnold Kling puts it, we decide what to believe by deciding who to believe. If church movies are bland and basic, their messages are less likely to stick in our children’s minds when they have to compete with the interesting stuff being put out constantly from all sides. If our church activities are all solemnly focused on Jesus with no insertions of Pioneer Day fireworks or neighborhood roadshows, they simply can’t compete with the world’s celebrations or diversions. Not to mention that if we don’t create our own stories about what our culture means, the larger entertainment industry is sure to paint one instead. One solution to this is to shut the world out, but we all know that’s only a temporary one.
So I propose an alternative: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Let’s build up some Latter-day Saint treasure. Let’s stop trying to be like everyone else and instead be so interesting and compelling that people want to find out what’s going on over here. Of course, it would also be naive to equate Latter-day Saint culture with Utah culture. As the church grows more global, we need to have not less church culture but more church cultures. We can’t do that by playing it safe, by creating a gospel culture of lowest common denominator. We have to be not only true and good, but beautiful, interesting, fascinating, hilarious. Let’s stop apologizing and be our weird, peculiar selves.
January is my birthday month, and usually one of my favorites, but things got off to a rough start this year. The school board was thinking about closing a program my kids participate in, so I had to make time to go and speak at a board meeting. Success: they’ve decided to expand the program instead of close it. Then one of my kids slipped in the snow and got a concussion. On top of regular life stuff, I’ve been struggling to keep all the balls in the air this semester. I finally decided to withdraw from a class last week, so hopefully there will be a bit more breathing room.
Next week is the Life, The Universe and Everything Symposium (number 42!) in Provo. I’ll be presenting my paper on Mormon portrayals of aliens on Thursday and participating in a panel about religious clashes in speculative fiction. On Saturday, I’m on another panel about speculative fiction for various school ages and classes. If you’re coming, please send me an email and let’s meet up!
Speaking of upcoming conferences, my paper on representations of Latter-day Saints in The Expanse and Stranger Things was accepted by the Mormon History Association for their conference in June. I really love this paper and am excited to work on it a bit more in preparation for the conference.
On the podcast side, we’re back in the swing of things with an experimental new short format which will hopefully let us cover more things while spending less time on post-production. Our first short episode is on a documentary called The Mission on Disney+, which is about an evangelical missionary who is killed trying to contact an isolated people. We also released an episode today on Indiana Jones as a possible lapsed Latter-day Saint, with the authors of the popular post over at By Common Consent. It’s a really fun episode!
