Getting the word out, or not

At this point, I’m pretty sure that you regret having spent last night watching that boring and utterly predictable football game between BYU and Oklahoma State when, instead, you could have been in the audience for a screening of Six Days in August.  And, of course, you have nobody to blame for that but yourself.  Fortunately, though, you still have a shot at redemption.  Go see it today!

I jest but, candidly, turnout for Six Days in August has been quite disappointing, and (to me) surprisingly so.  UEA and two BYU home games in an increasingly exciting season probably haven’t helped us, but I’m still puzzled.  I’m very close to Six Days, of course, but I think it a good and worthwhile movie that tells an interesting and important story quite well.  Moreover, we’ve had good publicity (at least in the “Mormon corridor”), and the overwhelming majority of those who have seen the film have reported liking it very, very much.  There simply haven’t been enough of them in the first place.  I’ve been hoping that word-of-mouth would give Six Days the boost that it needs.  And maybe, just maybe, that will still happen.  Maybe it will turn out the way last night’s game did.  As of right now, though, and for whatever reason, it is what it is.

A poor financial return on the film will make the creation of future movie projects (such as Witnesses [2021], Undaunted Witnesses of the Book of Mormon [2022], and Six Days in August itself) much more difficult, if it doesn’t put them altogether beyond reach. Moreover, I don’t know how much longer we’ll be able to keep Six Days in August in theaters if it continues to underperform.  So, if you’re interested at all in seeing Six Days on a big screen — where its beautiful cinematography is shown to best effect — you’ll need to go sooner rather than later.

Happily, though, interest in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints still seems to be on the rise among filmmakers outside of the Church:  The Lifetime Channel’s Mormon Mom Gone Wrong: The Ruby Franke Story will debut next week.  The Hugh Grant vehicle Heretic will open in early November.  The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives appears to be a mega-hit — see this curious item from the New York Post: “‘Utah curls’ trend makes $1.5K extensions look low-effort: ‘Like having Rapunzel hair’” — and the show has been renewed for a second season.  And Secret Lives builds upon such pre-existing cinematic achievements as The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, Hulu’s Under the Banner of Heaven, and, several years earlier, September Dawn — which, like Six Days in August, centers to a considerable degree upon Brigham Young.  It’s comforting to know that, even if we don’t tell our own stories, others will still be happy to tell our stories for us.

We have remarkable stories to tell, and a remarkable message to share.  Some time back, I read a superb book by Fiona Givens and Terryl Givens entitled The Christ Who Heals: How God Restored the Truth that Saves Us.  I sometimes encounter derisive comments from certain critics about how shallow Mormonism supposedly is.  Such complaints astonish me.  I find the implications, entailments, and disclosures of the Restoration radical and utterly profound.  And so, it seems, do Fiona and Terryl:

Mormonism is so rich in doctrine, so expansive in its teachings, that we may be too easily distracted from this one cardinal proposition:  The Restoration recovered that Christ who is the most remarkable being in the history of religious thought.  (1)

They endeavor to show, in fact, that the figure of Christ “comes into his full splendor and beauty through the lens of the Restoration” (1).

Mormonism has immense theological profundity.  It repudiates notions of inherited guilt and depravity, restores vulnerable compassion and empathy to a Heavenly Father, recaptures the saga of human preexistence and our literal co-heirship with Christ, and provides a coherent scheme of salvational plenitude for the dead as well as the living.  Its doctrines are alternately exhilarating and consoling, controversial and common-sensical.  (2)

I strongly suspect that one of the factors in recently declining conversion rates and in some retention problems among young Latter-day Saints is our failure to adequately exhibit the exciting and radical depth of the Restored Gospel.  This book is a helpful instrument for reminding ourselves and others of what we’ve sometimes allowed to be obscured.

Especially in this context, I like their comments on what Latter-day Saints often call the “Great Apostasy”:

This “falling away” does not represent some minor corruptions of sacramental liturgy or ritual forms.  It is not about wicked priests whom God punished by removing their priesthood.  It is about a fundamental misapprehension of the background and purpose and extent of the covenant (premortal origins, mortal incarnation, and eventual theosis and sealing into the eternal family).  It is the loss of the mode by which that covenant is executed (through temple covenants that create those chains of infinite belonging, completing our journey from intelligence to joint heirship with Christ).

The loss of the larger cosmic context was compounded by failing to see the Fall as a necessary and premeditated immersion of humankind into the crucible of experience, suffering, and schooling in the practice of love.  The loss was not about baptizing at the wrong age or in the wrong medium.  It was about not knowing that baptism makes us — all of us eventually — literally members of Christ’s family and co-heirs with him as planned in premortal councils.  What is at stake is not simple difference in standards of sexual practice or marriage’s purpose per se.  It is about failing to see the family structure as a divine mode of eternal association that is at the very heart of heaven itself.  In sum, the “Restoration” is not about correcting particular doctrines or practices as much as it is about restoring their cosmic context.  (14-15)

BYU Studies has made this interesting article available at no charge, presumably for a limited time:  “Book of Mormon Grammar and Translation,” written by Stanford Carmack

This paper discusses some of the Book of Mormon’s nonstandard grammar, showing how in many cases it was not the kind of grammar that Joseph Smith would have been expected to produce, since it was neither his native usage nor a presumed biblically influenced English. In these contexts, if he had been in control of the wording of the text, it is highly likely that he would have expressed things differently. Quite a few examples are provided in support of this claim, along with additional matching examples found in early modern texts.

Those who might be interested in pursuing the topic further will find additional articles by Dr. Carmack in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship.