- Metzger, Th.
Undercover Mormon.
New York: Roadswell Editions, 2013.
-
The author, whose spiritual journey had earlier led him to dabble
with becoming a Mennonite, goes weekly to an acupuncturist named
Rudy Kilowatt who believes in the power of crystals, attends neo-pagan
fertility rituals in a friend's suburban back yard, had been
oddly fascinated by Mormonism ever since, as a teenager, he attended
the spectacular
annual
Mormon pageant at Hill Cumorah, near his home in upstate New York.
He returned again and again for the spectacle of the pageant,
and based upon his limited knowledge of Mormon doctrine,
found himself admiring how the religion seemed to have it all:
“All religion is either sword and sorcery or science
fiction. The reason Mormonism is growing so fast is that you
guys have both, and don't apologize for either.” He
decides to pursue this Mormon thing further, armouring himself
in white shirt, conservative tie, and black pants, and heading off to the
nearest congregation for the Sunday service.
Approached by missionaries who spot him as a newcomer, he masters
his anxiety (bolstered by the knowledge he has a couple of Xanax
pills in his pocket), gives a false name, and indicates he's
interested in learning more about the faith. Before long he's
attending Sunday school, reading tracts, and spinning into the
Mormon orbit, with increasing suggestions that he might convert.
All of this is described in a detached, ironic manner, in which the
reader (and perhaps the author) can't decide how seriously to take
it all. Metzger carries magic talismans to protect himself against
the fearful “Mormo”, describes his anxiety to his
psychoanalyst, who prescribes the pharmaceutical version of magic
bones. He struggles with paranoia about his deception being found
out and agonises over the consequences. He consults a friend who,
“For a while he was an old-order Quaker, then a Sufi, then
a retro-neo-pagan. Now he's a Unitarian-Universalist professor
of history.”
The narrative is written in the tediously quaint
“new
journalism” style where it's as much about
the author as the subject. This works poorly here because
the author isn't very interesting. He comes across as so
neurotic and self-absorbed as to make Woody Allen seem like
Clint Eastwood. His “discoveries” about the
content of LDS scripture could have been made just as
easily by reading the original documents on the
LDS Web site, and
his exploration of the history of Joseph Smith and the
early days of Mormonism in New York could have been accomplished
by consulting Wikipedia. His antics, such as burying chicken
bones around the obelisk of Moroni on Hill Cumorah and digging
up earth from the grave of
Luman Walter
to spread it in the sacred grove, push irony
past the point of parody—does anybody believe the author
took such things seriously (and if he did, why should anybody
care what he thinks about anything)?
The book does not mock Mormonism, and treats the individuals he
encounters on his journey more or less respectfully (with just
that little [and utterly unjustified] “I'm better than
you” that the hip intellectual has for earnest, clean-cut,
industrious people who are “as white as angel food cake,
and almost as spongy.”) But you'll learn nothing about the
history and doctrine of the religion here that you won't find
elsewhere without all the baggage of the author's tiresome
“adventures”.
November 2014 