The Theology of the “Twilight” Series
— Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 —
Let me preface this by saying the only people I know who’ve seen the “New Moon” movie are enthusiastic teenage girls and Boyce College Dean Denny Burk. I can guarantee you, though, that lots of adolescent and post-adolescent women in your congregation have seen the movie and are reading the novels in the “Twilight” series.
Touchstone, a magazine where I serve as a senior editor, just ran a fascinating article on the theology behind the series. Jonn Granger, who was called by Time magazine the “dean of Harry Potter scholars,” wrote this piece, focusing on what he sees as the distinctively Latter-day Saint theological-literary structure behind the series.
Read it, and think about his thesis. What does the “Twilight” series tell you about what young women in your communities are longing for? What does it tell you about the appeal of Mormonism?
Twilight isn’t the only popular fiction with LDS motifs. Orson Scott Card, author of the Nebula winning “Ender’s Game” attributes Joseph Smith as his biggest influence. If you know what to look for the Mormon theology is quite apparent in his writings.
That doesn’t mean he doesn’t ask good questions. I would recommend his “Ships of Earth” series for an insightful speculation on how an omnipotent, omniscient deity can accomplish his sovereign purpose without violating man’s free will. He makes some points that I’m surprised some Calvinists haven’t bothered to examine.
However, the best counter to LDS dualistic theology is found in Coleman Luck’s latest book, “Angel Fall” available from Zondervan. It is a dark fantasy novel that is more than a little provocative and provides some nice competition for Fred Dekker and his legions of fans.
interesting post.
you asked, “What does the “Twilight” series tell you about what young women in your communities are longing for?”
that question sounds more about anthropology than theology. i think the distinction is important. it’s one thing to investigate a work’s anthropology, i.e. how it views the human condition. but, once you talk about its theology, the connotation is that it more intentionally says something about God or the gods.
I loved this article. It shows how you can take any idea, book, object, etc. and form an entire hypothesis around it. If the writer were Catholic…..hmmm that would have made for a more interesting twist. Dang, I just remembered Ann Rice, oh well thats been done :)
The Mormon connection is certainly interesting and one of which I was previously unaware.
That said — by far the most significant feature re/ these novels is the inversion of values which is common to the tripe consumed by the typical American today.
Throughout most of the history of Western civilization it has been taken as a given that werewolves, vampires, etc. were creatures of evil. Whenever a witch is reflected in pop culture today, more likely than not she will be a protagonist.
The change reflects a particularly warped exercise in political-correctness and anti-humanism — as if turning one’s self into a beast every full moon or drawing upon unnatural powers need not necessarily make one a bad person.
JD,
I agree with you. The mormon themes are troublesome - but what’s more troublesome is that so many people look past the Vampire-theme and the aberrant sex in the series (and not just garden-variety promiscuity).
Kamilla
Wired recently did a surprisingly insightful post on the “Top 20 Unfortunate Lessons Girls Learn From Twilight.” For example:
#1: If a boy is aloof, stand-offish, ignores you or is just plain rude, it is because he is secretly in love with you — and you are the point of his existence.
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/11/twilight-lessons-girls-learn/
This comment is a repeat of a comment I made over at Mere Comments. It’s not directed at anyone here other than Granger and his analysis.
Reading Granger’s analysis, I have to say I think he’s in as much of an alternate universe as Edward is.
Let’s start with John L. Brooke’s “Refiner’s Fire.”
The book makes assertions about Mormonism that almost no Mormon - modern or otherwise would even know about, much less advocate. I have never met a Mormon in my life of 35 years in the LDS Church who knows about or is even remotely interested in how Mormon beliefs supposedly evolved from roots in the 1600s. The fact that Granger dates the “founding” of Mormonism to the 1600s shows the sort of alternate universe kind of conspiracy theory-driven thinking that one can only shake one’s head at.
Mormonism started in the 1830s. And Joseph Smith was far too uneducated to be tapped into anything remotely resembling philosophical trends from the 1600s - except insofar as the formed a part of the general milieu of frontier America he grew up in.
This is nothing more than wild speculation posing as literary analysis. Maybe Granger has read “Refiner’s Fire.” But I would posit that he’s one of the few human beings on the planet that has. Mormons are blissfully unaware of this stuff, and even those of us with a good knowledge of apologetics have not the slightest clue who Mr. Brooke even is.
So much for the Carlisle connection.
Linking the Volturi to the Catholic Church is just silly.
The idea of a powerful organization against whom the hero must struggle is hardly a uniquely Mormon idea. Everyone in America has this archetype stored away somewhere in their psyche. Meyer could have gotten it from any number of places without having Catholics in mind.
Also, in calling the vampires “blood-atonement driven” I wonder if Mr. Granger even has a working knowledge of what the doctrine of blood atonement even is, or if he just picked it up watching “September Dawn” one Friday night.
Granger’s attempt to link the perfectly circular meadow with the “Mountain Meadows Massacre” is just so pathetically desperate as to be almost comical. You can almost envision a sleepless Granger sitting at his desk thinking about how to work in a Mormons-are-bloody angle into a review on a Mormon vampire novel.
“Let’s see… blood, blood… what’s bloody about Mormons? Oh, I know! Blood Atonement! OK, that’s one link… what else… Oo, oo, I know - Mountain Meadows Massacre! That’s a really good one! Now, how can I possibly link that bloody episode with Twilight? Oh yeah! Twilight has a “meadow” in it. I am on a roll here!”
News flash - clearings have always had symbolic literary meaning. You travel in the dark woods of life, and then you suddenly come into a clearing and taste the sun. It can represent enlightenment, opening your world view, any number of things.
I mean, come on guys. How credulous can you get?
Do you seriously think that we Mormons are all having Mountain Meadows flashbacks every time we hit a meadow?
Or maybe you do think that. Because you guys have gotten so used to defining our entire faith off of a few conveniently negative episodes that people like Granger simply assume that every believing Mormon must be thinking about the same stuff he thinks about every time “Mormonism” is on the brain.
Well, I hate to break it to you - but even with the recent books about Mountain Meadows, most Mormons aren’t thinking about the topic at all. Almost none of us have purchased any of the books on the subject, much less read them. This isn’t a topic that most Mormons care about.
I only know about it because I spend a lot of time debating with Protestants, and some of them are fond of opportunistically using the incident as a general slur on the Mormon population. And even I don’t feel any particular guilt about the incident.
I also found amusing Granger’s airy dismissal of Mormon apologetics on the massacre as “pathetic.” They’re only pathetic because they are inconvenient for him. I note that Granger never deigns to enlighten us why exactly they are pathetic.
As for myself, an atmosphere of panic about you Protestants sending an army to wipe us out seems like a pretty damn-good explanation to me. How about you?
The genetics thing is cute. And I’m glad that Granger found a way to shoehorn in another criticism of Mormonism in the guise of doing a literary review. But this one sinks as well.
The South American native showing up has nothing to do with Book of Mormon origins. Stephanie Meyer herself explained this detail in an interview. She did her research for this book. On vampirism, not Mormonism.
There is a South American legend of vampires that impregnate women.
That’s it.
That’s where the genetic hook came from. Not half-baked DNA criticisms of Mormonism - which again most Mormons neither know nor care about.
Incidentally, the DNA argument is an absolute embarrassment to anti-Mormonism. It betrays either a profound ignorance of how population genetics work, or an ignorance of what the Book of Mormon actually claims, or both. It was rather amusing to watch all the frenzied excitement in the anti-Mormon camp when they thought they’d finally uncovered a silver bullet to discredit Mormonism - and then the outraged anger and confusion that resulted when Mormons not only refuted the entire argument, but didn’t even break a sweat doing it.
Happy to elaborate on this if you are interested.
Finally, Granger’s attempt to shoehorn another tired counter-cult ministry standby into the review - Adam-God theory.
Let me just tell you right now that the only Mormons who even know about Adam-God are those who have it shoved in their faces by some anti-Mormon. The rest don’t know about it at all.
Adam-God theory comes from some very confused and vague statements made by prophet Brigham Young waay back in the 1800s. It was never fully accepted even when Young was prophet, and has fallen into complete and utter obscurity since then. Mention Adam-God theory in a modern Mormon Sunday School class and you will be met with a room full of blank looks. I find it implausible in the extreme that Meyer was ever even aware of this theory.
Granger would know this if he really knew that many Mormons. Apparently he doesn’t.
There is a very real temptation to assume that the members of a group are thinking about the same things we are thinking about when we are thinking about them.
If you were to play a word-association game with Mr. Granger with “Mormons” as the starting point, you’d probably get something like the following: “polygamy”, “Mountain Meadows”, “DNA,” “Adam-God”, “Jesus and Satan are brothers,” etc.
But if he thinks that modern Mormons really know, care, or think about those subjects, he would be completely wrong.
Let me give you an example on the other end.
Does the average Lutheran spend his time in the pews during the sermon agonizing over the utterly illogical and self-defeating mess of Augustine’s formula for the Trinity?
No?
Well that’s one thing I think about when I think about Lutheranism, among others. So that must mean that each and every American Protestant is torn with internal conflict over how to resolve the Trinity, right?
Well, of course that’s wrong. That’s just silly.
And Granger is being equally silly here. He is assuming that his own views of Mormonism - as an outsider - must be representative of what Mormon insiders are thinking. It’s an incredibly sloppy piece of thinking. I would have expected better from Touchstone.
Seth, you do get around. I am a week behind you trying to get caught up after vacation.
And I am Baptist; and I think about the Trinity all the time, (even when I am on vacation to Disneyland). :)