New/Old Mormon Family Values: Italian Reactions to Big Love and Twilight

by Massimo Introvigne
A paper presented at The 2009 CESNUR Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah, June 12, 2009

Ascription and Labeling

One year ago, I surveyed the attitudes of the Italian media towards the Mormon affiliation of U.S. presidential hopeful Mitt Romney during the first seven months of 2008 (Introvigne 2008). The survey was based on some general theoretical presupposition which I will shortly summarize here. According to ascription theory, human beings have both an ascribed and an achieved status. The ascribed status is due to factors such as gender, ethnicity, and religion (Stark 2001, 37). Achieved status is due to personal achievements, options, and merit. Obviously, ascribed status cannot be changed, while achieved status change on an almost daily basis. Theoretically, religion is that part of ascribed status which can be voluntarily changed. But this is less easy than it seems. If religion is perceived as an important ascribed status, it will continue to exert its effects even when changed. A follower of Reverend Sun Myung Moon, no matter what else features in his or her life, will be mostly described as “a Moonie”. If he or she changes the religious affiliation, the label “ex-Moonie” will often be used. There is no final escape from ascription.

Labeling is different from ascription (Cullen and Cullen 1978), insofar as a label is generally regarded as negative while an ascribed status may be value-free. Being Bulgarian (an ascribed status) is not normally regarded as negative in most countries of the world, which have no quarrels with Bulgaria. Being a Roma (or a “Gipsy”) is dangerously close to a label in contemporary Europe, and being a Jew was a label in Nazi Germany as it is today in certain Moslem countries.

Mormonism and Labeling

 In 1993, during the so called “cult wars” in Europe, I proposed a distinction between “anti-cult” and “counter-cult” activists and movements (Introvigne 1993), which has now become commonplace. Of course, “anti-cultist” and “counter-cultist” may in turn be used as labels, but this was not my original intention. Anti-cultists criticize “cults” as socially dangerous from a secular perspective, while counter-cultists describe “cults” as spiritually dangerous, from a religious perspective. Anti-Mormonism certainly does exist. We are confronted with an anti-Mormon work when the author tries to persuade us that the LDS Church is too rich and too powerful to be socially tolerable in the Intermountain West or the U.S. in general. But these works are much rarer than counter-Mormon books, videos and Web sites, whose authors insist that becoming a Mormon would jeopardize our eternal life, since Mormons are heretics and not “really” Christian.

Anti-Mormonism was much more prominent in the 19th Century, because polygamy and the domination of Utah politics by the LDS Church were regarded as civil rather than purely religious evils. After the demise of polygamy, anti-Mormonism decreased and counter-Mormonism increased. Of course, purely secular arguments are used against “fundamentalist” splinter groups still practicing polygamy, but at least in the U.S. most media are capable of distinguishing them from the mainline LDS Church.

If anti-Mormonism is scarcer than counter-Mormonism, labeling of Mormons should come primarily from the religious and Evangelical media, rather than from the secular and liberal. But this is more true in the United States. In Europe, the fact that the LDS Church had officially abandoned polygamy did not become common knowledge immediately after 1890. This is reflected by countless popular references and novels. As late as 1930, such a prominent French novelist as Georges Simenon (1903-1989) in his short novel L’oeil de l’Utah (The Eye of Utah: Simenon 1930) presented the Utah Mormons as cheerfully practicing polygamy, although he believed that Joseph Smith had nothing to do with it and this was a peculiar deviation introduced by Brigham Young. The fact of the matter was that there were very few Mormons, if any, in Central and Southern Europe in the 1930s. On the other hand, there were several million readers of cheap dime novels such as Buffalo Bill and the Danite Kidnappers, written by Prentiss Ingraham (1843-1904) and published in New York in 1902, whose German, Italian, French and Spanish translations were constantly reprinted up to the 1950s. Neither the American original nor the translations came with a publisher’s note explaining to the crowd of Buffalo Bill fans that polygamy was no longer practiced by the Mormons.
The astonishing news is that to a larger extent the fact that the LDS Church no longer practices polygamy is not generally known in Central and Southern Europe today. In my 2008 survey I analyzed 1,000 Italian articles on Romney, and found that 473 articles (or 47,3%) mentioned that Romney’s religion has something to do with polygamy, although 115 (11.5% of the total, and 24.3% of those discussing polygamy in connection with Romney) did some homework, and explained that Romney’s Church is not actually polygamist. However, very few articles were entirely accurate on this point. Most would say that Romney belongs to “a branch” of Mormonism which is non-polygamist, or that polygamy has become “rare”. 173 articles (or 17.3%) made some mention of Warren Jeffs, the events in Texas, and the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, not necessarily by that name, and only in roughly half of the instances clearly stating that Romney’s church and Jeffs’ church are two very different entities. A particularly telling result was that 93 articles (or 9,3%) included sentences which are variations of “Mr. Romney has only one wife”. This is of course reminiscent of the often-told story of the Mormon Apostle visiting Italy who, tired of being asked how many wives he had, ended up answering that he had several but was traveling only with one since Europe is so expensive. On a more serious note, it tells us that for a significant number of Italian reporters the word “Mormonism” immediately rings a bell whose sound is “polygamy”.

A Larger Survey

Continuing the work I started with the 2008 paper on Romney, I have carried out a larger survey, extending from January 2008 to May 2009 and collecting all stories mentioning Mormons or the Mormon Church in Italian media. By “media” I mean any kind of newspaper, magazine, or journal (excluding the official publications of the LDS Church); TVs and radios with a Web site; and major Internet news sites (blogs and Web sites promoted by individual buffs have been excluded; E-magazines and E-news services with more than a purely local audience have been included). Overall, I have collected 2,516 stories (Table 1). Romney’s Mormonism is still the most important topic, although he became less important after he was no longer a candidate (but there has been a revival in 2009, with stories on Romney as a presidential hopeful for 2012). In October 2008 the LDS Church announced the Rome temple. This generated a certain interest in Italy, soon to be obfuscated by the release in Italy of the movie version of Twilight on November 21, 2008.

Since Twilight’s fan base in Italy is possibly the largest in the world outside the U.S., the fact that Stephenie Meyer (the novels’ author) is a Mormon became much bigger news than the temple. Big Love, the HBO TV drama on polygamy, aired in Italy by Fox Life (a comparatively expensive cable channel) also has a small but devoted following. Although it is not a household name among the general public, the number of stories mentioning Big Love is only slightly smaller than those mentioning the Rome temple. “Other stories” include Warren Jeff’s Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Texas raid, and the 150th anniversary of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), whose first novel with Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet (1887), prominently featured the Mormons and polygamy. That there are only a dozen stories on the Texas polygamists may seem strange, but this result should be read with caution. In fact, the Texas raid is mentioned in roughly half of the stories on Big Love, and 15% of the other stories also mentioning Romney, Stephenie Meyer, or the Rome temple. If we include these further mentions of the Fundamentalists, the total number of stories with some reference to the Texas incidents is 490. Clearly, however, the topic in Italy is less interesting per se than if the story may include some references to Romney, Stephenie Meyer or at least Big Love. Things may change with the promotion of the Italian edition of former Fundamentalist Carolyn Jessop’s memoir Escape, which started in May 2009, the more so if a Hollywood movie will really be produced based on the book, as some (American) media have reported.

Table 1: Stories Mentioning Mormonism in the Italian media, January 2008 - May 2009

Topics	Stories	%
Romney’s Mormonism	1,150	45,70%
Twilight and Mormonism	755	30,01%
Rome Temple	306	12,16%
Big Love	290	11,53%
Other Stories	15	0,6%
Total	2,516	100%

 

Twilight

As mentioned earlier, Twilight remains in Italy a much bigger deal than either the Fundamentalists or the Rome temple. The 413 stories mentioning that Meyer is a Mormon are a small percentage of several thousand stories on Meyer and Twilight, but a significant portion of all the stories in Italy mentioning Mormonism. Then, on April 22, 2009 something else happened. Deseret Books, the LDS chain of bookstores, decided to pull the books of the Twilight series off of the shelf, making them special order only. This generated 342 stories in one month in Italy. Many of them do not mention that Meyer is a Mormon, and present the move (more often than not confused with a wider LDS ban on Twilight, or even with an excommunication of Meyer – a fact which of course never happened) as just another instance of bigotry by conservative American religion against popular books or music.

Table 2: Italian Stories about Twilight Mentioning Mormonism, January 2008 - May 2009

Topics	Stories	%
Meyer as a Mormon	413	54,7%
Church’s “Ban” of Twilight	342	45,3%
Total	755	100%

 

Big Love

Big Love is, of course, about polygamy. Although the original series makes crystal-clear that the LDS Church is strongly opposed to polygamy, the Italian version of the first season failed to translate “LDS Church” into “Chiesa di Gesù Cristo dei Santi degli Ultimi Giorni”, the Church’s name in Italy. Without any apparent reason, the name was translated “Chiesa Riorganizzata di Gesù Cristo dei Santi degli Ultimi Giorni”, or Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Of course a Church with this name no longer exists (the former Reorganized Church is now called Community of Christ). And very few people are supposed to know about the (former) Reorganized Church in Italy. However, some anonymous translator or copy-editor probably thought that a Church preaching against polygamy cannot conceivably be the Mormon Church but should be some splinter, “reformed” or “reorganized”, group. The protests of the Italian LDS Church obtained some changes in the following season, although they still got the Italian name of the mainline Church (now called “dei Santi dell’Ultimo Giorno” rather than “degli Ultimi Giorni”) wrong. The third season of Big Love has not yet been aired in Italy, and the controversy about the March 2009 episode depicting the sacred Mormon temple ceremony of endowment is probably difficult to understand for an Italian audience which is not very familiar with Mormonism in general. Accordingly, only a handful of Italian media picked that story up (see Table 3).

Table 3: Italian Stories about Big Love, January 2008 - May 2009

Topics	Stories	%
General	280	96,55%
Church’s Criticism of Big Love	10	3,45%
Total	290	100%

 

Attitudes towards the LDS Church
Are the stories about the LDS Church in Italian media positive or negative? Of course “positive” and “negative” are, in their own way, labels, socially constructed for different purposes. The points of view of a PR agency working for the LDS Church, a reporter and a scholar are not necessarily the same. I have classified as “positive” stories where the emphasis is on Mormon family values and on the Church as a strong and growing part of American and international religion and culture. “Negative” stories do not always use the four-letter word “cult” but emphasize the darker side of Mormonism as patriarchal, secretive, oppressive, and/or (in Christian media) somewhat beyond the level of acceptable Christian orthodoxy. I have classified as “neutral” stories discussing Mormonism as just another religion, with both positive and negative sides, or very short stories and references where no clear value judgment emerges (Tables 4-8).

The most apparent result of this survey is that the alleged “ban” of Twilight in April 2009 was a PR disaster for the LDS Church. Despite the limited time in the survey since it happened, it has generated no positive comments at all, and a record 98,54% of negative stories about the Church. Even in the American context, it is unclear why Deseret Bookstore took that step. Not only is Meyer a pious Mormon, but several Christian publications and organizations – including the Catholic News Service, Focus on the Family and Christianity Today – praised the Twilight books as based on solid family values and rated the movie as “acceptable” for teenagers. Twilight is about vampires but, as the Catholic News Service reported in an evaluation written by an officer of the Office for Film & Broadcasting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Just because you're a vampire, it doesn't mean you can't be a gentleman”. The leading character, gentleman vampire Edward Cullen, was described as “commendably scrupulous” about both blood-drinking and sex (Muldering 2009). In Italy most mainline media, including those with links to the Roman Catholic Church, praised Meyer’s hero as preaching old-fashioned moral values to teenagers of the 21st century, who are normally much less conservative than the vampire Edward Cullen is in both the novels and the movie.

Only at the fringes of Evangelical counter-cultism do we find, in a text by counter-cult activist Caryl Matrisciana, the claim that vampires are by definition demonic and that, since the Mormon Church is also Satanic, it is not surprising that a Mormon author writes about vampires (Matrisciana 2009). Matrisciana also claimed that Meyer “received” Twilight in a dream just as Joseph Smith “received” his heavenly visions and the Book of Mormon (ibid.). Matrisciana has however a reputation for heavy-armed counter-cultism and is not taken too seriously in more moderate Evangelical milieus. Deseret Bookstore’s move gives the impression that the most rabid Evangelical counter-cultists are closely watched in certain LDS quarters, and generate real concerns. Moving against Twilight was, however, a boomerang as the Italian data seem to confirm. In fact, Twilight – at least in Italy –, considered from the point of view of its impact on the media, was the best thing which happened to the LDS Church in decades (perhaps together with the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics). 73,85% of the stories mentioning (before the “ban”) that Meyer was a Mormon had a positive view of the LDS Church as an island of safety where family values were still taken seriously, as represented by Meyer’s novels.

Table 4: Attitude towards the LDS Church in Italian Stories about Twilight, January 2008 - May 2009

Attitude	Stories (total)	%	Stories on Meyer as a Mormon	%	Stories about the “Ban”	%
Positive	305	40,4%	305	73,85%	0	0%
Neutral	52	6,89%	47	11,38%	5	1,46%
Negative	398	52,71%	61	14,77%	337	98,54%
Total	755	100%	413	100%	342	100%

 

Classifying stories about Big Love is more difficult, since some media still confuse the mainline LDS Church and the polygamist Fundamentalists, and harsh judgments against “the Mormons” in fact may be referred to the Fundamentalists. Table 5 shows that Big Love was not exactly propaganda for the LDS church, but neither was it a major media disaster. The alleged “ban” against Twilight certainly did more damage.

Table 5: Attitude towards the LDS Church in Italian Stories about Big Love, January 2008 - May 2009

Attitude	Stories	%
Positive	41	14,14%
Neutral	98	33,79%
Negative	151	52,07%
Total	290	100%

 

Did the Church’s PR activity make a difference? Table 6, about stories generated by the announcement of the Rome temple, does show some impact (most stories were factual and neutral). Yet, notwithstanding a sustained PR effort by the Italian church, there were twice as many negative stories than positive.

Table 6: Attitude towards the LDS Church in Italian Stories about the Rome Temple, January 2008 - May 2009

Attitude	Stories	%
Positive	49	16,01%
Neutral	159	51,96%
Negative	98	32,03%
Total	306	100%

Considered from the point of view of the attitude towards the LDS Church, stories on Romney are strikingly similar to stories about the Rome temple, with the Romney campaign probably playing the role the Church’s publicists tried to have in the temple story. Most stories were neutral, but the ratio of negative to positive stories was still more than two to one.

Table 7: Attitude towards the LDS Church in Italian Stories Mentioning Romney’s Mormonism, January 2008 - May 2009

Attitude	Stories	%
Positive	177	15,39%
Neutral	589	51,22%
Negative	384	33,39%
Total	1,150	100%

 

Table 8 is a comparison, and shows again the alleged “ban” of Twilight as a significant PR fiasco. After the “ban”, negative reactions to the LDS Church jumped from 32% to almost 43% in one month. As opposite to this, Meyer’s insistence on socially accepted values had a very positive effect on the Church’s image in Italy, while stories about the Rome temple and Romney were presumably handled by more specialized religious and political reporters and generated the highest number of fact-based, neutral stories.

Table 8: Attitudes towards the LDS Church in Italian Stories Mentioning Mormonism, January 2008 - May 2009

Topic	Positive	Neutral	Negative
Meyer as Mormon	73,85%	11,38%	14,77%
Rome Temple	16,01%	51,96%	32,03%
Romney’s Mormonism	15,39%	51,22%	33,39%
Big Love	14,14%	33,79%	52,07%
Church’s “Ban” of Twilight	0%	1,46%	98,54%
Total	23,82%	33,24%	42,94%
Total, except “Ban” of Twilight	26,50%	41,36%	32,14%

 

Polygamy

As mentioned earlier, in Italy when somebody says “Mormons” most media still hear “polygamy”. Table 9 shows that more than half of the stories mentioning Mormonism also mentions polygamy. A record 100% is scored, not surprisingly, by stories about Big Love, a series whose subject matter is in fact polygamy. But the mentions of polygamy remains high even in stories about the temple or Romney.

I also tried to measure how many stories got the basic fact on polygamy right, focusing on clear statements that present-day Mormons are not polygamist and that “fundamentalist” members of Warren Jeff’s group belong to a different church. Only 23,5% of stories pass this test. There is still a slightly larger number of stories (39,26%) which are plainly wrong, i.e. state that polygamy is practiced by “a minority”, “ a part”, or “a branch” of the Mormon Church. Almost as many stories are ambiguous (37,24%), i.e. the reader does not get a clear picture of what kind of “Mormons” exactly present-day polygamists are. The largest number of reporters who got the story right wrote about the Rome temple, and presumably interacted with officers of the Church. These officers and media experts were much more successful in explaining the basic facts about polygamy than in conveying a general positive image of the Church.

Items about Big Love are less ambiguous: mostly, they either got the polygamy story right (34,48%) or wrong (54,83%). This polarization may be explained with the fact that while reporting on TV series is often superficial, most quality media really watching the show gained a clear understanding that the LDS Church is in fact quite hostile to polygamists. By the second season, this should have been obvious even to those confused (in Italy) by translation issues. But nothing should be taken for granted. Introducing the second season, the official E-magazine of Fox, the network carrying Big Love in Italy, explained that “the Henricksons are Mormons who practice polygamy” (without any attempt at distinguishing between the mainline LDS Church and the Fundamentalists), while Roman Grant, the rogue Fundamentalist leader in the serial, was described as “a Mormon gangster” (Poli 2008).

Table 9: Polygamy in Italian Stories Mentioning Mormonism, January 2008 - May 2009

Topic	Mentioning Polygamy	%	Right		%	Ambiguous	%	Wrong	%
Twilight	344	45,56	48	13,95		188	54,65	108	31,4
Big Love	290	100	100	34,48		31	10,69	159	54,83
Rome Temple	175	57,19	67	38,28		75	42,86	33	18,86
Romney’s Mormonism	523	45,48	98	18,74		202	38,62	223	42,64
Total	1,332	52,94	313	23,5		496	37,24	523	39,26

 

Quality daily newspapers such as il Foglio have examined the issues more in depth, connecting within the same articles Big Love, Twilight, Romney, the Rome temple and even American Idol’s Mormon teenage singer David Archuleta (see e.g. Delle Foglie 2009). Even these more well-researched articles remain ambiguous about the “Mormon taboo” of polygamy: its demise by the “official Church” is described as a move which “was born more out of political compromise than of deep conviction”, and the relationship between the “unofficial” (i.e. Fundamentalist) and the “official” LDS Church is far from being clearly explained. A previous article by the same newspaper and reporter was worse, describing polygamy as “the darker side of Mormonism”, seeing in Twilight’s eternal love between Bella and the vampire “a shadow of the Mormon doctrine of eternal – although polygamous – marriage”, and comparing “a seventeen year old girl’s love for a vampire born more than a hundred years ago with the polygamist child brides who marry much older men” (Delle Foglie 2008). Italian LDS Church officers have protested even against these articles by il Foglio, where at least some research has been done.

In conclusion, Italian media have still a long way to go in order to fully understand Mormonism, and to get their stories right about polygamy. The slow but continuous expansion of the Mormon presence in Italy (where there are some 22,000 members) may help. Data about stories on the Rome temple do show that the Church’s PR efforts do have some impact, particularly on the polygamy issue. However, the Italian Church’s communication effort is occasionally damaged by events in the United States such as Deseret Bookstore’s “ban” of Twilight, of which Italian Mormons have no control and whose large and largely negative impact overseas was probably not anticipated by whoever decided the move in Utah.

References
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