‘Meet the Mormons” is a slick, upbeat Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints-backed documentary that aims to answer the image of the church and its members “shaped by the media and popular culture.”
A quick montage of pop culture ridicule of Mormons and Mormonism hits on that — “What are you, Mormon?” punch lines from films such as “Fletch,” open mockery by the “The Simpsons” and “South Park.”
And the film’s narrator, Jenna Kim Jones, finds New York’s Times Square full of people with “misconceptions” about Latter-day Saints — “Lots of wives. “Lots of kids.” “Racists.”
But “Mormons,” the fresh-faced blue-eyed blond narrator informs us, “come in all shapes, sizes, shapes and colors.”
So the film shows us an African American Mormon bishop and his family in Atlanta. We meet Ken Niumatalolo, Mormon coach of the football team at the U.S. Naval Academy. We travel to Nepal where a native who has converted is helping build schools and water systems.
We meet a surviving hero of the Berlin airlift and a young man of mixed race, now old enough to go to South Africa to do his two years as a Mormon missionary.
But from the cherry-picked “stereotypes” to the sins of omission that follow, “Meet the Mormons” is nothing but propaganda. The film addresses the church’s reputation for “racism” without mentioning the long history in which that was true. The same gloss-it-over approach is used on the church’s sexist, patriarchal heritage.
And nobody brings up the homophobia that stormed out of the closet when Mormon money and organizers pushed California’s anti-gay Proposition 8.
