Musical Mission
Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, died on June 27, 1844. He was in an Illinois jail, awaiting trial for treason, when he was attacked and killed by a mob. But his movement continued, and there are around 14 million Mormons across the world today.
And now Smith has a Tony-winning musical (with some help from Trey Parker, Matt Stone and Robert Lopez). It's a big enough hit that it's probable more than 14 million people will see it.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:01 AM
4 Comments:
True, but the number of people who have received Mormon literature or spoken to a Mormon evangelist surely exceeds the audience of the musical by a huge amount.
More generally, the audience for Broadway musicals and the audience for Mormon missionaries barely overlap, and the latter is much larger.
Quiz question: What country has the largest proportion of LDS members? Hint: it has a higher proportion than any U.S. state other than Utah.
Not sure, but I'm going to guess it's a Pacific island nation. I know a weirdly large number of Pacific Islander Mormons here in NYC.
Correct. Specifically, it's Tonga. Mormons accounted for 17% of the island nation's residents in 2006, and the number keeps going up.
The primary reason is probably that Mormons (and also Seventh-Day Adventists) looked west, to the Pacific, when they began their great overseas proselytizing in the 20th century. But I wonder if a small factor might be that the Book of Mormon begins with an exciting story about the Jews travelling in boats across the ocean to unknown lands. In the actual Jewish scriptures, the sea is a scary place; both the Jewish scriptures and the New Testament are full of terrifying stories aboard boats, and the sea is a symbol of danger and chaos. Culturally, that's about as far from Polynesian tradition as one can imagine! I still can't comprehend how the Polynesians reached Hawaii.
Probably took a lot of tries.
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