All About Mormons

For the religious group, see Mormon.

"All About Mormons" is episode 108 of the Comedy Central series South Park. It originally aired on November 19, 2003.

Plot

In this episode, a new family moves into South Park, and their son Gary, stereotypically depicted as unusually perfect (achieving high grades, being perfectly polite, etc.), invokes the wrath of the other boys. Stan is drafted into the job of beating him up by the other children, but Gary's sheer politeness leads Stan to discover himself walking away with an invitation to dinner that night. After dinner, the five-kid, two-parent family has family game night where they play games, do performance art, and read from the Book of Mormon. Stan is intrigued and confused by all this, and asks his parents about the Mormon family's beliefs. His father concludes that they must be religious fanatics attempting to brainwash Stan, and heads over to confront them and beat them up (but only upon determining that Mr. Harrison is white). Instead, he too finds himself quelled by the family's perfection and politeness, and in the end, actually decides to convert to Mormonism himself. The next day, Kenny, Cartman and Kyle cruelly mock Stan for hanging around with Gary and his family, accusing Stan of going on a date with Gary. When the Harrisons and Gary show up, the three kids walk off lying about going to "put in some volunteer work at the homeless shelter".

The episode is noteworthy for its approach to the religion in question. Throughout the episode, characters ask questions about Mormonism, and the story then breaks off to a sub-story about Joseph Smith and the founding of the religion. For satirical purposes, the show deviates from the original accounts of Mormonism's founding by adding extra to stories originally left vague (e.g. the precise location where Martin Harris lost the transcript of the Book of Lehi given to him by Joseph Smith). The show asserts assumed flaws in the religion's founding, which especially concern Stan (for example, that Joseph Smith offered no proof to the general public of finding the Golden Plates, and that he claimed to have translated from a slightly different plate after the first translation was lost while in the possession of Martin Harris). Stan winds up yelling at the Mormons that they're ridiculous for believing in it without proof; they smile patiently and explain that it's a matter of faith, while Stan argues that it should be a matter of empirical evidence. He further lashes out at them for acting unusually nice all the time, claiming it blindsides stupid people like his father into believing in Mormonism (to which Randy Marsh unwittingly responds "Yeah!"). Afterwards, Stan's family apparently chooses to convert away from Mormonism and goes back to Catholicism, at Randy's insistence.

Stan's anger doesn't much upset anyone in the Mormon family other than Gary, who confronts Stan and the other boys the next day, pointing out that his religion does not need to be factually true ,because it still supports good family values. Gary condemns their bigotry and ignorance, stating:

"All I ever did was try to be your friend, Stan, but you're so high and mighty you couldn't look past my religion and just be my friend back. You've got a lot of growing up to do, buddy. Suck my balls."

He walks away, and the episode ends as Cartman (with a new-found respect for him) says, "Damn, that kid is cool, huh?"

Trivia

While the Mormon history is told, the nararator/singer fills between verses with the phrase "Dum, Dum, Dum, Dum, Dum". When Martin Harris takes the initial translated pages home to show his wife, she shows suspicion and suggests to Harris that he tell Smith that 116 pages were lost and he would need them retranslated. This was a ruse to compare the two versions and therefore disprove their authenticity. The narrator/singer changes the fill phrase to "Smart, Smart, Smart, Smart, Smart" during this portion of the story, but reverts back to "Dumb" when Smith states that an angel took the original tablet that the pages were translated from and the new translation would be slightly different than the original. Gary's father offers this story as proof that the translation was authentic. Stan argues that it proves it was false.
Although Gary was introduced as a new character in this episode, he has not appeared in another episode since.
The LDS Church itself has not issued an official statement in reaction to the episode.
The episode pokes fun at the stereotypical view of Mormons as fair-haired and light-skinned. The large majority of converts to the early LDS Church were of British or Scandinavian heritage.^{[citation needed]}
Kyle McCulloch again provides the voice of a one-time use character by voicing Gary Harrison. Coincidentally, he himself is Mormon.
In a separate episode "Probably" Mormons are portrayed as being the right religion to get into heaven, despite God being a Buddhist. Mormon themes have also been visited in Trey Parker's films Cannibal! The Musical and Orgazmo.
The town seen in flashbacks is Palmyra, NY; birthplace of the Mormon religion. Several shots of the town are surprisingly close to what the town looked like at the time.

Inaccuracies

While most of the Mormon history and theology explained in this episode is correct, a few of the episode's details regarding Mormonism are incorrect:

The "four golden plates" depicted in the episode appear as massive tablets, perhaps echoing traditional depictions of the two stone tablets containing the 10 commandments. However Smith and some of the witnesses described the golden plates as a collection (the exact number was never specified) of thin, metal sheets approximately 6" x 8".(Joseph Smith, Times and Seasons, v3:9, March 1, 1842, 707.)
Mormon beliefs regarding the location of the Garden of Eden (Independence, Missouri) are not found in the Book of Mormon, but in the Doctrine and Covenants, another Mormon scripture (see Adam-ondi-Ahman).
The episode claims that Mormons believe all Native Americans are descended from "white people" who came from Jerusalem, and that another Israelite tribe killed them and was cursed with "red" skin as a result. The episode is broadly reflective, however, of a repeated indication in the Book of Mormon that Lamanites were "cursed" with a "dark" skin or a "skin of blackness" as a result of their "iniquities" and "transgressions" (e.g. 2 Ne. 5: 21; Alma 3: 6), an effect that has been interpreted by some LDS Church members and leaders, including former church president Spencer W. Kimball, to apply to modern Native Americans.^[1] It should also be noted that the introduction to the Book of Mormon states: "After thousands of years, all were destroyed except the Lamanites, and they are the principal ancestors of the American Indians." LDS.org

Goofs

Stan asks Gary who Joseph Smith is. He has somehow forgotten meeting Joseph Smith in the episode Super Best Friends.
When Joseph Smith is digging around on the Hill Cumorah to find the Gold Plates, he soon finds them and lifts the lid off of the stone container. Two shots later, a metal shield has appeared on top of the lid next to Joseph, even though he is never seen pulling it out.
In the scene where Stan returns home after having dinner with the Mormon family the TV show playing is That's My Bush!, despite Shelly claiming it to be Friends.

References

^ "The day of the Lamanites is nigh. For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised. In this picture of the twenty Lamanite missionaries, fifteen of the twenty were as light as Anglos; five were darker but equally delightsome. The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation. At one meeting a father and mother and their sixteen-year-old daughter were present, the little member girl — sixteen — sitting between the dark father and mother, and it was evident she was several shades lighter than her parents — on the same reservation, in the same hogan, subject to the same sun and wind and weather. There was the doctor in a Utah city who for two years had had an Indian boy in his home who stated that he was some shades lighter than the younger brother just coming into the program from the reservation. These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness. One white elder jokingly said that he and his companion were donating blood regularly to the hospital in the hope that the process might be accelerated.", Spencer W. Kimball in General Conference, Oct. 1960, reported in Improvement Era, December 1960, pp. 922-23.

External links

Southparkstudios:All About the Mormons?

Template:Episode navigation

[1] "The day of the Lamanites is nigh. For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised. In this picture of the twenty Lamanite missionaries, fifteen of the twenty were as light as Anglos; five were darker but equally delightsome. The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation. At one meeting a father and mother and their sixteen-year-old daughter were present, the little member girl — sixteen — sitting between the dark father and mother, and it was evident she was several shades lighter than her parents — on the same reservation, in the same hogan, subject to the same sun and wind and weather. There was the doctor in a Utah city who for two years had had an Indian boy in his home who stated that he was some shades lighter than the younger brother just coming into the program from the reservation. These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness. One white elder jokingly said that he and his companion were donating blood regularly to the hospital in the hope that the process might be accelerated.", Spencer W. Kimball in General Conference, Oct. 1960, reported in Improvement Era, December 1960, pp. 922-23.

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