The social drawbacks of prophecy
July 12th, 2009 by Menachem Wecker
Though Theophany can carry very positive implications for prophets, it is also liable to destroy their families, friends, and communities.
Such is the premise of Zoe Murdock’s new novel, Torn by God: A Family’s Struggle with Polygamy (first 4 chapters available here).
Set in a small town in Utah in 1959, Torn tells of Michael Sterling, who becomes increasingly alienated from his family and community, who reject a vision he claims to have privately experienced.
Sterling stubbornly clings to his epiphany, yet the disbelief of his wife, Sharon, and his children, Beth and Mikey, makes him vulnerable to a rogue FLDS-like polygamist society, run by one Brother Reuben, who claims to believe in Sterling’s vision.
As Sterling becomes friendlier with Reuben and the polygamists, Sharon, Beth, and Mikey immediately recognize his new friend as a fraud and try to warn him to stay away. The local bishop does the same and is forced to set an excommunication plan in motion so that Sterling does not lead the church astray.
But Reuben’s declared faith in Sterling’s vision empowers Sterling where his church has denounced his special epiphany. Sterling sets down a destructive path of increasing dependence (religious, psychological, and ultimately financial) on a charismatic who is using him.
According to her website, Murdock’s “most basic desire is to know how people come to believe what they believe and how those beliefs lead them to act in specific ways,” which she finds “as exciting and stimulating as exploring a foreign country.”
Indeed the book, which reminds me of the magic and confusion of Ole Edvart Rolvaag’s masterful Giants in the Earth, takes the psychological temperature of not just the prophet, but also of the entire community.
Particularly of interest to non-Mormons (and to some Mormons too no doubt) will be the ways the LDS doctrines of personal revelation and the Law of Consecration collide with modernity.
I won’t ruin the story, which I highly recommend (and Murdock is well worth following on Twitter), but I will say that Murdock presents a very fair and honest look at a Mormon community, in which all the characters grapple with real world problems.
I learned a lot about Mormonism from the book, but I also think that the issues that Murdock presents are larger questions about sacred vs. secular, religion and spousal and parental relationships, and personal vs. public worship.
The title page declares that the narrative “is inspired by real events and is set in the landscape of the author’s youth,” and for that I hope that the more tragic parts of the narrative were literary license and did not actually plague the author. But whatever Murdock endured, readers stand to learn a lot from her experiences and insights.