by

Over at Sunstone this week, the inimitable Andi Pitcher Davis is, inimitably, launching a year-long project in participatory performance art. It is an ingenious project, really, even for Andi, and that is saying a lot. It’s called “Books of Mormons.” Here is the official description.

The minute I heard of this project, I started thinking about my own “Books of Mormon”–the books that defined my Latter-day Saint experience as a young person growing up in Oklahoma in the 1970s and 1980s. These, far more than any scripture or conference talk, shaped me into the Mormon that I am today.

Deta Petersen Neeley’s four-volume Book of Mormon novelization for children was one of these books. As were about a dozen books by Paul Dunn, the Yorganson brothers’ From First Date to Chosen Mate, the filmstrip versions of Johnny Lingo and Leon’s Truck. And, a little bit later, Sterling W. Sills’ The Majesty of Books.

But the Mormonest Mormon book of my personal Books of Mormons is Jack Weyland’s Charly. There is a story behind this. There is always a story.

Jack Weyland was the speaker at the first youth conference I ever attended, at the University of Oklahoma some time in the 1980s. The details are fuzzy, but the experience is locked in my mind. I had never read any of his books, but I was fully prepared to make fun of them, since, at the time, I fancied myself a budding intellectual, and I had somehow learned that making fun of the sort of books that Jack Weyland wrote was what the sort of people I fancied myself being often did.

His talks at youth conference were fine, but not earthshaking–similar to most of the other talks we at the time. But somehow, I ended up with a copy of Charly, which I gleefully read so that I could laugh at the oh-so-sappy Mormon sentimentality that, I imagined, dripped off of every page.

Mostly, the book cooperated. It was about what I expected. Act I: Mormon boy (Sam) meets fascinating, well-educated, non-Mormon girl (Charly). Boy likes girl, girl likes boy, religion gets in the way. Act II: Girl reads book of Mormon, girl gets testimony, girl gets baptized, boy and girl get engaged.

And then Sam discovers that his Charly has what people at the time charmingly referred to as “a past.” As in a sexual history. Sam becomes despondent, and he decides that he can’t marry “used merchandise.” He goes to the bishop to call everything off, and then there is Chapter Seven, which rocked my young world in a very good way.

Here are the first two pages of that chapter, freshly annotated along the lines that Andi suggests:

Boom! The bishop takes away Sam’s temple recommend on the grounds that, insisting that Charly is not worthy shows that he does not believe in the atonement of Jesus Christ. And that he is not, in any meaningful sense, a Christian.

Yeah, I know the problems. This is hardly an acceptable modern feminist sentiment. But it was the first time in my Mormon life that I ever saw somebody take on the worst elements of the purity culture in the name of Jesus Christ. After all of the lessons about chewed gum, licked donuts, and nails in boards, here was somebody who came right out and said that the prevailing Latter-day Saint view of sexual morality was fundamentally un-Christian.

And I also knew that, as enlightened and liberal as I liked to pretend to be, I was more like Sam than like the bishop. Charly forced me to come to terms with my own silly and un-Christian views of morality. It was the first time in my life that somebody made me look in the mirror and acknowledge that a trait that I considered a virtue was actually a vice.

Forty years later, I still own the copy of Charly that first changed my understanding of the atonement. And I don’t laugh at Jack Weyland anymore because he taught me the Gospel.