I don’t know if it was a visitation or a revelation, but just as a bevy of bright-eyed male missionaries popped up like toadstools to sell the good news of their all-American God in the rousing opening number of “The Book of Mormon” (at the Eugene O’Neill) a blinding pillar of light came down around Row D, Seat 101, where I was sitting on March 19th at 2:06 P.M. Someone onstage was saying, “I would like to share with you a most amazing book,” when suddenly the voices went silent and the scent of Paco Rabanne filled the air. When I looked up, the Angel of the Rialto was before me. He was on the bloated side of cherubic, with receding hair, a five-o’clock shadow, and wire-rimmed glasses. He sported the usual white angel robes, but, instead of going barefoot, he wore royal-blue slippers with “S” and “R” in gold monogram. “Mammon, not Mormon,” the Angel said in his forceful, almost stern voice. “ ‘The Book of Mammon.’ The Prophet was dyslexic.” He added, “All will be Perfect. All will be Trivialized. The Small shall be made Large, and the Large Small. Don’t worry. Be happy. I am in control.” He pointed to the glinting letters on his slippers. “Spondulicks Rule,” he said, and was gone. The opening number was just finishing. A missionary onstage proffered the Book of Mormon in my direction. “Have a free book written by Jesus,” he said.

Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad as missionaries in Africa in “The Book of Mormon.” Illustration by QUICKHONEY

Before Joseph Smith, Jr., found the Mormon gold tablets buried near his home, in Palmyra, New York, in 1823—a discovery that eventually led to the distribution of more than a hundred million copies of the “golden Bible” worldwide—Smith and his father, who were impoverished, semiliterate yeomen zealots, had been using divining rods and peep stones to look for buried treasure, “money digging,” as it was called then. Now, almost two hundred years since the angel Moroni summoned Smith to his “work,” the authors Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and Robert Lopez, with the help of Casey Nicholaw, Parker’s co-director, have delivered what the Smiths were looking for: a gold mine. “The Book of Mormon,” which bills itself as “God’s Favorite Musical,” is sure to be the pagan public’s favorite, too, which is not to say that it’s great.

The actual Book of Mormon, whose hieroglyphs Smith “translated” while peering at peep stones in the bottom of his hat, lives up to Edmund Wilson’s estimation of it as “a farrago of balderdash.” It is also, however, a surrealistic godsend for comic writers like Parker and Stone, two philosophes from the University of Colorado, who majored in skepticism and minored in cheekiness, and together created the popular TV satire “South Park.” The musical, which is currently playing at a hundred-and-one-per-cent capacity, with millions of dollars in advance ticket sales, gives off a lot of Parker and Stone’s familiar comic heat, as well as their familiar lack of illumination. Their sendup of religious fundamentalism is painted in broad acrylic strokes: shocking enough to elicit laughs but not deep enough to generate understanding. Like thrilled kids shouting “Pee Po Belly Bum Drawers!,” the writers contrive to have a group of blighted Africans sing, “Fuck you, God, in the ass, mouth, and cunt!” The laughter is hip; the formula is Hollywood. AIDS, female circumcision, assassination, Jesus, and the despoiled African population as a collective Stepin Fetchit routine are the targets here; one African character, for instance, finds a typewriter at a local market and thinks she’s “texting”—big racist gag.

The show is smart enough to test the waters of outrage but not brazen enough to take a genuine plunge. The satire is more about the Mormons’ buttoned-down, bushy-tailed style than about the substance of the religion. The fact that Joseph Smith’s holy relics have never been found; the Mormon scriptures themselves, which situate the Garden of Eden in Jackson County, Missouri; the doctrine of polygamy, which helped drive the Mormons literally into the wilderness— all this would make for hilarious material, but you won’t find it dramatized in “The Book of Mormon.” It’s no accident that the writers have had success with puppet shows (Lopez with the stage production “Avenue Q,” Parker and Stone with the 2004 movie “Team America: World Police”); their characters in this show, who have no emotional reality, are puppets of piety. “The Book of Mormon” is really a retooled buddy movie, in which two Mormon missionaries—Elder Cunningham (the charming Josh Gad), a fat, shambolic, insecure schlub, and Elder Price (the expert Andrew Rannells), a lean, tight-assed, megalomaniacal dickhead—take a road trip to Uganda. It’s Hope and Crosby all over again, with God standing in for Dorothy Lamour.

The great joke of the musical is to have the hapless Elder Cunningham reinvent the Mormon story for beleaguered Ugandans, who have so far resisted conversion. At one Bible class, a disgruntled tribesman named Mutumbo (John Eric Parker) denounces the story as irrelevant to his life and makes for the exit, loudly announcing his plan to go and rape a baby to cure his AIDS. Elder Cunningham stops him with a fabulous piece of narrative improvisation, a combination of “Star Wars,” “The Hobbit,” and “Star Trek.” “People back then had even worse AIDS,” he says, winging it. “Behold, the Lord said to Mormon Joseph Smith, ‘You shall not have sex with that infant.’ Lo, Joseph Smith said, ‘Why not, Lord?’ And thusly the Lord said, ‘If you lay with an infant you shall burn in the fiery pits of Mordor. A baby cannot cure your illness, Joseph Smith. I shall give unto you a frog,’ and thus Joseph Smith laid with the frog and his AIDS was no more.” When the newly minted African Mormons act out the drama of Joseph Smith for some Mormon leaders who come to award Elder Cunningham a medal for his successful field work, the musical is at its most hilarious:

MUTUMBO: My name is Joseph Smit’. I’m going to fuck this baby. CHORUS: No, no, Joseph. Don’t fuck the baby. MUTUMBO: Suddenly the clouds parted and Joseph Smit’ was visited by God. GOD: Joseph Smit’, do not fuck a baby. I’ll get rid of your AIDS if you fuck this frog.

The first principle of “The Book of Mormon” is that faith is nice but doubt gets you an education. When parodying what Thorstein Veblen called our “fearsome and feverish credulity,” the writers are equal-opportunity employers. Elder Price has the Book of Mormon rammed up his keister by an African rebel called General Butt-Fucking Naked; the devout doofus, prohibited by his faith from imbibing caffeine, has a spooky Mormon “hell-dream,” in which he is pursued by gigantic cups of Starbucks coffee. “I believe that in 1978 God changed his mind about black people,” he sings in “I Believe,” an anthem of Mormon articles of faith. (Blacks, according to Mormon tradition, were the descendants of Cain, cursed by God for his sins. “Cain slew his brother,” Brigham Young, the second president of the Church, wrote. “And the Lord put a mark upon him, which is the flat nose and black skin.” Black men were not allowed to join the priesthood until 1978.) “Turn It Off,” a terrific hymn to repression, addresses the Mormon ability to dissociate from both facts and feelings. “Don’t feel those feelings / Hold them in instead,” the swish Elder McKinley (Rory O’Malley) sings. “Turn it off / like a light switch / Just go click / It’s a cool little Mormon trick.” For a while, the missionaries tap-dance in the dark—a swell metaphor for the refusal to think.

“True irreverence is disrespect for another man’s god,” Mark Twain wrote. By that standard, the creators of “The Book of Mormon” ultimately lack the courage of their non-conviction. For all the show’s refreshing novelty, it cops out almost completely at the finale, giving the entire cast of the credulous a free moral pass. “Who cares what happens when we’re dead,” they sing in “Tomorrow Is a Latter Day.” “We shouldn’t think that far ahead. The only latter day that matters is tomorrow.” Oh, c’mon, guys! What happened to the poisoned water from all those pure wells? So the Angel of the Rialto was right. “The Book of Mormon” sets out to attack religious fundamentalism, only finally to embrace Broadway’s gospel of the bottom line. Nonetheless, inspired by the show’s spirit of inquiry, I have two questions for the authors: Why are there no Buddhist soul singers? And, more to the point, if Jesus is a Jew why does he have a Mexican name? ♦