The surprising sweetness of 'The Book of Mormon'

SURPRISING SWEETNESS: Of the South Park creators' new musical The Book of Mormon. Kristin Dombrek writes of the show's surprising levels of empathy towards religion in general:

The Book of Mormon teaches us what secularists don’t get about what makes religion so awesome: it’s like a musical you live in, and it can actually be more fun if it seems a little fake, if you have to work a little to believe. There tend to be so many gaps that the thrill of it is filling them in, making them fit. While to outsiders, religious people seem to believe despite the obvious manufacturedness of their religion, The Book of Mormon suggests that believers believe (at least in part) because of the pleasure of revoicing, adapting, and even inventing stories and then treating them as sacred.

As I walked out of the theater into the throngs on 49th Street, so brightly lit it felt like a set, I considered this surprising sweetness—surprising, to me, because of its unusual (for Parker and Stone) sentimentality, and surprising because it was being interpreted, in the popular press, as empathetic toward religion. But the show left me puzzling over the difference between empathy and condescension. Isn’t empathy to imagine, for a moment at least, that the other’s world, no matter how strange, is real and huge, not silly and cute? The Book of Mormon does stage a provocative empathy for believers, when it shows us the everyday, meaning-making work that they do, as they try to preserve their own faith surrounded by their churches’ overbearing authority and the often hostile cultural contexts in which they live.

Of course I haven't seen the show, but I've read and heard – mostly from theatrical friends – about it. Particularly given the reputation and body of work of its creators, the empathy is surprising – but not to be entirely unexpected; after all, they're very clever people.