At his blog Tuned In, James Poniewozik writes about an episode of HBO’s Big Love that shows an endowment ceremony inside of a Mormon temple—a place that only Mormons in good standing are allowed to be—and the controversy surrounding it:
All this circles back to the eternal question: how obligated are outsiders to follow the traditions of a religion they don’t belong to?
Religious traditions about representation are often strict and absolute—that, in part, is the point of them. Like dietary laws or other religious-cultural traditions, they serve to keep the group cohesive by drawing bright lines between it and outsiders.
The question is—as with the controversy over cartoons of Mohammed, which broke Islamic rules against depicting the Prophet—why and when people outside the religion should be expected to stay within those bright lines.
Now, as a wholly secular person—and a Big Love fan—I may be too biased on this for my opinion to even matter. To me, the issue is execution. I think artists should be able to depict Mohammed; but to do it only to provoke people and prove you can, with no greater point, is still obnoxious. Likewise, if Big Love portrays the ceremony in such a way that it thoughtfully serves its characters’ stories—which, as a fan of the show, I’d expect it to do—then I’d say it’s justified. But I wouldn’t expect LDS church members to agree with me.
Read the full post here.
[via: the Scoop]