The Blog of Marek Cottingham
Despite the seeming absurdity of the conversion of General Butt Fucking Naked in The Book of Mormon, the real world context upon which this was based reveals the surprising capacity for even the worst people to change for the better. It also ties into a wider conversation on the archetype of the “psychopath” used in popular discourse, despite an utter lack of grounding in reality.
The play The Book of Mormon presents what is at first look, a ridiculous scenario of conflict resolution, which plays strongly into an unoriginal and historically pervasive white savior archetype. However, examining the real world context on which the play is based reveals a surprising an optimistic view, in which even the most immoral individuals have the potential to change for the better. It also serves as an interesting challenge to some of my previous core beliefs about extreme violence and the people who champion it.
At the start, the situation in the Ugandan village where the play in set is fraught with suffering and conflict. The villagers live difficult lives, contending with famine, dysentery and a widespread AIDS epidemic. Dangerous religious ideas do great harm to the villagers. Firstly, some believe that having sex with a virgin will cure their AIDS, leading them to commit rape of young children or babies. Secondly, a tyrannical warlord, General Butt Fucking Naked, rules over them, enforcing the practice of female genital mutilation under pain of death. Coming from a comedy play, it’s a stark remainder of the terrible living conditions people in parts of the world still experience and the heinous human rights abuses performed as religious adherence.
When faced with the murder of a villager for confronting the general, our two main protagonists, the Mormon missionaries Price and Arnold, react very differently. Price admired by his peers as an intelligent rising star concludes that the Mormons have no place here, being unable to help these people. He decides to return to the US and go to Orlando, finally fulfilling his dream. Arnold on the other hand, decides determinedly to become a martyr, declaring that he’s going to, “man up,” like Jesus Christ did when he was crucified.
Arnold proceeds to argue aggressively to try to stop the injustices he sees. The only problem: he does so by making up biblical stories. He claims that having sex with a frog will cure aids and that Jesus Christ turned men into frogs as punishment for cutting off a woman’s clitorus. In the song “Making Things Up Again,” his consciousness, personified as his parental figures, warns him that “when you fib, there’s a price”.
It almost comes to pass that Arnold pays this price. Towards the end of the play, the missionaries are visited by the Mormon mission president, who upon seeing the twisted religion the villagers now believe, decrees that the mission will be shut down and they will be sent home. His sweetheart, the villager Nabulungi, leaves him, feeling betrayed as she believed the Mormon promise of reaching salvation in Salt Lake City to be a literal promise that she would get to go to the US. She returns to the villagers and lies to the villagers that Arnold Cunningham was eaten by a lion, not wishing to tell the truth. Finally, the villagers are confronted by the general, who hearing of the villager’s new religion has come to confront them and punish their defiance.
It is here that Arnold prevails through tremendous dumb luck. He returns during the confrontation, to the surprise of everyone, including the general, as they had all just been told he was dead. He then proceeds to scare the general by threatening to turn him into a lesbian. His sweetheart, to whom another villager had explained that the promised land was simply a metaphor and she was silly for taking it literally, returns to his side. They then all live on happily, with even General Butt Fucking Naked converting to Arnold’s brand of Mormonism.
Taking a step back, it is unclear that Arnold is a hero. He came ridiculously close to getting the villagers killed by encouraging them to openly defy a murder bent warlord. Sure, he knew he was putting himself at risk, drawing parallels from his situation to when “they sentenced [Jesus] to die,” in the song “Man Up”. But does that give him the right to preach his religion, putting the villagers at risk?
At its core, I based this criticism of the play on one key idea. I thought that the conversion of General Butt Fucking Naked, while funny and endearing, was utterly unrealistic. If that was the answer to warlords, we wouldn’t still face this problem in some regions of the world today. Specifically, I viewed General Butt Fucking Naked as a psychopath, an immoral murder, rapist and cannibal beyond the reach of reason. Although I didn’t articulate it this way at the time, I viewed the character as a man with a broken brain, incapable of change.
To my surprise then, when I discovered that the character is based of a real person. General Butt Naked is the ‘war name’ of Joshua Blahyi, a Liberian warlord. At the age of 25 gave up his practises of murder, rape and cannibalism, in order to become a Catholic preacher.
Long before watching the play, I had a discussion with a friend about the concept of ‘psychopathy’. Psychopath, is not a medically recognised description of mental illness according the mental health authorities, such as the modern DSM diagnostic criteria. It doesn’t describe real human beings. It’s a cultural idea, a stereotype of people who embody all the worst traits. In short, it’s an assertion that some people are just evil.
The actions of Blahyi are driven by psychological trauma. As a child of only 11 years, he was forced to perform a human sacrifice of a young girl. He was abused and manipulated into becoming the man he was. But trauma and mental illness do not guarantee perpetual violence. After 14 years of war, where he lead child soldiers and feed them cocaine, where he was responsible for the deaths of 1000s of people and would regularly kidnap and cannibalise children as human sacrifices, he changed. He describes this change as a religious epiphany, where he was visited by a Christ like figure which spoke to him.
Now he lives as a reformed man. He has testified to the Truth and Reconciliation Commision of Liberia and expressed willingness to be tried for war crimes. He now works as a preacher, openly opposing the practises of human sacrifice he once performed and fears still occur in Liberia. He even has an understanding of the economic factors that drive violence, running an NGO which trains former soldiers, many of whom were children, in agriculture and construction.
Blahyi is still the subject of assassination attempts. It is understandable that many who have lost their family to him desire what they see as justice. But is this justice just another name for revenge? Killing Blahyi is not going to save someone’s life, rather, it is more likely to destabilise his efforts at rehabilitating former soldiers and risk an outbreak of further violence.
This doesn’t fully invalidate the criticisms of Arnold’s character in The Book of Mormon I’ve made. But it does lead us to a fundamental problem. No person is just evil. And if evil doesn’t exist as an external force, how can we fight it? As discussed, extracting our ‘justice’ upon those who have done great wrong will often serve only to risk perpetuating the violence. Perhaps we can look to The Book of Mormon for an answer: best to try, even being unsure we will succeed, to find a way to intervene and challenge the harm we see being done right in front of us, as Arnold did when he saw a child at risk of harm in the moment. Or we can follow the example of Price, pessimistically determining the situation is too complex to try anything and run back to our theme parks in Orlando, turning a blind eye to the problem.
PS: While I think that bringing up the determination of Price to drive positive change makes for a dramatic conclusion, I don’t think that creating more religions founded on lies is a good model. Afterall, making up stories about divine retribution is what got us into this mess and doing more of the same is a hazardous approach to get out of it. While Price’s story about a frog curing AIDS may prevent a rape, it will still lead people to believe they don’t need medical treatment. This video is a good articulation of the argument against using the promise of divine punishment to drive morality: respecting beliefs | why we should do no such thing