Mormon Missionaries in Popular Culture
Mormon missionaries have been portrayed in various popular culture media. Missionaries are the main focus of LDS cinema films God's Army (1999), The Other Side of Heaven (2001), The Best Two Years (2003), The R.M. (2003), God's Army 2: States of Grace (2005), Return with Honor (2007), and The Errand of Angels (2008). The musical Saturday's Warrior (1973) was also made into a film in 1989. There is also a DVD series, "Liken the Scriptures" that occasionally show missionaries.
Missionaries were featured in the PBS documentary Get the Fire (2003), as well as in the Tony Award-winning satirical Broadway musical The Book of Mormon. Hollywood portrayed missionaries in Yes Man (2008) starring Jim Carrey, and British film Millions also mentioned missionaries. Films portraying missionaries gone astray include Trapped by the Mormons (1922), Orgazmo (1997) and Latter Days (2003).
In 2008, former missionary Chad Hardy was subjected to church discipline after releasing a pin-up calendar titled "Men on a Mission," which consisted of pictures of scantily clad returned missionaries.
Read more about this topic: Missionary (LDS Church)
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, mormon, missionaries, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“I never understood exactly why people get engaged—The only time I ever did the most disastrous things happened—but I feel that there’s a great deal to be said for immediate matrimony always. If I once got started I’d probably have to become a mormon to cover my confusion. What I mean is that if he and she are crazy about each other it is sheer tempting God to stay apart, come what may. And if people arent crazy about each other being engaged wont help them.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“It was very agreeable, as well as independent, thus lying in the open air, and the fire kept our uncovered extremities warm enough. The Jesuit missionaries used to say, that, in their journeys with the Indians in Canada, they lay on a bed which had never been shaken up since creation, unless by earthquakes.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is said the city was spared a golden-oak period because its residents, lacking money to buy the popular atrocities of the nineties, necessarily clung to their rosewood and mahogany.”
—Administration in the State of Sout, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The time will come when the evil forms we have known can no more be organized. Man’s culture can spare nothing, wants all material. He is to convert all impediments into instruments, all enemies into power.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)