Abstract
Treating Lehi’s dream as a metaphoric media experience, Lehi (and later Nephi) were visual audience to the dream about the iron rod in their revelatory state. The dream’s iron rod and the great and spacious building make differing appeals to would-be travelers, situating that dream as a powerful foreshadowing of today’s polarizing structure of competing media purposes. Similarly, the Church’s aesthetic digital productions defy popular culture that is without moral consideration. This is demonstrated through comparing one of the Church’s digital films, represented by the iron rod, with popular culture, represented by the spacious building. Analysis of the Church’s short film The Hope of God’s Light focuses on the iron rod as resistance to popular culture with its employment of visual metaphors, the power of epiphany. Implications include the stark bifurcation of screen options before us in this day, the work of faith versus the indolence of partying, Lehi’s dream as a preface to the rest of the Book of Mormon narrative, and adoption of personal ethics through the iron rod lifestyle.
Introduction
Roger Scruton described the contemporary culture wars as a media setting battleground, a “contest over territory” [1] as art maintains tradition and popular culture pushes aggressive ideologies. In a Latter-day Saint scriptural application, popular culture serves as a proverbial great and spacious building (1 Nephi 8), similar to Theodor Adorno’s description of the “culture industry.” [2] Adorno worked to expose the dangers of the mass distribution of products and media content that enslaves audiences with a need for “belonging to the in-group” that comes through the desperate assumption that being part of social hierarchies are “better, higher and purer than those who are excluded.” [3] Those who are “excluded” are those who dismiss the industry’s appeals and stand with traditional standards of art and moral philosophy. This appeal, according to Adorno, is a façade and encourages a dangerous engagement with media that is enslaving rather than liberating.
If we liken the contrast between the construction of the iron rod versus the great and spacious building in Latter-day Saint scripture to the current media industry’s expanding production themes of sex and profanity, [4] we can observe that God’s fallen enemy draws us closer through a focus on beauty, a beauty the enemy warps through emphasis on heightened and cemented ornamentation, pleasure, and the display of fashion (Moses 7:26). The enemy’s calculated blueprints would spread his dominion across landscapes—hence the adjective “great” to capture the size of the building—by establishing impressive structural and cultural heights.
The angry and aggressive nature of mockers in the great and spacious building can likewise found in shopping centers, on social media, and—in the medium I highlight in this study—especially on large and small media screens. The great and spacious building is our own status quo and has been for a while. Recruits into the building are the culture industry conformists of our day, who promote a victim mindset among their viewers while simultaneously offering comfort and amusement for those victims in media narratives. These narratives create fear of social alienation, while at the same time offering a glut of pleasure choices which the culture industry tries to convince victims to believe is their real identity.
Also reflective of Lehi’s dream is the growing cynicism toward the Church and the Church’s effort to meet that criticism in mediated arenas. [5] Aysia Tan describes this as Church members’ now being situated, as audience of a mediated world, where there is “No Neutral Ground,” [6] which mirrors Lehi’s vision which contrasts those who ate the fruit of the tree with those laughing in the building. Ralph Hancock describes this as the Church’s growing “cultural exile,” that is riddled with the “challenge of engaging the moral, political, and philosophical ideas at work in the larger society,” and which is “more urgent… than ever.” [7] Even further, Lindsey Hulet explains the Church’s complex public image due to media depictions that drive “panic, anger, and fear” regarding Church doctrines and practices. [8] Thus, within Church doctrine and scripture, such as the recounting of Lehi’s dream, we can study the role and lessons of the screen experience, even though screens were not available to Lehi in his time. We are now a screen mediated species—exemplified by our constant connection to phone and television screens. [9] Ultimately, the content on our screens becomes an ideological battleground, one side advocating faith and personal sacrifice, and the other promoting indulgent gratification. This means that the contemporary Latter-day Saint media experience is tasked with navigating its viewers away from popular culture offerings that prioritize comfort and dismiss moral and ethical purpose. [10] For example, Lehi was disturbed when he saw the great and spacious building, much like Latter-day Saints often are with current popular culture offerings. In this study I utilize Lehi’s dream as a metaphoric lens that will aid us in understanding and resisting the pleasure-focused culture industry in contemporary media. In the process, I will offer an example of the differences between quality Latter-day Saint media productions as opposed to the gluttonous nature of profit-only driven media in the digital world.
In Lehi’s dream, the behavior differences of participants between the two opposing structures in the dream—one group alert and sober (those who hold onto the iron rod), and the other drunken with indulgent, intentional hedonism (those in the great and spacious building) can be likened to our media situation today. As viewers choose one path or the other—the iron rod or the spacious building—the result is a growing polarization between moral artistry that honors the depth of faith, on the one hand, and appeals for rapid pleasure that degrade the human family. This competition is played out through the competing purposes in media production. This really is a war: being pleasure-centric, a lifestyle within great and spacious building results, in our day, in the comparable popular culture pornification of media, [11] representing a real anger levied against Christ and his followers. Underneath the mockery, we sense the threat of violence. The sturdiness of the iron rod is therefore a source of security for those who reject the world.
In this essay, I offer a case analysis of the Church’s attempt to push back the narrative of the great and spacious building in our day and age. That case analysis focuses on the Church’s production, The Hope of God’s Light, [12] a short film where the protagonist—similar to the themes in Lehi’s dream—walks out of darkness into light, finds God, is redeemed, and abandons the lifestyle of the metaphoric great and spacious building. Analysis of the film as a cinematic metaphor of Lehi’s dream allows us to understand the revelatory capacity of the visual screen experience in both dreams and cinema.
Borrowing from Adorno’s description of art being integrally linked to popular culture, we can expand our understanding of the trajectory of contemporary culture, for it is hauntingly foreshadowed in the Book of Mormon more broadly, specifically in the record of the centuries of trouble that the Nephites faced following Lehi’s dream. Members of the Church “are increasingly realizing that those (perhaps) previously seemingly irrelevant war and legal discussions in Mormon’s narration represent a prescient gut check as rapid cultural shifts take place.” [13] These shifts are not friendly to religion.
Theodor Adorno’s Culture Industry and the Dismissal of Commodity Living
As a philosopher of aesthetics, Adorno described authentic art as raw and representative of the details of life, [14] such as an arduous journey where hands must cling to a rod for safety. This is similar to Adorno’s demand that art be relatable by displaying the detailed pain of what humans experience, thereby setting a standard for productions that seek such authenticity. Adorno was a defender of traditional artistic crafts and was worried about their demise amid the growth of mass culture, specifically with the unrefined titillations of television and popular music, which were in his time replacing theater and symphonies. This defensive stance derived from his criticism of mass culture’s purpose being profit driven rather than focused on finding meaning in life. His seriousness in this criticism not only characterized his academic career, but also his personal life. Along with his focus on aesthetics, he regarded resistance to commodity-based living as an ethical imperative to avoid defining ourselves in a way that would result in art and morality being “lost in the process” of productions focused on commodity accumulation. [15]
As a story of personal redemption in our day, The Hope of God’s Light demonstrates the peace described in Lehi’s dream through an iron rod path that is accomplished through painstaking effort to correct a lifestyle of addiction. The same visceral offering of emotional and intellectual impact is observable in how Lehi describes the state that his dream left him in, declaring “I fear exceedingly” (1 Nephi 8:4), which coincides with the similar visceral experience of conversion in The Hope of God’s Light with its wording, “as part of our condition as mortals,” we “sometimes feel as though we are surrounded by darkness.” Resistance to popular culture materialism—an Adorno-ian focus that intertwines with Lehi’s concern about the great and spacious building he dreamt about—includes discernment concerning media productions that push audiences into political and social identities which can undermine their identity as children of God. [16]
The Hope of God’s Light retells the narrative of Todd Sylvester’s real-life repentance and conversion. The short film visually and symbolically incorporates both aesthetic principles and a dismissal of culture industry-centric media. In doing so, it demonstrates the powerful didactic capacity of theologically-motivated media. Latter-day Saint media efforts, driven by Latter-day Saint doctrine and centered on representing the raw and painful journey of life, operate as a metaphorical iron rod version of media, and present a stark contrast to contemporary media that is profit-driven—that is, to a great and spacious building form of media creation.
Dreams as Media, and Both as Emotional Effect
By connecting Lehi’s dream to the contemporary mediated screen experience, I utilize the concept of visions, which often come in the form of dreams, and are memorable not only as visual experiences but also as sites where we can observe warnings and epiphanies. I argue that visual experiences with media can be just as life-affecting as visions. Sleep researchers who study dreaming states describe this as the “emotional processes” [17] that are born within “the inner human world” and affect our conscious lives afterword.
To more clearly delineate how this study integrates dreams and media as similar in impact and setup, we can note how both can have dramatic emotional impacts on us. Research demonstrates how dreams and media storytelling are both life changing. [18] [19] In this way, our treatment of media can be examined as if they are also dreams and visions—that is, for example, a film can play out as a visual, sonic, and emotional experience in the same way as a dream or vision. Cultural geologist Chris Lukinbeal argues that “Cinematic landscapes are sites where meaning is contested and negotiated, a veritable arena of cultural politics.” [20] Dreams and visions serve similar psychological functions, and also spiritual functions, and therefore through them the mind, the visual screen, and cultural meaning may be explored as warning, invitation, and insight about society. In both mediums, we are the audience to what is put before our eyes, not knowing what led to their beginning, nor what happens after they end. Rather, we are left in emotional—or spiritual—states of having been impacted by the visual and emotional screen experiences of both cinema and dreams/visions. For this reason, Lehi’s dream, in its simplicity and bold condemnation of lifestyles that criticize faith, serves as an apt metaphor for a theoretical examination of contemporary media.
The Hope of God’s Light as Iron Rod Resistance
Relating Lehi’s dream to the current culture industry tells us much about our current circumstances, particularly as we are continually plugged into a culture industry of products, services, and pleasure that is not easy to discern without intellectual and spiritual labor. The antithesis to the culture industry, which is manifest in the great and spacious building in the dream, is the iron rod. So, as Lehi’s dream moves from the power of conversion to warning of the dangers of sin, Sylvester’s story moves along a different path to the same destination—from leaving the great and spacious building toward illumination and faithful living. The convert Sylvester is driven to illumination, bringing audience along his journey away from the prideful building, while the prophet Lehi is given a contrasting screen experience of starting in a faithful place and sticking there. Both men, as narrators of their visual experiences, express for the audience what is gained and lost by choices amid landscapes where both temptation and protection have real estate.
With regard to the aesthetic elements of these two narratives, symbolic structures are key. Viewed from the lens of the new culture industry, the great and spacious building offers a strong centralized identity that can be quickly adopted and marketed. Adorno, however, would describe such an identity structure as a distraction from authentic liberation. That more authentic version is visible in The Hope of God’s Light, where a deeply personal, difficult journey toward liberation is the centerpiece.
The Hope of God’s Light is not an isolated Church production. It is grounded in religious and moral resistance to the culture industry, and other Church-produced short films also identify individual pain as the precursor to a religious realization, [21] [22] [23] which is narratively presented as life changing. These other Church digital shorts also engage visual display with voiceover description accompanied by somber soundtracks to offer a deep identification with the pain felt. These elements center the films’ narratologies on intellectual and spiritual fights that present the lived experience as an extraordinary awakening. We begin to care about the painful journey being undertaken, which short-circuits any wallowing in either indulgence or intoxication.
Visual Metaphor as Aesthetic
Capturing the horrified worry Lehi felt at the beginning of his dream when left in a state upon awakening in which he “exceedingly feared” (1 Nephi 8:36)—The Hope of God’s Light displays how the initial rush of an intoxicated lifestyle leaves one discordantly feeling desperate for help and guidance. Sylvester’s story utilizes visual metaphors and voiceover that displays an intoxicated lifestyle driving broken homes, depression, suicide, and cynicism. The production quality of the film is significant, offering ongoing metaphors that express Sylvester’s progressive liberation from the building’s empty intoxication. The journey starts with Sylvester walking through a desert without direction or path as he seems confused about where to go, paralleling Lehi’s own long walk at the beginning of the dream and the confusing mist of darkness he confronted. Sylvester’s opening orientation of walking alone serves the same function. In both film and dreams, the viewer is given “omnipresence in filmic space while becoming removed from that space.” This is also called the ‘god-trick’ in cinematography, where viewer is invisible participant but given depth in time and space that plot characters are not. [24] While Lehi begins as a participant in the dream, his sight of the landscape seems to separate him in a prophetic way in which he is shown the landscape in his increasingly daunting detail.
That is, while Lehi initially walks through a mist and then along the rod to the tree of life, the rest of his screen experience seems visual rather than journeyed—as if he is watching from the tree and given an aerial overview of human temptation and behaviors. Similarly, in The Hope of God’s Light, Sylvester’s voiceover guides the audience along his journey by jumping to various stages of his life, also utilizing this ‘god-trick’ view of his life’s experience as Sylvester is shown to be moving across time and space to revisit different moments of his life—a sort of punctuated life reflection as was given to Ebenezer Scrooge. [25]
Mirroring the mist of darkness, late in the digital short Sylvester opens a metaphoric Pandora’s box, from which emanates red clouds that encompass him as darkened figures race around him, keeping him in the darkness despite his subsequent observation of the sun through the clouds that dissipate the mist. These scenes follow his observable loneliness, isolated in an empty home that provides no shelter when overwhelmed with the elements. Snow covers the inside of the house while his weary face, looking on, seems desperate to escape the lack of comfort. In a similar scene in Lehi’s dream, the great and spacious building leads, while superficially providing sociality through a drunken party, also engenders extremes of loneliness and purposelessness. The Hope of God’s Light represents this in the framed picture of Sylvester’s family, which is visualized as damaged and dropped into mud, with the basketball he was wielding deflated, and he describes his intense battle with the temptation of suicide.
Sylvester’s discouragement, displayed with metaphors that communicate darkness and loneliness, is then replaced with visuals that represent the awakening power of conversion. After emerging from the red mist, in the dark of night Sylvester holds and turns on a lightbulb, intentionally and with his own sense of control. The lightbulb then illuminates the periphery of his place in the desert. The final images of the film include Sylvester, initially lost in narrow canyons, emerging out and stepping into the sunlight. His first sentence after being liberated describes how he “wandered,” which is met at the end with his description of being firm in his confidence in God—wording and imagery that parallels Lehi’s dream. As a meaningful illustration, the cinematography focuses on the images of a moving, lively campfire mirrored in the eyeball of a friend who felt inspired to invite him to church.
Sequencing Epiphanies as Continual Realizations
Key to the lessons of the film in relation to Lehi’s dream is the function of epiphanies, which can come in two forms: conversions encouraging forward movement, and warnings of trouble ahead. As both cinema and dreams are commentary on social and cultural conditions, they operate as “production[s] with a set of socially and artistically determined rules.” [26] In Lehi’s vision, there comes an instruction to bravely acknowledge that part of the journey holding onto the iron rod is the brutal reality of the difficulty of the task, and of how painful the future can be. Lehi’s epiphanies move toward continual trouble, elevating the warning as the enemy’s structures become visible: first the mists of darkness, followed by the filthy river, and finally the monolithic spacious building.
Sylvester’s epiphanies, on the other hand, move toward continual peace and closure. In a supplemental KSL story about his experiences after losing his basketball scholarship and while contemplating suicide, [27] Sylvester was prompted to selflessly give to others when he saw a girl at a lemonade stand. “I had this impression that said, ‘Give her all the money in your car.’” This broadening experience aligns with similar experiences in the film, such as being informed about fasting, then feeling alive at a ward party, and finally feeling the climactic power of God that was “ten times stronger than any drug I had ever taken.”
The Work of Faith Versus Indolence of Partying
Both Lehi and Sylvester describe the laborious nature of their efforts to arrive at a safer destination. Spiritual awakening leads to work, particularly service. Lehi describes the needed resolve and focus it takes to arrive at truth, with wording such as “clinging” with determination “even until” a weary wayfarer painstakingly arrives at the destination. At that destination, the white fruit is consumed, but instead of this consuming happening in an elevated building accompanied by dizzying laughter, the fruit is consumed across a river and under a tree, bringing the “sweet” reward of individualized work. Sylvester fasted. Lehi endured an arduous hike along the rod to be able to reach the tree and eat its fruit: hunger works as supplement to the journey through the various landscapes. The idea of appropriate consumption empowers the individual over the appetites of popular cultural indulgence. Showing Sylvester praying amidst his fast along with Lehi’s description of being rewarded with the sweetness of the fruit above anything else he had tasted (1 Nephi 8:11), the verbiage and imagery of both texts allow “emphasis on the visual,” [28] where “this metaphor emphasizes landscape and cinema as a cultural production, a space that is mediated by power relations.” Moving away from indulgence is understood as an individualized journey toward God.
In Lehi’s vision, the mist of darkness demonstrates the significant warnings against the confusion that comes with agency. It is this confusion which allows the great and spacious building to obtain real estate and even come to preside as the dominant force among the people as the dream progresses. Emergence out of that addictive, intoxicated culture and its industry is a brutal but rewarding process, described by Sylvester as a constant search and demonstrated in the film by his long walk through a desert, finally arriving at the sunlight.
Because it is a vision of warning, the landscape observed in Lehi’s dream becomes increasingly troubling, creating an emotional setting where he would later gather his family to describe the dream and exhort them to remain faithful (1 Nephi 8:2). Lehi’s joy tasting the fruit of the tree is disrupted by his view of the landscape being claimed by evil—the river and the lifted building. Visual manifestations of space seem to overwhelm his previous narrow view that unfolds as evil structures seem to far outnumber covenant path structures.
The great and spacious building has territory not only in the periphery of Lehi’s sight but also in its height. As the dream nears its conclusion, the landscape visuals of Lehi’s dream take on an upward instead of solely a lateral dimension. Not only was the building elevated, but it was “high above the earth” (1 Nephi 8:26). This allows for a disturbance, a warning, as “landscape as spectacle can retain a sense of place and simultaneously disrupt narrative space.” [29] That disruption takes place as Lehi not only looks from side to side in his seeming disgust, but it is implied that he is caught staring up in a sense of shock—or in other words, the cinematic technique of a character being enraptured by the daunting scene in front of him. [30]
Both texts end with the main characters staring at the vastness of the landscapes before them. While in his warning vision, Lehi looks up in horror, Sylvester’s story also ends with him looking out to the landscape before him, but there is a difference. Sylvester in not looking up but straight into the horizon at sunrise—the companion invitation in digital cinema that combats the popular invitation of the spacious building. One screened experience serves as warning (Lehi) and the other as invitation (Sylvester). Both observations of expansive landscapes take place after long journeys of men who are simultaneously voyagers and narrators of their observations. Both craft an assertive response to the culture industry-spacious building lifestyle. The visual theological experience can come as dreams, or cinematically.
The Resuscitation of Faith Via an Epiphany of Ethics
As a symbol, the iron rod suggests the need to dismiss a pleasure-centric lifestyle, with its intoxication and escapism, and instead undertake laborious movement. As we have seen, Adorno describes this as authentic art, manifest in the depiction of genuine utility transferred via both perspective and materials, in Lehi’s vision the resolve to choose the right and the practicality of holding onto a rod. The rod is a threat to the building, and in response, the mocking unison of building dwellers seek “the liquidation of its opposition.” Their mocking causes some to view the rod as confining or as impractical by those who choose to leave its promises. [31] Sylvester, awakening from the spacious building’s intoxication, describes the simultaneously joyous but difficult move back toward the proverbial iron rod: “For the next year and a half I fought like a lion to overcome all my problems.” Similarly, Lehi describes his travel for “many hours” to eventually arrive at the rod (1 Nephi 8:8), and partake of the tree’s fruit. Obtaining the reward takes time, and it takes pain. In contrast, the culture industry always seeks to dismiss that spiritual and intellectual—if not also physical—experience toward autonomy away from gluttony and simplistic, mass distributed pleasure.
Becoming fully alert after exiting the great and spacious building, and free from the need for drugs, which Sylvester describes to KSL as the power of the 12-step program, [32] he is shown in the video as no longer alone—not living for himself—but frequently talking to people at a ward gathering. While the film starts with his judgment of others through mockery and a sense of self-accomplishment, Sylvester eventually turns toward a sense of service, expressed by his experience of being prompted to give his money to the girl at the lemonade stand.
As Lehi’s dream is experienced as sequential images that together serve as an increasing imperative to warn his family members, we come to understand that for two of his sons, the warning falls on deaf ears. Later, Lehi exhorts his sons with all the energy of his soul to heed his warning, and dismiss the appeal of the building, even though Laman and Lemuel were mourning the loss of their wealth and comfortable lifestyle in Jerusalem (1 Nephi 2:11). Coinciding with Sylvester’s produced and digitally sharable narrative, the condemnation of pleasure as life-centric priority reflects the Sermon on the Mount’s charge to give away commodities and avoid some degenerate social associations (Matthew 6:1-3). Resisting the urge to “belong to the in-group” is also something Adorno urges in resistance to the culture industry.
Sylvester’s attempted fast, along with the appeal to give away his money, caused the removal of his suicidal tendencies. The significance of the ward party, where he amusingly heard someone “pray over the hotdogs,” instilled a new humanity, a new observation of human life as interactive and relational rather than guided by personal indulgence. While the iron rod is a path of difficult service, Sylvester emerged out of the prayer over hotdogs with a feeling of being home: “Two years! Seven hundred days after I had pleaded to God in my closet!” His journey drove him toward human interaction: “Something was telling me that I needed to be with these people.”
A final observation is also worth noting: those in the spacious building never get their hands dirty. Adorno values labor and purpose and describes them as the barometer of being outside the culture industry: “Anyone who does not take immediate action and who is not willing to get his hands dirty is the subject of suspicion.” [33] Dirty hands versus hands holding drinks. Some hands are increasingly enfeebled by holding intoxicating drinks amid the industrialization of new ideological initiatives. Other hands are so busy holding to the rod that they are now beautifully calloused.
That calloused work of holding to the iron rod is what Scruton described as “society depend[ing] on the saints and heroes who can once again place [art] before us and show us their worth.” [34] Aesthetics and theological life are intertwined, and we must resist attempts by an impulsive pleasure industry to have them be coopted and lose their savor. With productions such as The Hope of God’s Light, we come to see that there are aesthetic cultural texts that faithfully reflect the iron rod.
The Bifurcation of Screen Engagement and Lifestyles
A different scene in the scriptures describes those holding to the rod as compared to those who inhabit the great and spacious building. One huge contrast is the degree of humility each group exhibits. Exhibiting humility at the Last Supper, eleven of the disciples were reflective enough, and resistant enough to social pressure, to wonder if they were the one to abandon Christ (Luke 22: 21-23). Their sense of honor and a desire to self-check themselves differentiated them from the antagonists of the narrative: the chief priests who were prone to “bribery, theft, murder.” [35] Lehi similarly describes this succumbing to social pressure as becoming embarrassed after arriving at the tree of life, and falling away from it back into the mists of darkness. The mockery directed at those taking the iron rod path in the dream is a template for contemporary culture industry distractions.
Nephi’s adoption of his father’s seriousness led to his own observation of the dream, which extended the vision’s symbolism and testimony of the ministry of Christ (1 Nephi 11). Working more as a question-and-answer session about the symbolism of the dream, Nephi’s conversation with the Spirit and subsequent viewing of the same dream as his father Lehi is accompanied with specific directions. He is taught with the repeated charge to “Look!” Indeed, the demand that we “Look!” is explicitly stated seven times during his vision. While Lehi’s vision was his screen, and our observation is on handheld screens, Nephi’s “screen” experience was a vision put into his mind during consciousness. In contrast to Lehi, Nephi was consciously praying before his vision begins, and it is therefore perhaps more comparable to our device screen experience than Lehi’s dream. Nonetheless, the Spirit’s seven-times repeated charge to “Look!”, and with the exclamation point present in each instance, the seriousness of warning is all the more explicit, demonstrating the dangers of being distracted from the iron rod focus and lifestyle.
Popular culture, unfiltered and often immoral, mirrors what Nephi is told the great and spacious building specifically represents. Note that Nephi does not just describe the great and spacious building as having some people, but encompasses “the multitude of the earth” that “were in a large and spacious building” (1 Nephi 11:35). In the same verse Nephi describes how this congregated force in the building is not simply partying, but later become an army as those who “fight against the twelve apostles of the Lamb” (1 Nephi 11:34). Thus, like Adorno’s serious condemnation of popular culture as a distraction from aesthetics, Lehi and Nephi saw in their visionary screen experiences, long before our own technological screen experiences, the seductive power of the building’s ideology that is readily used as distraction and even weapon against the iron rod path.
Lehi’s Dream as Precursory to the Book of Mormon
Lehi’s dream is presented early in the Book of Mormon, working as a spiritual preface to what followed later in the Nephite civilization. Hundreds of pages of other lessons and warnings follow Lehi’s dream, and vindicate it. The subsequent chapters focus on the difficulty that the family had to endure—years of travel (1 Nephi 17:4), followed by an intimidating storm at sea (1 Nephi 18:14)—and an eventual rupture in the family that never healed. That rupture where some chose the rod and others the spacious building drove the victim narrative of various subpopulations in the rest of the book, such as the perceived injustices of the power hungry King-men, their assault, and the damaging implications of their self-serving nature (Alma 51:5; Alma 60:16). Further, Laman and Lemuel described Nephi as an oppressor and liar who toppled their rights to power (2 Nephi 5:2-3). Think about that–Nephi was framed as the oppressor. In response, Nephi described his older brothers as prone to violence (2 Nephi 5:4). The family eventually split into two camps (2 Nephi 5:5), and at times other identity groups such as the Zoramites and Mulekites played roles in the conflict. The contention never ceased and led to genocide after an unforgiving war of hatred (Mormon 5:5).
The ugly contention in the Book of Mormon started with Lehi’s foreshadowing dream that predicted Laman and Lemuel departing from the iron rod. The record does not describe Laman and Lemuel as partying in the building, but it is implied that they were making their way towards it. The locus of an entire civilization’s demise was foreshadowed in a vision that anticipated the severance between a group of brothers, which rebellion began in their very home, where it festered and never relented. The great and spacious building was, and is, overwhelmingly appealing, and still in homes today through the culture industry’s digital networking it causes analogous severances and sufferings.
Glenn Olsen describes concern about the shift away from religion as the dominant lifestyle choice, where media now “teach rebelliousness against tradition” for the sake of association and pleasure, [36] very much like the drunken nature of the great and spacious building described by Lehi. In contrast, The Hope of God’s Light describes the long, painful, rewarding process of finding peace within and with others through adopting a personal ethic which is in in opposition in both process and result to profit-driven constructions—whether of spacious buildings or of media productions. Before explaining his embrace of the iron rod that comes with a “painful,” work-vested journey, [37] Sylvester describes his “twenty-five years” of personal gluttony that left him, despite personal engagement, empty.
Although both the iron rod and the spacious building lead to the body consuming what one believes to be desirable, the fruit of the tree of life makes its consumers more alert to their surroundings. The indulgence found in the spacious building, by comparison, dulls the senses of its occupants. Emerging out of his previous life in the Babylonian building, Sylvester reflects on the rescue he found in the tree of life’s fruit, seeing it as deeply opposed to what is on offer in the building: “God promises to illuminate the way before us, no matter how long it takes.” Like the path accompanying the rod, the artistry of The Hope of God’s Light paints a world that captures the difficulty of the journey, including facing ridicule after being awakened.
Conclusion
Lehi’s dream comes with an ethical charge against dangerous commodity-based lifestyles expressed in the vision’s stark contrast of pleasure compared to a prescribed path with a secure railing to grip. What does the great and spacious building look like today? What is the increasingly common “finger of scorn” (1 Nephi 8:33)? Lehi’s dream transfers quite easily from 600 B.C. to today. On the path by the iron rod, the participant is active, moving, and purposeful beyond the engagement of satisfaction, rather than idly laughing at others. Adorno called such laughter the ‘abuse of free time.’ [38] We all receive velvet enveloped RSVP invitations to enter the great and spacious building and drink away our time in laughter at those who are not intoxicated. Hysterical levity in that building is covenant-less and movement-less, a misuse of time.
Age-old warnings, such as we find in Lehi’s dream, caution us against the all-consuming laughter coming from the continually expanding industry. Christ offered that stark lifestyle choice, “come, take up the cross, and follow me,” nearly two millennia before Adorno observed the dangers of servitude to popular culture. Both Christ’s teachings and Adorno’s critique of the culture industry eschew commodity living as life’s purpose. In Lehi’s dream, he sees some members of the human family who are distracted by their surroundings and “cast their eyes about as if they were ashamed” (1 Nephi 8:25). On screens today, the same distractions and shame are spiritually and intellectually proving the necessity of Lehi’s warning about pleasure culture. We must not be seduced by appeals for our conformity through laughter, mockery, and the intoxication of belonging to social circles.
Through this comparison of Lehi’s vision with The Hope of God’s Light, we see that it is possible for both dreamed and cinematic theological experiences to counteract the appeal of the great building in visually striking aesthetics. May we appreciate and encourage the Church’s effort to produce those visual experiences that in Adorno’s eyes are the only authentic art.
NOTES:
[1] Roger Scruton, Against the Tide: The Best of Roger Scruton’s Columns, Commentaries, and Criticism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2022): 6. [Back to manuscript].
[2] Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry (New York: Routledge, 1991). [Back to manuscript].
[3] Adorno, 145. [Back to manuscript].
[4] Vidangel, “New Data Shows Increased Offensive Content in Movies and TV Shows,” KSL (April 2, 2023), https://www.ksl.com/article/50613110/new-data-shows-increased-offensive-content-in-movies-and-tv-shows --- [Back to manuscript].
[5] Emily Abel and Chelsea Kern, “How and When Should You Defend Your Beliefs on Social Media?” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (2021, September), https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/liahona/2021/09/digital-only-young-adults/how-and-when-should-you-defend-your-beliefs-on-social-media?lang=eng --- [Back to manuscript].
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Full Citation for this Article: Yergensen, Brent (2024) "Dreamscapes, Cinemascapes, and the Iron Rod: Digital Theology as Response to the Culture Industry ," SquareTwo, Vol. 17 No. 1 (Spring 2024), http://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleYergensonDreamscapesIronRod.html, accessed <give access date>.
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