I had big plans for today. I was going to do a whole post on Super Bowl commercials, and why they suck. Then it turned out that everyone already agreed with me, and didn’t really care about the commercials because oh my god did you see that fucking catch!?

So instead, I’m going to focus on my latest pop-culture obsession, Big Love, HBO’s series about a lovable family of fictional Mormon polygamists. I finally got caught up with it last month, after watching the first few episodes in 2006 and vowing to come back to it later. Now that I have, I’m finding myself less interested in the stories (which are pretty good themselves) and more interested in the religious eccentricities throughout.

The Mormon belief in “testimony” crops up in several storylines. I have no idea how accurate the show is in its depiction of this belief, but what I’ve seen is curious, to say the least. The short version is, when a Mormon is faced with a tough issue, they pray about it, and sometimes receive a “testimony” from the Holy Spirit, telling them that their actions are right.

This concept figures heavily into the show’s premise. The protagonist, Bill Henrickson, was raised on the compound of a fundamentalist LDS sect that practiced polygamy, but was kicked out as a teenager (mostly so the old men could keep all the young wives for themselves). Over time, he rejected polygamy, met and married his wife Barb, and started a successful business, all the while maintaining a strained relationship with his family on the compound. Six years before the start of the series, Barb was diagnosed with uterine cancer and had a hysterectomy, derailing the couple’s plans to have more children.

Bill prayed on the matter, and received a testimony that he should return to his polygamous roots, take a second wife, and make more babies. I have no idea how he talked Barb into it — the show has left that up to our imaginations thus far — but she said yes, and he married (spiritually, but not legally) an ultra-conservative woman from the compound. A couple years later, Bill began courting a third wife, and married her after receiving another testimony.

During the run of the series, Bill has received testimonies about his business investments. His best friend and business partner (a fellow polygamist) received one about taking a fourth wife, but it turned out to be completely wrong, and the courtship ended on extremely bad terms. Bill’s 16-year-old son has received a testimony that he should “live the Principle [of polygamy]” when he gets older. Barb, still Bill’s legal wife, has confessed that she never received a testimony for the Principle, but is willing to live this life because she sincerely believes her husband’s testimony was real.

It’s not my place to say whether these characters, or real life Mormons (both mainstream and fundamentalist) are faking their testimonies, but the process leaves plenty of room for rationalization. You pray, clear your mind, and listen for divine guidance. To the untrained mind, the Holy Spirit will sound suspiciously like your own thoughts and intuitions, but trust us, it’s totally real, and not just coming from inside your head. The fact that Bill’s testimonies affirm his preexisting beliefs is, to him, proof of those beliefs’ rightness, as opposed to proof that he imagined the whole thing. When a testimony fails to come, it usually concerns a complex issue that a character hasn’t figured out yet, meaning they have no intuitive answer. Their solution: “Well, there’s no testimony, so I guess this problem isn’t that big a deal.”

It’s depressing enough to see fictional characters behaving this way — thanks to the wonder of testimony, Bill’s son has begun sinking into religious fervor and rank misogyny — but it’s even more upsetting to know that real people are making decisions using this system, and others like it. I’m not just talking Mormons here; for all I know, the show has completely misrepresented this idea, and real-life Mormons would find the concept laughable. I’m thinking more about the whole universe of “spiritual-but-not-religious” people, whose methods for communicating with their gods, spirits, and higher consciousnesses is strikingly similar to Big Love’s take on testimony.

I’ve had countless people tell me that unleashing one’s latent psychic abilities (or whatever) feels almost exactly like listening to one’s own intuition, except that you have to assume there’s some kind of divine truth behind it, and that’s why I don’t hang out with those people anymore. Because, dude. I don’t need to use half-remembered pagan deities as an excuse for talking to myself, and I sure as hell don’t want to use them as scapegoats for my own stupid choices. Most of all, I don’t want to rely on my own illogical, neurotic instincts to make major life decisions.

And that, I suspect, is what all those cranky “New Atheist” authors mean when they say that faith is not always an admirable quality.

P.S.
What the hell is wrong with me that I can’t just enjoy a TV show, without picking apart all the creepy implications therein?