Wednesday, August 8, 2018

The X-Files and Mormon Forgery, with a twist


The X-Files and Mormon Forgery, with a twist

From The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice by Philip Jenkins

"The story, "Hollywood AD," was written by [X-Files] series star David Duchovny himself, tells of the finding of a hidden gospel that reveals a sexual relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The owner of the gospel is one Micah Hoffman, who is blackmailing a Catholic cardinal in order to keep it from the public. The Cardinal, O'Fallon, is a key leader of the American church, who is reputedly in line for the papacy. As in Stigmata, the church is prepared to kill to achieve its goals, and O'Fallon murders Hoffman, who proves to have forged the text, rather than discovered it. The cardinal then kills himself. The heavy symbolism is groaningly clear: the cardinal is Judas, the forger is Christ. There is an interesting twist to this story, namely, that in a sense this story is perfectly true. It did happen but with certain key differences. What we have here is a version of the story of Mark
Hoffman, rather than Micah. Mark was a Utah-based documents dealer with a unique knack for finding (and forging) rare Mormon historical treasures. In the 1980s, he found a real gem, the "Salamander Letter," an early account of the revelations to Joseph Smith, which supposedly showed that Smith was far deeper into occult and magical practices than anyone had been able to prove hitherto. It was a forgery but good enough to allow Hoffman to blackmail the church hierarchy of the Latter Day Saints, who dreaded the exposure of such an embarrassing text. In real life, the church did not try to kill the forger, but Hoffman himself killed a number of people in an effort to throw police off his trail. The real Mark Hoffman - like the fictional Micah - tried to cover his tracks by a series of
bombings, which is what ultimately brought him to the attention of law enforcement. But now we face a fascinating question: Why did the fictional presentation – why, in short, did David Duchovny – choose to make this a Catholic horror story rather than a Mormon one? Well, Catholics are much better known and probably have more enemies prepared to believe stories like this. But there is another more basic factor at work here, namely, that the whole hidden gospels theme is just profoundly anti-Catholic at its core. It appeals to the millions of people who believe that the church
has been sitting on the secrets of true Christianity for two thousand years and that someday, truth will out. In other words, the idea of hidden gospels is very congenial to the Protestantism upon which American culture is built. However modern or post-modern the guise - however many Smashing Pumpkins songs appear on the soundtrack – Stigmata is dealing with a basic component of American Protestant mythology."


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