Idealistic Religious Ideas v. Unpredictable Reality

Religion is portrayed in this play as a multi-faceted in the way that it can serve many different purposes and effect people in many different ways. In the play Angels in America, even characters who aren’t devout followers of religion are shaped by it.

            Because he’s the easiest to speak about in the context of how religion has shaped the identity of Joe, I’ll start with him. Poor Joe. He’s spent most of his life denying his true identity, praying that his own God would break him down so he could start over, and be the person Mormonism tells him he should be. In reality, though, Joe is a homosexual, and no matter how adamantly he has spent his years repressing his feelings, his desires that are darkened only by his personal religious standards—ones which he chooses to be involved in—he always has and will feel an attraction to men. Joe’s religion constrains and shapes him into a self-destructive being without a real sense of self, who is ashamed of his sexuality and lacks self-esteem; it leaves him without room to grow. In a scene with Roy, after disclosing his sexuality, Roy yells, “…there are so many laws, find one you can break,” and I wonder if this prompted Joe’s pursuit of Louis. I looked into the Church of Mormon's opinion on homosexuals and found that, “…attraction itself is not a sin, but acting on it is.” I also stumbled upon an article by a homosexual Mormon that I found to be very heartwarming.

            Hannah, Joe’s mother, is also Mormon (surprise! Must run in the family!) and to me, I feel that she is bored. When Joe calls Hannah and reveals that she is a homosexual, she is cold, and shuts down, but then she turns around and moves to New York. After considering the way Hannah interacts with Prior, I came to the conclusion that she didn’t only come to New York because her son was going through a time of crisis, but also because she is bored. She is constrained by her religion to believe in certain things, behave a certain way, and react to rights and wrongs committed by others. Her religion oversimplifies her life; I think Hannah was very, very bored. By moving to New York, she enters a complex and exciting community of humans, and while she assumes supportive motherly roles, she also surprises the reader by befriending Prior, accepting him even though he’s a homosexual. She is still a devout Mormon at the end of the play, terrified of the wrath of God—or angels, think the confrontational hospital scene—and it shapes her identity and beliefs, but I don’t think it exactly controls her desire to be a part of a non-Mormon community, and her son’s life.

            Louis, like Joe, is filled with guilt because stemming from his religion. For different reasons, they are both very self-destructive and don’t think they deserve to be loved. Most religions—including both of the ones these men identify with—believe in loyalty, and don’t believe in homosexuality. While Louis isn’t a devout practice of Judaism, he still cares what it a rabbi has to say about abandoning a lover in a time of need, and seems distraught from the response he receives: while Christians believe in forgiveness, Jews believe in guilt. Children are often scared into obedience and good habits by stories of the wrath of God—what a great phrase—and whether people acknowledge it or not, a religious background has a great impact on how we feel about ourselves and certain behaviors later in life. Louis’ identity isn’t too impacted by his religion; he doesn’t have any ritual, and he barely knows the prayer for the dead, but it does play a role in shaping the way he feels about himself, and his abandoning of and cheating on Prior. He does often use his religion to start debates with Belize, though, something he seems to be fond of.

            Harper’s religion taught her to be dependent and to desire nothing but a home, husband, and children. However, there are no children there for her to take care of (her husband is a homosexual, so this could be why). In some light research, I learned that women’s role in the Mormon society are ones of dependency, child rearing, and home-keeping. Between the damage of being involved with Joe—who’s undergoing a mid-life identity crisis—and Harper’s life not turning out to be how she was raised to believe it would be, Harper’s already unstable mental well-being is on a downward slide throughout most of the play. With all of the changes coming in Joe’s behavior, she has to learn to be on her own, which is something her religion didn’t prepare her for. The false idea that her religion has given her reinforces her feelings of alienation and purposelessness.

            Hannah and Harper have a very important conversation in the relation of God and humankind. Harper asks Hannah, the motherly Mormon figure, how people change; Hannah responds with a gruesome and visual account that starts out with, “Well it has something to do with God and it’s not very nice.” In my interpretation of the whole statement, I feel like she means to say God challenges humans and pushes them to their breaking points in order to see if they can get back up and put themselves back together. As sadistic as this idea of God is, I feel that it rings true in the idea that people change most in situations of suffering; they either learn to walk with their limp or they fail to recover. People are constantly changing, learning, and growing into different versions of themselves, whether the stimulants are positive or situations of suffering. While the angel approaches Prior screaming for stasis, whether humans are a spontaneous accident or they were created this way, stagnancy is not in their nature.