You Can't Take the Mormon Out of Manti

        Manti Te'o's phantom girlfriend and her (un)timely death from leukemia evoke the scene in Fargo in which Marge Gunderson meets her old high school classmate Mike Yamagita for lunch.  Mike tells Marge that he married their mutual classmate, Linda Cooksey, who died of leukemia.  Their meeting is awkward in many aspects, but even more so in retrospect when Marge learns that Linda is alive, was never sick and was never married to Mike Yamagita.  Quite to the contrary, he'd been stalking Linda for years.

        Manti Te'o's phantom girlfriend also evokes Elder Paul H. Dunn -- if you grew up Mormon in the 80s, anyway.  Since you probably didn't, Elder Dunn was in the Top 100 of the Mormon hierarchy (that's the "Elder" part) and particularly popular among Mormon youth and their parents, who bought stacks of his faith-promoting cassettes and books.

        Elder Dunn was so popular because he had so many entertaining faith-promoting stories.  Anyone older than 40 who grew up Mormon remembers him playing for the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series -- but his miraculous survival at the Battle of Guadalcanal was most kids' favorite.  The Japanese had Elder Dunn's platoon pinned down.  It was either a hundred-yard dash through crossfire or death.  Elder Dunn's canteen, ammo belt and right boot were shot off.  A bullet cleaved his helmet in half but did not knock it off his head. Everyone else in the platoon was killed. "Dunn, you are so gosh-darned lucky," Elder Dunn's sergeant was said to have said.

        Elder Dunn turned out to be a gosh-darned liar.  In 1991, reporters who didn't even have the Internet ascertained that he never played major league baseball.  He did play Rookie League, a step below "A" ball.  He also fought on Okinawa, but none of the survivors from Dunn's units remembered being stationed on Guadalcanal.  Or Iwo Jima.  Nobody corroborated Dunn's desperate sprint through Japanese machine-gun fire.  Elder Dunn's best friend did not die in his arms or make him vow to teach patriotism to the Church's youth before he gave up the proverbial ghost.

        Elder Dunn admitted that not all his homespun homilies featuring himself as the protagonist were completely accurate -- but they were intended to be faith-promoting allegories, like Jesus's parables.  They didn't have to be factually "accurate" to be faith-promoting.  He had a point there, but Mormon consumers spoke with their proverbial wallets.  Elder Dunn's career as a Mormon motivational speaker was done.  The Church kicked him sideways or downstairs to emeritus status in its hierarchy.

        I'm not sure which I did first Wednesday night -- compare Manti Te'o to Mike Yamagita and Elder Paul H. Dunn or conclude that he was complicit at some level and point in the hoax.  It all happened in seconds.  If you're reading this piece you're following the Manti Te'o story.  My bases for deciding he perpetuated the hoax at some level and point are the same as those of other people who similarly conclude.

        Beyond that, I decided right away that Manti Te'o perpetuated the hoax at some point and level because he is a devout Mormon.  I admit it.  I don't know Te'o, but I know he's devout.  He says he is.  He's not only from Hawai'i, which has a vibrant Mormon community with a particularly Polynesian flavor.  He's from Laie, which is also home to Brigham Young University-Hawai'i, which is not to be confused with BYU-Provo or BYU-Idaho (Rexburg).  It's like being from Provo, Hawai'i.

        Te'o's parents are devout Mormons, too.  "Manti" is a city in the Book of Mormon.  Giving your child a Book of Mormon name is the Mormon equivalent of giving your child a Biblical name.  If you're from Utah, you associate Manti Te'o with Manti, Utah, a real town about 20 miles south of Moroni.  Like Manti Te'o, it's named after a make-believe city populated by make-believe people of a make-believe race featured in a make-believe book.

        If you're a Non-Mormon in Utah, you can't miss the connection to Manti Teo's make-believe girlfriend.  You also can't miss Mormonism's contribution to the saga.  This is true whether Te'o was a stooge, a co-conspirator, or anything in between.

        Mormons are more trusting than most people.  They share a religious mythology as unique and robust as any other.  It's not just Joseph Smith's accounts of visits from God and Jesus or the Book of Mormon's provenance.  There's the Three Nephites, Book of Mormon prophets who were so righteous that God has allowed them to remain on Earth.  Though they would now be around 2,500 years old, the Three Nephites can assume any form, like the Agents in The Matrix.  They're three Mormon super-heroes -- rescuing children from irrigation canals, fixing flat tires, and performing all kinds of other good deeds that total strangers sometimes perform.  They work solo, as a duo or a trio -- but they always vanish without a trace.  In fact, that's how you know for sure they were the Three Nephites.

        People who believe in the Three Nephites and all kinds of other people that never existed and history that never happened are more likely to believe they're in love with a woman they've never met.  That covers how Teo's strong Mormon background contributed to him being a victim, if that's what he is.

        Now for how Mormonism would be more likely to produce a person who concocts or complies with a conspiracy to mislead people about a girlfriend dying of leaukemia.  Mormon mythology doesn't just make Mormons more susceptible to cons of any inspirational stripe.  It compromises their ability to distinguish reality from alternative reality.  Some seem to lose interest in making the distinction, period.  Empiricism is usually pedestrian and rarely faith-promoting.  Explanations, proof and accountability can always come later.  They will.  So don't worry.

        For now, anything that promotes your faith or was even intended to must be positive.  Kill the messenger?  Are you kidding?  They're already lionized, elevated to several pedestals above reproach.  That's what makes their message faith-promoting in the first place.  It becomes no less so just because it also sells the messenger's books, saves them from tremendous embarrassment or puts them on a path to join the Gipper and Four Horsemen in the pantheon of Notre Dame football immortals.

        The message doesn't even have to be accurate to be faith-promoting, as we know from Elder Dunn on down.  Even if it isn't, nobody's admitting that anybody lied.  If some details got lost in translation, they're not central to the faith-promoting story.  Besides, nobody got hurt.  To the contrary, their faith was promoted.  Elder Dunn still inspired a lot of young people to believe in the Church and patriotism.  Manti Te'o still inspired a lot of people to feel good about the Church and Notre Dame football.
       
        You can't take Manti out of Mormon -- and you can't take the Mormon out of Manti.