What’s Religion Got to Do with It?

But before getting too far into doctrinal details, perhaps you’re wondering what Stephenie Meyer’s personal religion has to do with the Twilight novels. After all, Bella Swan and most of the other characters in the saga are generally religion-free. Bella explains:

Religion was the last thing I expected, all things considered. My life was fairly devoid of belief. Charlie considered himself a Lutheran, because that’s what his parents had been, but Sundays he worshipped by the river with a fishing pole in hand. Renée tried out a church now and then, but, much like her brief affairs with tennis, pottery, yoga, and French classes, she moved on by the time I was aware of her newest fad.²

While the characters’ actions in the series are not motivated by religious fervor, Meyer’s “Unofficial Bio” on stepheniemeyer.com highlights her membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There she says that her religion “has a huge influence on who I am and my perspective on the world, and therefore what I write (though I have been asked more than once, ‘What’s a nice Mormon girl like you doing writing about vampires?’).”³ But it’s actually not such a great leap from the teachings of the Mormon faith to vampires and the undead. Like Meyer’s fictional world, Mormonism features a closeness between the realms of the living and the dead, the mortal and the immortal.

For LDS, the newly dead live temporarily in a spirit world that is another dimension of our very same world of the living. Indeed, living Mormons perform proxy baptisms for dead ancestors who never embraced the faith in their lifetimes. And, perhaps most pertinent to the Twilight series, the LDS believe in eternal marriage—that once you are married in the right place and by the right authority, your earthly marriage will be honored through life and death. That means love need never die (and in the eternities, the lovers need not die either). As a Mormon, Meyer believes that one day her body will be immortal and all-powerful, resurrected in a perfect form, together with her husband and sons forever. Sounds a little like Bella and Edward Cullen’s transformation into immortal and powerful vampires, doesn’t it?

Meyer’s Religion and Its Philosophical Context

The Twilight series is a textual renewal of Meyer’s faith and her commitment, which ties back to the teachings in the booklet “For the Strength of Youth” that she and I received as young people in the Church. One such renewal of that faith is the agency Meyer gives Bella. At the beginning of Twilight, Meyer places Bella in a new geographical location; she gets a fresh start where she stands at a new “fork” in Forks. Which path will Bella choose for her life, now that she is far from her mother and on the verge of womanhood herself?

In a sense, Meyer plays Heavenly Mother to her fictional daughter, Bella. In Mormon teachings, mortals leave the preexistent state—a world before this one where each spirit decides to come to Earth to be tested in the flesh. According to Mormon thought, God places us here in this life and leaves us with freedom to choose our path and be held accountable for our choices. This freedom and responsibility is known as agency in the Mormon faith, and it is one of the first ideas explained in “For Strength of Youth.” Alas, there are, of course, consequences, sometimes eternal ones, for our earthly actions.

LDS thinkers did not originate the idea of agency, however. Rather, it is a central tenet of Christian philosophy going back at least to Saint Augustine (354-430 BCE), who called it “free will.” While free will is a gift from God, unfortunately we all end up falling short in our use of the gift. Bella asserts her agency when she tells Edward in no uncertain terms that her choices and their consequences are her responsibility alone:

This has to stop now. You can’t think about things that way. You can’t let this . . . this guilt . . . rule your life. You can’t take responsibility for the things that happen to me here. None of it is your fault, it’s just part of how life is for me. So, if I trip in front of a bus or whatever it is next time, you have to realize that it’s not your job to take the blame. You can’t go running off to Italy because you feel bad that you didn’t save me. Even if I had jumped off that cliff to die, that would have been my choice, and not your fault. I know it’s your . . . your nature to shoulder the blame for everything, but you really can’t let that make you go to such extremes!⁴

We can’t blame Edward for trying to save Bella, however. Throughout Twilight, Bella gives off the distinct feeling that she needs Edward-as-savior when her choices make her face danger: “I wanted nothing more than to be alone with my perpetual savior,” she says in Twilight.⁵ Like a Christ figure who pays for the sins of the one he loves, Edward cannot help but pick up some of the slack when his beloved falls short. Bella almost proves Saint Augustine’s point that our own human actions are never quite good enough; sometimes, to be saved, we still need help from a higher power.

Meyer makes agency an issue for Edward, too. A “fork” in the road is there for Edward when he tries to fight his predestined state as a vampire:

[T]he majority of our kind who are quite content with our lot—they, too, wonder at how we live. But you see, just because we’ve been . . . dealt a certain hand . . . it doesn’t mean that we can’t choose to rise above—to conquer the boundaries of destiny that none of us wanted. To try to retain whatever essential humanity we can.⁶

Ironically, the more-than-human character wants his humanity to come through even more. He is determined to fight any sense of predestination.

Eternal Covenants, Binding Promises

Edward is no mere fallible mortal, and although he appears like a high-school homecoming king, he has walked the planet for much longer, making him mature and stable. Edward means business. He means what he says, and his words become actions. Just after Bella and Edward’s first kiss, and their first (chaste) night together, the following exchange ensues:

“I love you,” I whispered.

“You are my life now,” he answered simply.

There was nothing more to say for the moment. He rocked us back and forth as the room grew lighter.⁷

In this romantic moment with Bella, Edward’s words are an action. When he says, “You are my life now,” there is a union created in that utterance. Just like when a baseball umpire cries, “You’re out!” and the base runner is out, or when a minister announces, “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” the speaker’s words literally perform an action. From the moment of that action, the future changes because of the speaker’s utterance. Words can also be an action.

This idea comes from the philosopher J. L. Austin (1911- 1960), who would call Edward’s “You are my life now” a performative utterance. In How to Do Things with Words, Austin adds that when we know exactly what the utterance is performing (or what the words are doing), that “performative” is “explicit.”⁸ Do “explicit” “utterances” in Bella’s bedroom sound like some sort of dirty talk? I am sure neither Austin nor Edward meant them as such. Instead, the words bind Edward and Bella together with a vow of consecration to each other. The words that Edward utters halfway through Twilight still hold meaning at the end of Breaking Dawn.

Eternal Union in Body and Spirit

As a Mormon who believes she is married to her husband for all eternity, Meyer relates to this never-ending promise. Mormons become “sealed” to their family members and believe that in the next life their immediate and extended family are joined. Bella and Edward obviously desire such a union. Although Edward thinks he is damned because of his vampire state, Bella cannot imagine herself in the hereafter without her companion: “Besides, the only kind of heaven I could appreciate would have to include Edward.”⁹ And Edward feels the same way, as Bella describes it: “He really did want me the way I wanted him—forever. It was only fear for my soul, for the human things he didn’t want to take from me, that made him so desperate to leave me mortal.”¹⁰ We see this union in a different way in the joy that Bella constantly feels when Edward picks her up and carries her around with his strong body. She cannot help but be happy, even when other negative circumstances engulf them.

This union of the body and the spirit is nothing new in religion and philosophy. To get “erotic” for a moment, Plato’s (428-348 BCE) dialogue The Symposium features a myth that explains the creation of love on Earth. In the beginning, there were three types of people who all had two heads with four arms and legs (eight total appendages). The three types of people were male/male, female/female, and male/female. At that time there was no need for love in the world because everyone was whole and happy. Feeling threatened by this wholeness, Zeus sent down thunderbolts that divided the people into what we would call humans today. Love was originated so that those who had been separated would be able to find their other half.

Plato’s liberal view of love and sexuality clearly does not fit into the conservative LDS view of sexuality and potential marriage partnership. Mormon teachings allow marriage only between a woman and a man. Interestingly enough, though, in his Time profile of Meyer, Lev Grossman pointed out that the author’s next novel, The Host—unrelated to the Twilight series—is

set in the near future on an Earth that has been conquered by parasitic aliens who take over the bodies of humans, annihilating their hosts’ personalities. One human host resists; she lives on as a voice in the head she shares with the alien. When host and parasite (who goes by Wanda) meet up with the host’s old lover—now a resistance fighter in hiding—the alien falls for him too and joins the humans. It’s a love triangle with two sides, a ménage à deux. Like Twilight, The Host is a kinky setup—two girls in one body!—played absolutely clean.¹¹

Plato’s Symposium seems to have made it into Meyer’s writings after all. Or maybe the inspiration came from some old-fashioned, Mormon-fundamentalist Big Love.

Close but Not Too Close: The Erotics of Abstinence

Meyer walks a playful line between sex and no-sex in her Twilight series. The books are erotic, dangerous, and descriptive. Edward has to resist not only Bella’s body but also her blood. Unlike other teenage heroes, Bella risks more than pregnancy: Her lover might destroy her completely. In his Time profile of Meyer, Grossman declares that the Twilight series is full of the “erotics of abstinence” because Bella and Edward get close but not too close—at least not until later in the series when the pair marry. The couple avoid the premarital sexual “should nots” of Meyer’s religion as outlined in “For the Strength of Youth.” Because of the couple’s premarital chastity, the LDS church-owned bookstores, Deseret Book, gave Meyer’s works prominent displays in their shops throughout the United States. But more recently, because of the erotic nature of Bella and Edward’s abstinence, some LDS members have asked the bookstore to remove Meyer’s series from the stores. Deseret Book struck a compromise by keeping the books available for special order.¹²

So, are the pair poster children for chastity? In the half-page kisses Meyer describes breath by breath, the letter of the law and the spirit of the law diverge. Grossman highlights a scene “midway through Twilight in which, for the first time, Edward leans in close and sniffs the aroma of Bella’s exposed neck. ‘Just because I’m resisting the wine doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the bouquet,’ he says. ‘You have a very floral smell, like lavender . . . or freesia.’”¹³ Grossman argues that although Edward “barely touches” Bella, “there’s more sex in that one paragraph than in all the snogging in Harry Potter.”¹⁴

But Laura M. Brotherson writes in the Mormon Times (published by the Mormon-owned Deseret News) that Edward is a “guardian and protector. It’s like a lion falling in love with a lamb. Thankfully for Bella, Edward comes from a family who has not only taught him to control his deadly appetite, but helps him do so as well.”¹⁵ Vampire family values! Brotherson commends Edward’s “sacrifice and self-discipline, especially because it goes so against his natural wiring.”¹⁶ Edward’s ability to resist is “breathtakingly attractive” and engenders confidence in Bella that she has found the right (super)man: “It’s little surprise to me that when Edward asks Bella, ‘Do you trust me?’ there is no hesitation. How could you not willingly give your whole life and anything else he wanted, knowing full well he would never take or do anything that would hurt you?”¹⁷ But Bella does not fully know, really, and that is part of the danger and eroticism Meyer creates.

Returning the Gaze

Meyer focuses on the carnal instead of the spiritual with her array of lengthy descriptions of Edward’s looks. Because almost all of the Twilight series is told from Bella’s point of view, and because Meyer fixates on Edward, Twilight returns the gaze that is usually reserved for men looking at women. Much feminist philosophy argues that men have customarily controlled the “lenses” of looking: whether photographic, filmic, theatrical, or even fictional (through descriptions in novels and other narrative forms). Customarily, the auteur/ author/director makes his audience gaze upon the woman’s form with sexual desire. Meyer, however, makes us gaze through Bella’s eyes at Edward’s beauty. Edward is objectified, continuously sized up like a piece of meat at the market.

It’s not simply a matter of making a sex object of the male (for a change). We are also aware of Edward returning the look: “Edward was staring at me [...] I stared back, surprised, expecting him to look quickly away. But instead he continued to gaze with probing intensity into my eyes.”¹⁸ Multiple times in Twilight, Bella stares at Edward, and he stares back. Instead of a unidirectional gaze that makes the other person a mere object of desire, Twilight offers a conversational, heartwarming, bidirectional gaze between the two young lovers.

Nice Mormon Girls and Sexy Vampires

We need to conclude by asking: Is Twilight properly Mormon? As with any text, there are multiple manners of reading and interpreting Twilight. And not all of Meyer’s critics (professional and amateur; Mormon and non-Mormon) believe her Twilight series upholds the right standards. I hope this chapter has convinced you that it’s at least possible for nice Mormon girls to write about sexy vampires.

NOTES

1 See “For the Strength of Youth,” www.lds.org/youthresources/pdf/ForStrengYouth36550.pdf.

2 Stephenie Meyer, New Moon (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006), p. 36.

3 Stephenie Meyer, “Unofficial Bio,” stepheniemeyer.com.

4 New Moon, p. 507.

5 Stephenie Meyer, Twilight (New York: Little, Brown and Company), 2005, p. 166.

6 Twilight, p. 307.

7 Twilight, p. 314.

8 J. L Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1962).

9 New Moon, p. 37.

10 New Moon, p. 527-528.

11 Lev Grossman, “Stephenie Meyer: A New J.K. Rowling?” Time, April 24, 2008, pp. 34-35.

12 “Deseret Book pulls ‘Twilight’ series from shelves,” www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=6243225.

13 Grossman, p. 34.

14 Ibid., p. 34.

15 Laura M. Brotherson, “Edward, Self-Mastery and the Marital Fire,” MormonTimes.com, January 17, 2009.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Twilight, p. 73.