Strains of the Enlightenment: Making Belief in American Secularism and African Difference in <i>The Book of Mormon</i>
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article argues that the 2011 Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, best known for its parody of Mormon religious beliefs, uses what Sara Ahmed terms “affective economies” to paradoxically remake American beliefs in secular rationality. Whereas Richard Schechner posits a strict division between “make-believe” and “make-belief ” performances, The Book of Mormon demonstrates how the “make-believe” of Broadway makes beliefs and feelings in its audiences through circulations of affect. This article traces how such affects and beliefs are imbricated with national impressions about religious, racial, and sexual difference, particularly through the musical’s Mormon and black African characters. By attending to the musical’s impressions of Mormons and Africans, it deconstructs the musical’s tacit investments in American secularism and rationality through its circulation of “common sense” ideas about religious and racial others.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it