I’d like to do SiOB a little early this week because it looks like this conference is going to generate some interesting news. That news will be rolling in over the next few days, so let’s wrap up this past week’s posts separately before the news begins! (To give you something to read while you’re waiting.) Also, I’m not really in a position to live blog events at the real “Main Street Plaza”, but if any of you are doing so — please feel free to post links here!!
Here’s the preview of what to expect this weekend: It’s General Conference (unfortunately, not a TED Talk). Here are some tips on surviving it. In one corner we have Ordain Women. In the other, we have righteous Mormons who understand the importance of gender roles. It seems like it wouldn’t be so hard to find a solution, but the CoJCoL-dS has cleverly decided to shut out the media instead — can’t wait to see how well that works out!!
The Ordain Women crowd makes some really good arguments, theological as well as personal, not to mention humorous. Across levels of orthodoxy, lots of people really believe in the priesthood, as unbelievable as it may seem. And some are even willing to settle for a separate track if the CoJCoL-dS could throw them that bone.
The church’s hard sell works on some people, but it can backfire:
I am a Mormon Feminist who believes in the gospel and is in love with a Unitarian Universalist. I attend his church because I want to be with my family on Sundays and because I know my Heavenly Parents understand that I don’t want to hear from other Mormons why I should leave him (yes, this is a common thing to hear when a marriage becomes interfaith) or why I should pressure him to come back to church.
Especially if you decide to treat your loved ones to stuff like this:
As to your living arrangements, there are other ways to enjoy the advantages you describe. I wish you would have talked to me first…but I guess that is the last thing you would have done. It’s difficult to hear you state so proudly that you have stripped yourself of the principles taught to you by the two people in the world who love you the most and want your happiness, while you drink the rationalizing bathwater of a society who cares nothing about you. I understand your perspective. I have heard it many, many times from people…people who later had to deal with the downsides they didn’t see and then kept trying to rationalize their regrets.
Mormonism isn’t all bad — it can encourage positive things like goals. And they’ve actually decreased their proof-texting. And Mormons can be surprisingly supportive and surprisingly assertive (despite their teachings).
But… you might want tho thing twice about taking your nevermo significant other to Testimony Meeting. Also, those awful Mormon sex-shame object lessons seem to have gone viral and the undies are a problem. Let’s hear some crickets!
In other fun, check out Runtu’s review of a personal review of an insider’s view!
In life journeys, how long have you lived in one place? The Profet has given the second part of his interview. Has John Dehlin left the church again? Also two more exit stories and two more responses to the FAQ!
OK, so now it’s time go pop some popcorn!!! And if you see the mishies, try not to get tazed!
The entire story of Ordain Women’s attempt to attend the priesthood session has been tweeted (with lots of photos and comments from various participants) at the Exponent.
A quick question.
For those listening to Conference, a fortnight from Easter Sunday, can someone tell me how many references there were to these fundamental terms:
Cross
Crucifixion
Calvary/Golgotha
Mary
This is a serious question. Perhaps even worthy discussion.
Thanks,
I doubt you’ll find many people here who listen to Conference.
And I doubt there were many references, considering that there are often relatively few even when Conference has fallen on Easter Sunday. The last time that happened was 2010; you could review the talks and see how many references there were then.
@2 The one person who would probably be able to tell you the answer to this question is Ziff. He computes all sorts of statistics of this type.
Thanks–
Useful tips. Thanks. I haven’t attended/listened to a Conference since April 1968, when I chose to join a march past Temple Square in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., a 39-year-old slain prophet, after hearing no mention of him in Conference up to that point, although there was much said about another 39-year-old slain prophet.
I just thought that those terms to be useful litmus indicators of the degree to which an organization can legitimately claim to be “Christian” at this time of year.
@5 The Mormons are notorious for hardly observing Easter in church at all, even on Easter Sunday. Around this time of year, there’s generally a lot of discussion about this lack in both faithful and ex-mo circles. If I see any posts about it in the next few weeks, I’ll be sure to include them in SiOB.
In the CoCJoL-dS, about the only holiday that is specially observed in church is Mothers’ Day — and for that one, the in-church observance seems calculated to upset as many people as possible…
@2: Those particular terms/concepts are more Catholic than Mormon. You’ll notice that Mormon buildings don’t sport crosses like other Christian buildings. Although the crucifixion is important, Mormons like to say they focus on “the living Christ” rather than the dying Christ. My mother once told me that it’s “gross” that people wear little crosses around their neck, because why would they wear something that represents death/blood/ect? In terms of Mary… Well, Catholics consider her the Mother of God, which carries a LOT more weight than in Mormonism where she is the mother of Christ (who is not God, but His son). Thus, Mary tends to come up on Mother’s Day (as chanson mentioned).
@7 I was thinking of making a similar comment.
The Mormons generally believe that the atonement took place in Gethsemane (when Jesus was praying and sweating blood, etc.), and specifically avoid focusing on the cross and the crucifixion. (I think Alan’s mother’s reaction to using the symbol of the cross is very typical of Mormons.)
On such points, it’s not so much that they’re ignoring the role of Jesus — it’s more that their culture focuses on different parts of the story.
p.s. to clarify, in case my comments appear to contradict each other:
On the one hand, the Mormons are notorious for not having any sacred/ritual celebration of Easter (or other Christian holidays) as a part of their church worship services. (Often people complain that their ward schedules talks on other random correlated topics such as tithing on Easter Sunday.) But the lack of emphasis on certain specific elements like the cross or divinity of Mary aren’t necessarily further evidence of it.
Actually the church has been so preoccupied with Joseph Smith and the restoration and how humankind would be lost had not Joseph restored the gospel, that they have a difficult time putting Jesus in the equation. I think if someone wanted to do the research you would find that the Church suddenly *discovered* Jesus when the Mormons aren’t Christian attacks began in the 70’s.
Take for example D. Oaks recent women can’t hold the priesthood talk. Here he is a special witness of Christ, called to bear testimony of the Jesus as the author of salvation, but it is priesthood’s role in bringing about salvation that he feels is most important.
There are a couple of books about the role of the cross in Mormonism. One of them is “Banishing the Cross” by Michael Reed. He documents early Mormons wearing crosses. http://www.amazon.com/Banishing-Cross-Emergence-Mormon-Taboo/dp/1934901350
David O. McKay hated crosses; Spencer W. Kimball loved them. He put crosses on both of the churches that were built under his direction as stake president in Southern Arizona; they had to be removed when McKay had his freakout over the cross. In fact, McKay worked so hard to make crosses verboten in Mormonism that Kimball couldn’t do much to revive their use when he was prophet.
In other words, I agree with Chanson that “the lack of emphasis on certain specific elements like the cross or divinity of Mary aren’t necessarily further evidence of” Mormon’s weirdness about Easter.
Hi–
Those are very useful comments. Thank you. I had conversations from my parents similar to Alan’s about people wearing crosses around their necks. I think the wearers see them less around their necks than over their hearts. It always struck me as an odd quibble from people who wear on their undergarments representations of objects available at Home Depot. I guess LDS should be grateful that Elohim was apparently a bricklayer in his earthly existence; had he been a miller, for example, they might be wearing millstones around their necks. Parker’s observation is very apt, I think. I think it also derives from the trajectory they are on, precisely the same as that followed by the RLDS a generation ago. They’re desperately trying to divest themselves of a counterproductive past in a long-term pursuit of respectability at least on the fringes of American evangelicalism. The RLDS did it. It’s their only way out.
I should have been clearer about what I meant by “Christian,” because Alan’s observation that those terms were “Catholic” is appropriate, particularly from an contemporary American religious standpoint. I was thinking of “Christianity” more as the almost 2,000-year cultural and aesthetic realm in which Copts and Abyssinians and Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox and Armenians and Roman Catholics and Lutherans in their hundreds of millions and billions would react with striking uniformity to those terms and their historical associations, as literally hundreds of millions of windows and icons and statues and paintings and hymns and masses and oratorios and cantatas and sermons and poems and pageants and processionals focusing around those core historical concepts and characters and places declare their cultural/conceptual centrality and vitality. In time and space those words have intense resonances in what can be considered the Christian ecumene; and even billions of Muslims sincerely revere Mary as the mother of a great prophet and name their daughters after her with amazing frequency.
In other words, it’s hard to imagine anything professing to be “Christian†or even ancient not resonating to the sound of those words. Even if they are meaningless fictions. Mary? According to all Christendom, including the Reformation fathers, she was “blessed among women,†the one the Alpha and Omega and the Great I Am called “Mom.†If she weren’t the Theotokos, where is the “Theoâ€?
Similarly, it’s hard to imagine people from those times and places responding to the fact of death so dismissively, sliding right past it to talk about the comforts and pleasures of resurrection. I think such blitheness is a tree-ring marker of a post-Enlightenment, more accurately, in American terms, post-Calvinist, almost Jeffersonian/Jacksonian optimistic outlook. I don’t think that any ancient religion would have the same response to the Passover/Easter events, saturated by death as each of them is, that Mormons do.
It’s more like what you find in happy-clappy contemporary non-creedal Evangelicalism. It is, in fact, a trenchant critique of Mormonism’s claim to be a “restoration.†Its aesthetic perspective has almost nothing ancient about it except a trivial legalism, especially about financial matters, for which one would look in vain for New Testament authority.
An intellectual historian or an art historian could spend time usefully pursuing the differences between the Christian world/mind view and that to be found in Mormonism. And the reaction to those terms and many others would be clues in such an analytical process.
Imagine 41st-century archeologists examining Christian remains up to the end of the 21st century when the religion ceased to be a cultural force. They would have a pretty good sense of the meanings of those words, based on the historical record and artifacts. Then, if they excavated LDS buildings, galleries, libraries, museums, would they associate the one cultural complex with the other? T
hat’s the point I was trying to make. And a “word search†on those terms of the Conference transcripts would tell a similar story. Simply calling your organization “Christian†does not put you into the main currents of a vast cultural ocean, especially after you’d devoted 150 years to cutting as many cultural/ aesthetic/sacerdotal/ theological ties to that tradition as possible. The result is Wonder Bread and tapwater from unleavened bread and wine radioactive with divinity.
lol, your comments are always so clever — I wish you’d write us an article!
This is one of the reasons that it is so frustrating to hear Mormons “correcting” people on the question of whether Mormons are Christian.
They’ll say stuff like “We worship Christ as God, so of course we’re Christian!” They typically show a complete inability to grasp and acknowledge that their definition of “Christian” isn’t necessarily the same one other people are using. It is the term for a specific religious tradition, which one can legitimately argue Mormons aren’t exactly a part of.
Meh. Protestants have been around for five hundred years, and by and large they’re not interested in icons and statues–instead, they are iconoclasts. They smash that crap (and they do consider it crap). Austere Presbyterian churches are still christian, for example, and they reject all the things in that list except for hymns.
Mormons are descended from Congregationalists, who are the remnants of the English Puritans who settled New England. They completely rejected the liturgical calendar.
The problem isn’t the Mormon claim that they’re Christian. They problem is that they claim to be Christian while insisting they’re not Protestant. If they’d say, “Oh, yeah! We’re totally Protestants,” they could point to the influence of Calvin in why their approach to worship is so austere. After all, it’s shared by millions of other Protestants.
@14 Yes, but it’s not just a question of culture and aesthetics (where, you’re right, Mormons align with Protestant traditions). I think there is a sufficient break theologically to view the Restoration as a separate tradition from Christianity.
From my perspective, maybe the Mormons should be considered “Christians” and maybe they shouldn’t — but the thing that drives me nuts about the Mormon approach to this question is their standard “Answer the question they should have asked instead of the question they asked” strategy.
By refusing to acknowledge (or even understand, really) that a big part of the problem is disagreement over the definition of the word “Christian”, they guarantee that they will never answer the question satisfactorily. And then they get upset and frustrated that the question is never resolved.
Well, maybe…. but the same could be said of any of the 19th century American religions: Christian Science, Seven-day Adventistis, Jehovah’s Witinesses.
I have no patience for this idea that someone has a proprietary claim on the term “Christian” and gets to define what it means and declare who has a legitimate right to use it. It’s religious gatekeeping by those who consider themselves orthodox, and it’s bullshit. So you’re an “unorthodox” Christian rather than an orthodox one. So what? It’s not like it really matters. It’s not like someone calling themsef an oral surgeon when they’re actually a dental hygienist. It’s not going to hurt anybody–it’s just going to piss off the orthodox, and I’m frankly all in favor of that.
In other words, maybe Mormons are crappy Christians from the POV of Catholics. Fine. They can be crappy Christians. Doesn’t mean they’re somehow not Christian at all.
I feel the same way when people from the Utah-based cojcolds try to do it with the terms “Mormon” or “LDS.” As far as I’m concerned, the FLDS have just as much right to call themselves Mormons or have LDS in the name of their church as Dallin H. Oaks. I have just as much right to those terms. We have just as much right to those terms.
In other words, maybe fundamentalist polygamists and CofC members and post-mos are crappy Mormons from the POV of those who hold temple recommends. Fine. We can be crappy Mormons. Doesn’t mean we’re somehow not Mormon at all.
@16 I’m not talking about people’s right to define different terms. I’m saying that if you are using terms to mean something different from the way your intended audience understands those terms, then you are not engaging in effective communication.
I think the Mormon approach would be improved if the would at least add something to the effect of “I understand that my definition of “Christian” may not be the definition you are using, however I think my definition is more valid than yours because…”
In other words, in my opinion, Mormons have just as much right to redefine Christianity as gay people have the right to redefine marriage. Mormons have just as much right to call themselves Christian, even though it makes some people really uncomfortable, as trans people have the right to determine what gender they want to identify as, even though it makes some people really uncomfortable. I think saying, “Oh, Mormons aren’t really Christian” is akin to telling someone born in the US whose parents were born in China, “You can’t call yourself American. Even though you’re a citizen, your looks and your way of performing Americanness don’t see sufficiently authentic to me. You’re too Chinese to claim that term.”
I realize there are limits to the comparison–you can’t just decide to call yourself an American if you’ve never been to the US and your parents aren’t citizens. But I think people brought here in infancy who have no idea they’re actually undocumented should have both the legal and the intellectual, personal right to think of themselves as American.
Umm, no. I still don’t buy it. Because the intended audience is insisting on a limited, pure, orthodox definition. They know full well that there are other definitions out there, and they reject them because they don’t think they’re sufficiently orthodox.
If when asked the question “are Mormons Christian?” they address the questions “What is the definition of Christian?” and “Who gets to define it?” — thoughtfully, like you did, instead of ignoring them — then they would have a good answer to the question, instead of a shitty one.
@20. Well, OK. I can agree with that.
“Nobody here but us Cuckoos!â€
Everyone knows the joke about the sly fox in the chicken coop who, when the farmer demanded to know who was in there, cried out “Nobody here but us chickens!†Funny. But less so if the farmer were careless of categories and gullible to boot and discovered nothing but feathers the next morning.
Couldn’t happen, of course, but consider the Cuckoo bird, a similarly sly deceiver who thrives at the expense of the uncritical.
“Cuckoos are what’s known as brood parasites, meaning they hide their eggs in the nests of other species. To avoid detection, the cuckoos have evolved so that their eggs replicate those of their preferred targets. If the host bird doesn’t notice the strange egg in its nest, the newly hatched cuckoo will actually take all the nest for itself, taking the other eggs on its back and dropping them out of the nest.â€
http://io9.com/5785233/nest-stealing-cuckoo-birds-are-locked-in-evolutionary-war-with-their-would-be-victims
This has been a fascinating discussion, amounting to an interesting sort of historical study.
First, my “medieval†emphasis on tradition and culture as identifiers, through various efforts to deal with the slippery taxonomy represented by Mormonism’s recent flirtation with Christianity, and then into Holly’s post-modernist latitudinarianism. Really interesting.
Mormonism’s sudden cozying up to the great and abominable —cue the conspiracy soundtrack—is probably according to someone’s “plan.†Does a “plan†actually exist? Who knows, but if there were, it would be pretty cuckoo!
And that’s a little depressing, because it would represent yet another con in the long history of Mormon cons. The benefits would be considerable. They’d lose the “cult†label within the Christian community for one thing. They wouldn’t even be a “peculiar people,†about which they were so proud when I was a kid. They’d just be regular folks. They could jettison a lot of historical weirdness in the process of climbing through the eye of the needle of Christian acceptance, and then they could start working on their co-religionists without all the historical tensions and alarm bells. Many “Christian†communities wouldn’t realize the trick until they opened their doors one Sunday morning to find big piles of feathers.
And that would be very funny, because by appealing so affectingly to the line of, “Who’s to tell what’s what or who’s who†they would be avoiding having to discuss the sticky question that lies at their myth of origin—“Which church is right?†The question wasn’t “which church is ‘Christian’� Nor was it “Which of these things is really a lot like the others and does it matter, among friends, anyway?†It was a question less of social relationship but of rightness.
And that’s when the Mormon exclusionist rigor drops like a hammer:
“. . . .they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt; that: ‘they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof.’â€
The basic question, for all religionists is “Will this set of beliefs or associations or practices achieve some spiritual or eschatological benefit for meâ€? Mormons would end up confessing, well, “we’re in here with all these ‘Christians,’ but, in point of fact, since we’re the only TRUE Christians, the ONLY ones that God recognizes as his own and will reward, and when all is said and done, we’ll be the ONLY ones in the nest.â€
I know, it all sounds a bit cuckoo.
So, when Mormons ask, “Why can’t we be Christians�, I’m inclined to ask, “Why would you want to ‘join’ with those churches? It’s not because Christians are right, because you think they’re ‘all wrong.’ So why do you want to hang around so many people who are so abominably ‘wrong’? I think I’d better go check the chicken coop.
not even close. It’s plain old-fashioned live and let live.
you’re right: that’s completely cuckoo.
Here’s some serious bullshit from the church, trying to assert ownership over the word “Mormon”: http://www.courthousenews.com/2014/04/10/66953.htm
It seems like when I was a kid, we were less insistent on being called “Christian”. We weren’t just “Christian” — we were the new world religion that was growing to overshadow the others! This current move towards wanting to be more a part of the Christian club seems like kind of a sad step down.
Insisting on being called “Christian” isn’t just a question of making it easier to get converts (as the cuckoo analogy @22 suggests), although that’s part of it. I think it’s also about wanting to be leaders of the religious right politically. Specifically, they want to get on the religious right’s bandwagon in terms of keeping women and LBGTQ people in their place. And it’s hard to join in the fun of excluding others if you’re one of the weirdos that other people are trying to push off the bandwagon yourself. Hence the desperate insistence on inclusion.
Holly’s right that the question of whether Mormons should get to claim the label “Christian” is strongly parallel to the question of who gets to be called “Mormon,” and there’s a strong case for it, as outlined by Holly on this thread.
My perspective is that (1) most members of the CoJCoL-dS don’t understand the opposing argument (they assume that the opposing case is nothing but bigotry against them and ignorance of Mormon beliefs), and consequently they argue their own case very badly, and (2) I’m kind of disappointed that Mormons would want to be accepted as “Christian” so badly.
it’s a question of basic logic. It is indeed The Church of JESUS CHRIST of Latter-day Saints, as the church likes to point out. Mormons do believe in the atonement. They might not recite the Nicene Creed, but they believe in all its elements–with the possible exception of the whole Heavenly Mother thing. But all the rest? It’s pretty much a standard LDS Sunday school lesson.
Like I said, Mormons might be crappy Christians, but there are plenty of ways that they qualify, and insisting that there are these one or two things somewhere huge enough to disqualify them entirely (like the fact that they reject the idea that the Trinity is just one personage or don’t actually recite the Nicene Creed) seems prissy, stupid and mean to me.
Of course, trying to insist that the word “Mormon” is trademarked and the intellectual property of the Utah-based LDS church is even prissier, stupider and meaner.
Right. Whether it makes sense to call Mormons “Christian” is a question of basic logic not simply a question of bigotry and ignorance. That was my earlier point.
(Analysis of the motivation for wanting to be called “Christian” is a new topic @25.)
Are you talking to me, or to someone who insists that the differences are necessarily huge enough to disqualify Mormons from being considered Christian?
I think there is a logical case for placing Mormons in the category “Christian” and a logical case against it. I think the case for calling Mormons Christian (as you have outlined) is probably the stronger of the two (but the logical case against it exists, and shouldn’t be dismissed/ignored).
I am not arguing that Mormons have no business calling themselves Christian nor that they have no business expecting others to respect that identity.
If my position was not clear — I’m sorry, I will try to phrase my comments more clearly in the future.
Well, this brood parasite has a bird story to tell as well.
In my part of the world lives an endemic species, the yellow billed magpie. Birders come from all over the world to see this common bird.
Fifty miles away over the Sierra Nevada, lives a virtually genetic similar bird; the numerically superior, widespread, black billed magpie.
Now as the story goes, if by chance one type of magpie enters the other types range, it’s off to the attack by the offended majority of true magpiehood.
None of this applies to Mallards, so it may not be a good universal story, even if they do put up with brood parasites.
Just because trans people have the right to determine their gender, it does not follow that everyone has the right to define themselves as trans.
I think “Christian,” at some level, works the same way. There are boundaries to the word. Yet, because the identity is shared by so many conflicting interests, it’s hard to define those boundaries, and probably not worth the trouble. Unlike “trans,” it’s probably better to blur the boundaries because no one gets hurt by the blurred boundaries — despite evangelicals saying Christmas is under attack.
A similar discussion came up for me recently with regard to Judaism and Jewish literature. There’s an orthodox position that the writings of assimilated American Jews who might, for example, celebrate Christ as a messiah, don’t get to qualify as “Jewish” because Christianization amounts to cultural genocide. I think a good case could be made that a Jewish literary canon shouldn’t include stories that celebrate Christ’s divinity, and that the boundaries of Judaism might include the idea that worshiping Christ is a form of idolatry. At the same time, what about those assimilated Jews? Here, the debate seems a lot thornier, whereas in the world of Christianity, I tend to brush off any assertion that someone doesn’t get to define themselves as Christian.
Hi Chanson–
@27:
I hope I understand where you are coming from, and as I said @21, I agree with your point that Mormons don’t argue their position well.
I wasn’t speaking specifically to you. I was trying to address the entire question, including points Pierre raised and arguments from people who say that Mormons aren’t Christian because they don’t adhere officially to the Nicene Creed. As I said @26, I find that downright silly. This comes up regularly on RD, so much so that I’m probably going to write about it soon.
*
@29
Did anyone ever suggest that it did follow?
@30 Yes, a lot of people think trans isn’t “real”…that gender identity applies to everyone so that anyone can choose to be gender deviant. Your comment reads like Mormon:Christian::trans:gender, and I can’t tell the logic there, since trans identity certainly has stronger borders than Mormon or Christian, IMO
Well, we’re even, since I cannot even begin to make heads or tails of your first sentence @31.
Not that I’m asking for an explanation, mind you. Your first sentence @29 was so ill conceived that I didn’t bother to read beyond it, and I figure anything else you have to say on the topic would likewise be nonsense.
As chanson said @27,
Just like the logical case against anyone being able to adopt “trans” exists. But you threw a bunch of identities together @18, like they’re akin. Tell me, how is the Mormon right to call themselves Christian akin to gay people’s right to redefine marriage, is akin to a trans person’s right choose their gender, akin to a 2nd gen Chinese-American to define themselves as American? “Live and let live” has limits, which my @29 is about if you bother to read it.
@33:
Alan, there are people I find it worth my time to engage with in conversation.
You’re not one of them.
I don’t bother to read the crap you write–opening posts, comments, pretty much any of it. Your questions don’t matter to me, and I’m not going to answer them.
Okay…..well, if you truly don’t address me further, I’d consider it a favor. You’ve only been obnoxious to me ever since I’ve been here (with rare exception). If you comment on my posts, you tend to commandeer them. If you respond to my comments, you tend to be dismissive and rude. So, if you’re disengaging with me because you’ve finally decided I’m not worth your time, then I sigh with relief.
MSP is pretty much the only place that I post on Mormonism, and rather infrequently — in part because of useless exchanges like this, but also waning interest. Meanwhile, I get the sense you have multiple soapboxes with large audiences, so I’m left wondering why you feel the need to bully and belittle me, and tell me that my words are crap?
My @29 wasn’t even addressed directly to you, btw, it was about the topic generally.
@35: What a passive-aggressive crap move this person makes: “I will consider it a favor if you don’t address me any further, and oh, here are a bunch of questions for you.”
This comment isn’t addressed to HIM, btw. It’s about the topic generally.
It’s not passive-aggressive….I asked one question, which I expect to be left unanswered, and I expect to be left wondering until the end of the time.
(And if there’s any passive-aggressiveness in that, I blame the culture of Seattle.)
I look forward to reading your treatment of the subject.
In general, I don’t like it when the leaders and spokespeople of the CoJCoL-dS encourage members to believe that any time people outside the church disagree with the party line coming out of the Church Office Building, it’s nothing more than anti-Mormon bigotry. I think that approach is polarizing and encourages misunderstanding. It’s particularly frustrating w.r.t. the “Are Mormons Christian?” question because (as you have amply demonstrated) they could make a strong logical case, so it’s aggravating when some choose to go with the polarizing one.
As an example of what I’m talking about, I was disappointed with JB’s treatment of this question in her myth-busting article for the Washington Post. She had the opportunity to address this question in a reasonable way for a huge audience, and she chose (in my interpretation) to reinforce the Mormon belief that the other side has no case at all.
I don’t think they can make a strong logical case, actually, because then how could they justify to themselves the campaign against other Mormons, and the attempts to trademark “Mormon”? The hypocrisy prevents them from taking a solid position against who they see as aggressors — and this hypocrisy filters down into the membership.
@39 I think a strong logical case can be made for this point in isolation, but I agree that when Mormons insist people call them “Christian” while simultaneously insisting that people withhold the identity “Mormon” from the FLDS and AUB, etc., that’s hypocritical.
OTOH, if we say that Mormons have no business withholding the identity Mormon from competing sects of Mormonism while simultaneously saying that the Christians are right that Mormons have no business calling themselves Christian, then we are in danger of committing a similar hypocrisy. 😉
It can be made, but not by the Church…unless it wants to exist in blatant hypocrisy. The Church wants it to be good that it can define “Mormon,” but bad that “Christian” is defined for them. Hence, the behavior that we see as bad (defining the terms of shared identities) is clearly not what the Church considers bad. What’s bad for the Church is not having the ability to define terms as it sees fit.
It’s kind of like how the American government can’t say that Iran needs to dismantle its nuclear program because nuclear weapons are “bad.” Rather, it has to come up with a bunch of reasons why it’s good for America to have them, but bad for Iran to.
I think set-ups like this that engender hypocrisy prevent issues from being directly addressed….they have to stay “muddied” so that bad behavior has a place to hide.
Hi, Guys–
It’s been an interesting discussion. I still have this question.
“So, when Mormons ask, “Why can’t we be Christiansâ€?, I’m inclined to ask, “Why would you want to ‘join’ with those churches? It’s not because Christians are right, because you think they’re ‘all wrong.’ So why do you want to hang around so many people who are so abominably ‘wrong’?”
Part of the problem is the lingering disdain and contempt (howsoever defensive it might be said to be) of the LDS toward what they have long dismissed as the “sectarian” world, now the “Christian” world they seem to want to be part of. Here are some easily obtained examples.
“Believers in the doctrines of modern Christendom will reap damnation to their souls (Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, p.177)
“Evil spirits control much of the so-called religious worship in the world; for instance, the great creeds of Christendom were formulated so as to conform to their whispered promptings.” (Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, p.246)
“After the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was organized, there were only two churches upon the earth. They were known respectively as the Church of the Lamb of God and Babylon. The various organizations which are called churches throughout Christendom, though differing in their creeds and organizations, have one common origin. They belong to Babylon.” (George Q. Cannon, Gospel Truth, p.324)
I’m content to leave it there. But I will say that, “sectarian” or not, latter-day or not, Chanson is a saint. Keep up the good work.
@40: that’s been my basic point since @16.
@42: your question still assumes that people like Catholics and Episcopalians have some sort of claim on the term “Christian” that invalidates a Mormon claim to it unless Mormons become more like them. I disagree with that basic premise.
@44 Not necessarily.
I think the unspoken assumption behind Pierre’s comment @42 is that the Mormons’ new emphasis on calling themselves “Christian” is primarily motivated by a desire for Mormons to be seen as one of the club with the Catholics and Episcopalians. In other words, he’s assuming that it’s not that Mormons have a particular attachment to the word “Christian” — they simply want to be known by the same name as the religious majority, whatever that name may be.
That assumption may be wrong. But if we grant the assumption, then Pierre’s follow-up question is “Why? Why do the Mormons want people to see them as members of this club that they used to disagree with so strongly?”
It is wrong. Mormons do have a particular attachment to the word. This is part of why they can and do repeatedly assert, sometimes angrily, sometimes with resignation, sometimes with rolling of their eyes, sometimes with fervent testimony, that they are Christian: because they are–by their definition, by their particular attachment to the word–regardless of the fact that it’s not a definition others share or an attachment everyone wants to recognize.
That should be the starting question, not the follow-up. After all, you don’t have to quibble about the definition of Christian to wonder why the corporate church is cozying up to groups it used to vilify.
To borrow from your comment @20, if Pierre starts with what you label the followup, then we have an interesting conversation about the political ambitions of the COJCOLDS and religious assimilation and the watering down if not outright repudiation of core LDS doctrines and so forth, instead of getting hung up on the definition of the word christian.
It’s not really about the definition of the terms, which change. It’s about the players vying for spots at the table, which is why a focus on the hypocrisy is interesting. Perhaps the basic reason the Church aims for “Christian” is because the table in this country has always been a Christian table, so as Mormons moved from a small Utah church to one with international aims, underpinned by American patriotism housed in the Republican party, “Christianity” was the only available option. “Jesus Christ” is more readily known across the seas…and the 20th century generally moved the logic of the state from blatant white supremacy to multiculturalism; one of premises of multiculturalism is the downplay of difference for the sake of shared sameness. Whoever offers the best way to accommodate difference under the guise of sameness (as opposed to having the best difference) wins the game. (The game being an economic one focused on growth.)
In other words, because the term “Christian” is as malleable as any other word, worrying about what it means is a distraction.
If someone had asked me when I was seven if I was a Christian, I would have said, “Of course!” and been puzzled by the question. The people I taught in Taiwan accepted that we were Christian–and we believed that we were. We were there preaching Christianity; that’s what we said, and that’s what we really believed.
This is the reality for millions of Mormons. To ignore what they mean when they say, without any hint of guile (and, admittedly, perhaps without a lot of awareness of larger issues) that of course they are Christian and focus instead on some discussion over what being “Christian” means in terms of the political ambitions of several dozen old white men is to privilege white male patriarchal Mormon orthodoxy to the point where it is the only thing that matters in determining how millions of people are allowed to think of themselves.
And that’s some messed up bullshit, though par for the course for so many of the men who comment at MSP.
I’m old enough to remember when the Church shunned the word *Christian.* That was the term the fallen religions used. As I said earlier, it wasn’t until Mormons were told that they weren’t Christians that they became interested in the label. Even then it took the LDS Church a long time to finally get it that the Jesus Christ and god head they espoused was quite different than the one espoused by the other guys. And it does seem that the Mormon interest in being *Christian* is because they want to now be invited to the party, even if they aren’t sure they will attend.
@49: Well, I’m old enough, and I don’t remember the church shunning the word “Christian.” I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but the fact remains that when I was a practicing, believing Mormon, I thought of myself and my beliefs as covered by the terms “Christianity” and “Christian”–because, well, in all sorts of obvious ways, I and they were.
Now this I don’t remember. In fact, I remember the temple ceremony where the protestant preacher who believed in a god “without parts and passions” was mocked for a fool and was shown to be a pawn of Satan.
I think it would be far more accurate to say that it took the LDS Church a long time to finally get how offensive and alienating it was that they mocked everyone else’s god just as much as others mocked theirs. That’s why that bit about the preacher was excised from the temple ceremony in 1990: so people couldn’t bludgeon them with it and use it as a way of convincing people not to join the church. And I know that it worked: in high school, one of my friends stopped taking the missionary discussions when he found out what Mormons thought of the god his family would continue to worship even if he converted.