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Elantris was his debut novel, and it was poorly written, but the characters were likeable, even if most of them were defined by one or two quirks.
I'm surprised you liked the priest so much, since the Shu-Dereth church was such an obvious stand-in for the Roman Catholic Church, and the priest's whole arc is basically about discovering that his church is evil and the fantasy pope is a fraud.
Mormons apparently have a real grudge against Catholics - there's a great essay by an ex-Mormon (full of really annoying early-aughts LiveJournal memes and Tumblr-speak, but still worth a read) about how Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series is an allegorical Catholic-bashing Mormon fantasy.
For what it's worth, as a Mormon I didn't see this as anything against Catholicism. Sanderson has quite a few characters that lose their faiths (or otherwise grapple with them), all believing in very different sorts of religions. "Character loses faith in dominant church" is simply the story (out of those) which will be told most often because more characters will be members of the dominant church than any other. There's also something very Catholic about standard fantasy due to its origins in Tolkien's work. Like, the default assumption for fantasy is that it's set in a sort of medieval Europe.
In his latest book, the Stormlight Archive,there are another two characters who grapple with and eventually lose(?) their faith. One believes in a sort of Eastern made-up religion which worships stones, and another must convince the dominant church (called "Vorinism") that their god has literally died.
In Mistbornanother character grapples with a sort of "church of churches" which believes in all faiths and strives to remember all of their teachings. He eventually decides that the church is literally false, but that its teachings are both useful and beautiful. If Elantris were his only story of a character losing their faith, I'd perhaps agree with you, but given all the other stories about that that he's written I think it's pretty clearly not supposed to be any sort of point against Catholics.
I don't think Brandon Sanderson or Stephenie Meyer hate Catholics, and I doubt either of them intentionally decided to write Evil Fantasy Catholics into their stories. But it's impossible not to see the allusions. They almost certainly did it unconsciously, the same way anyone else deeply immersed in a particular culture will unintentionally write through that lens.
I'd argue Evil Fantasy Catholic's, because there's a hierarchy, are easier to write into a fantasy story than Evil Fantasy Protestant's.
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I haven't read Elantris, but I've read Mistborn, and what makes the religion particularly Catholic? I read big institutional religions as just that, big institutional religions, and I don't know that that would have to necessarily be Roman Catholicism, even if that's the best example. If I remember correctly, Mormonism itself is institution-focused enough to fit in some ways, which would be an obvious influence as well.
And whatever the case may be, in Mistborn, I read the worship as being for political reasons at the head (even if not in the rank and file), which is probably not true of any major group of Christians.
Mistborn didn't feature such an obvious "Catholic" church. It was a lot more explicit in Elantris, which even had monastic orders and a fantasy pope.
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To be fair, Dalinar’s arc is much, much better developed than the others. Part of that is experience, part of that is having several times as many words to play with.
I personally found Sazed’s approach to be the weakest despite how much I like where he ends up.
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I don't know why that should be, but it doesn't surprise me. Mormonism does have Protestant roots, and every new denomination that sprung up did have in common "At least we're not those durn Papists!" 😁 Also, we're probably the single biggest denomination in Western Christianity and we're pretty solid on "Sorry, no, you are not Christians and you are heretics".
This paper by a Mormon is a nice try, but doesn't work. No, you're not restoring the Catholic (meaning "small c" universal) church to the pure original before its corruptions, that's a staple of every split off sect since the Reformation.
I avoided all the Twilight books and movies as best I could, but by cultural osmosis I did imbibe some things - such as the sparkly vampires - and the Italian vampires, dressing in red and black, and looking like a stand-in for the Catholic Church. Of course they're the bad vampires while the Cullens are the good
Mormonsvampires 😁Catholic heretics, sure. I tire of all the people who say we're not Christians though. Even if we grant that the Catholic church is the one true church, with 100% correct beliefs, you still aren't in charge of dictionaries. And yes, this is fundamentally a debate about the definition of the word "Christian." State whatever you want about the beliefs themselves, but attempts to simply define them away just waste everyone's time.
Okay, generally I'm up for a theological fight but today I have a cold and am constantly sneezing, and it's pointless anyway. Mormons and Unitarians and Uncle Tom Cobley and all claim the mantle of Christianity merely by invoking the name of Christ, even in sects where Christ has been reduced down to "just this guy, you know?" and we're all equally divine and there are many paths up the mountain and besides what if you were born in a Hindu or Buddhist country and all the rest of it.
I think when it comes to the point of "all the doctrines of traditional Christianity are wrong, all the history of the Bible is wrong, we have the special unique extra true scriptures" then it's so different from the originating faith, it's not the same thing at all, so why call it Christianity? It would be like the USA maintaining the name of the Colonies long after the break with Britain and the monarchy.
I agree that a theological debate is pointless--I think we'd both agree that my definition of Christianity includes Mormons and yours does not. The question is which definition is more useful.
If they believe in Christ more than they believe in any other human, I'd call that Christianity, even if they don't believe he's divine. That's generally how we describe other faiths. Jews and Muslims probably believe in Christ more than people like Unitarian Universalists, but in everyday conversation it's easiest to call the latter Christians and the former two by their own names.
We literally don't believe any of this.
Most of them are correct, but getting just a few seemingly small things wrong can lead to big issues.
The history of the Bible is correct, and the Bible itself is mostly correct in its description of that history.
We have some of them, believe that others have yet to surface, others have yet to be written, and that still others have perhaps surfaced in other faiths but we don't yet know that they're scripture. I'd agree MORE with this statement if it was modified to [some of the special unique extra true scriptures]. Even then, it's less because those books are so special, and more just because they're newer and haven't been warped quite so much as older books of scripture have been over the years.
Well, I'd be fine with "The United Colonies of America" as a name. Going by our modern definition, they would no longer be colonies, but if they insisted that they were colonies, well, the UCA is powerful enough that we'd probably just say that "colony" now has two meanings. One for the original meaning of the word, and another for UCA-style countries which started out as colonies. Similarly, Marxism is nothing like what Marx wanted, but we still call it Marxism because that's just how the movement has evolved. We already do this with so many different things, and it's a natural part of the evolution of language. We still call the royal family the "King" and "Queen" even though they hold no power and are essentially glorified celebrities. We call smart phones "phones" even though they're exactly as phone-like as the original cell-phones, and far more computer-like than the original computers.
I'd honestly be pretty OK with some umbrella term besides "Christian" to describe non-Catholics, if not for the baked-in assertion that your church membership irreversibly determines your beliefs forever. Does someone with 100% Catholic beliefs instantly become non-Christian when they are baptized into another church, even if their beliefs don't change? What if they've never even heard of Catholicism and are just joining the best Christian church they know about? Seems silly to me to assert that these people aren't Christian even when they are following literally all of Christ's teachings to a T (pun intended and highly meaningful).
I can't speak for your interlocutor, but I would imagine that he would extend Christian farther than Roman Catholic. I'm guessing the key things that would be pointed to would probably be the trinity or maybe salvation-related things.
When people say Christian, they do mean more than "likes Jesus most," or at least I do. I'm not familiar with the Mormon conception of what Jesus is doing, though, because my impression is there are some pretty substantial soteriological differences, among other things.
I think the biggest difference is the concept of the Trinity. We still think Jesus is divine, died for our sins, saved us, and is God, but we don't think that he and God the Father are literally the same person.
I'd be willing to accept another definition of Christianity, but I think the Nicene Creed is a bit too restrictive. The entire doctrine of the Trinity seems unimportant to me relative to the doctrine of Christ and salvation through him.
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I can confirm this line of thinking having been raised Mormon.
I’d never even heard of “priesthood of the believer” until many years after leaving and so to hear Mormons tell it there’s
Catholics with their obviously political and non-Godly nicene creed and claim of papal connection to god
Mormons with their claim to modern day prophets and inspiration
the Protestants who didn’t like catholic rules so just made some stuff up
Funnily enough the latter is how Catholics will tend to describe Mormonism, while Protestantism is usually viewed as the result of being overly accommodating of some individual’s mental illnesses or more banal objections.
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Yeah, I don't really agree with the complaint that Brandon Sanderson's books are poorly written because of the prose. Prose is completely incidental to the quality of a book, IMO. I read books for the plot and for the characters (in that order), with prose only extremely rarely coming onto my radar. Literally the only time it happened was when reading Pat Rothfuss' The Wise Man's Fear, when I realized that while the protagonist was in the fae realm he started to speak in iambic pentameter. It was a neat trick, but otherwise meh. Not worth caring about.
My personal issue with Elantris is that it's just kind of boring. It's not bad or anything, but I honestly probably would've not finished the book if I hadn't already read Sanderson's work and liked it. I kept waiting and waiting for the story to get good, and it just never did. But it's his first book so I guess it's not unreasonable that it isn't as good as his later ones.
Prose isn't the most important aspect to me, though I do notice when an author's prose is clunky and their dialog wooden, and appreciate it when it's not. But when I say I think Sanderson is a mediocre writer, I don't just mean he doesn't write in high-falutin' literary style with pretty words. I mean his dialog is frequently as cringey as a dad joke, his storytelling is a trope parade punctuated by the sound of dice rolling, and his characters are collections of personality quirks referenced over and over. Especially his female main characters, who with a few rare exceptions like Vin in Mistborn, are basically all the same character. (If you played a drinking game every time the main female protagonist "blushes," you'd die of alcohol poisoning before finishing the first book.)
That reminds me of an old wheel of time drinking game - a shot every time someone expresses themselves through their nose - snorts or sniffs or the like. You're lucky to get through more than one chapter.
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Prose certainly can be important to the quality of the book. The Old Man and the Sea gets pretty much all its value from its style. The Lord of the Rings gets an awful lot out of it, with its ambiance of nostalgia. But yes, I agree that quite a lot of the time, I don't really care too much about it. People don't read Sanderson for the prose.
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