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Notes -
Right-coded violence reasserts itself (?)
It's sobering, that this morning someone might have asked you "did you hear about the 40-year-old Iraq war veteran who committed a 'third space' mass murder over the weekend?" and you might have reasonably responded, "Which one?"
(Insert Dr. Doofenshmirtz meme here!)
Of course, like any normal American, the instant I heard that someone had shot up a Mormon congregation and burned their house of worship to the ground I
crossed my fingers and prayed the perpetrator was a member of my outgroupimmediately wondered if the shooter was a right-coded wingnut who somehow blamed Charlie Kirk's death on the Mormons.(I've never managed to determine whether Tyler Robinson and his family are actually Mormon, or maybe were Mormon at some point, but nobody seems to care; apparently all anyone else wants to know is whether he was really a gay furry, a groyper, or both. But living in Utah seems sufficiently Mormon-adjacent that a psychotic killer could draw the association.)
So far, no apparent Kirk connection! However the Michigan shooter indeed regarded Mormons as the anti-Christ. Perhaps that's the whole story: he just really, really disliked Mormons (sort of like everyone else). This makes Donald Trump's commentary interesting; the President immediately declared that this was a "targeted attack on Christians" and was met with an Evangelical chorus of "Mormons aren't Christians" (which to me seems a little tone deaf, under the circumstances, but times being what they are...). In any event this is probably the deadliest case of targeted violence against Mormon congregations since the 19th century.
(There was apparently a bomb threat in 1993 that could have been a mass casualty event, had the explosives been real. Other than that, I'm not an expert on hate crimes but Google does not seem to think that Mormons are very often the target of such things.)
The North Carolina shooter got less attention (he did not burn down any churches), but that didn't stop Newsweek from digging into some peculiarities of history:
This fellow has quite a colorful record, and part of that record includes the fact that
This reads like schizophrenia to me, but on balance it seems more right-coded than left-coded, concerns over "white supremacists" notwithstanding.
All this seems to have the usual left-coded social media spaces crowing; they have spent the past few weeks assuring us all that right wing extremism is far, far more common and deadly than left wing extremism. But to my mind, neither of these cases quite reach that "political extremism" threshold. The Michigan shooting appears to be genuine sectarian violence of a kind rarely seen in the United States, and the North Carolina shooting looks like a textbook mental health event. Nevertheless, I have no difficulty seeing these as right-coded, for the simple reason that they were carried out against minority groups by white, middle-aged, ex-military men. That's red tribe quite regardless of what their actual political views are--indeed, whether they have any coherent political views at all.
This got me thinking about all the other violence that I see as a blue tribe problem, quite regardless of its ideological roots. The obvious one that Charlie Kirk himself occasionally gestured toward was inner city urban gang violence; that is blue-coded violence, to my mind, though it is arguably "politically neutral." A couple weeks ago I suggested that we should be paying closer attention to the role that "Neutral vs. Conservative" thinking has to play in the national conversation on identity-oriented violence. This weekend's events strengthen that impression, for me. I do not really like the "stochastic terrorism" framing, particularly given my attachment to significant freedom of speech. But neither can I comfortably assign all responsibility for these events strictly to individual perpetrators.
I wish I had something wiser to say about that. I would like there to be less violence everywhere, but certainly the trend toward deliberately directing violence against unarmed, unsuspecting innocents seems like an especially problematic escalation, and one our political system seems to be contributing toward even when our specific political commitments do not. I don't know if drawing a distinction between "tribe-coded" and "tribe-caused" is helpful. But it is a thought I had, and have not seen expressed elsewhere, so I thought I should test it here.
This is... tricky, I think, in terms of sensitivity.
On the one hand, Mormons aren't Christians. Or at least, they do not fall within any historical confession of Christian orthodoxy. They're probably best understood as a type of heretic; personally I put them in a category that I think of as 'Jesusists', that is, religions that take Jesus as their central figure, but which are too different from historical Christianity to be understood as the same thing. The point is that "Mormons aren't Christians", as a statement, is substantially true.
On the other, it is obviously breathtakingly insensitive to bring that up at this time. Mormons believe that they are Christians, even if they are, in my judgement, in error. (I realise that technically definitions can't be wrong; even so I can and do believe that they draw the line between Christianity and non-Christianity in an indefensible place.) More importantly, whether Mormonism is a form of Christianity or not is irrelevant to this particular issue. Murdering a group of Mormons at worship is obviously very, very bad. Christians ought to respond to that by condemning the crime while offering empathy, support, and compassion to those grieving. It is not the appropriate time to engage in a confessional dispute.
But to return to the first hand - a major public figure, the president of the United States, just responded to this by asserting that Mormons are Christians, and that this shooting is an attack on Christianity qua Christianity. Now I judge both of those statements to be untrue, and though many might argue the former, the latter seems pretty hard to dispute. It is not factually true that this shooting was "a targeted attack on Christians". If nothing else, ranting about the anti-Christ suggests that the shooter himself is a Christian, albeit a very delusional one. So it seems like there is value in clarifying in this moment that Trump's interpretation of the shooting is wrong.
I suppose this is just another situation where Trump really needed to keep his mouth shut, because all his comments have done is make a tragic situation worse for everyone.
I find the attempt to define what a Christian is to be rather impossible. Think of it this way. For example, you could say that Mormons are not Christians because they do not follow the Nicene Creed. But I would guess that the majority of 1st century Christians did not follow the Nicene Creed either. We cannot even be sure if Jesus or Paul believed in the tenets of the Nicene Creed. Yet surely if Jesus was not a Christian, then no-one ever has been.
Jesus and Paul both believed that God was The Universal Prime Mover, that is: there is nothing before God. He set the universe in motion. Mormons do not believe this, but rather that God was a human that lived in an existing universe, and through good works ascended to God status.
Is "God was a human that lived in an existing universe, and through good works ascended to God status" actually the belief of the average modern Mormon, though?
I would imagine so? This is a pretty unambiguous teaching which is routinely affirmed by their leadership.
What? No it's not, none of that is unambiguous teaching at all, let alone "routinely affirmed". AFAIK the last significant comment on this was nearly twenty years ago and was pretty much as ambiguous as it gets.
The "through good works" part in particular is totally wrong. As far as I know that has never been taught by any LDS leaders. We don't believe in works generally, not the way others would like us to.
What are the parts of Christianity that Mormons believe were missing for 1800 years?
Which differences would you accept as “yes these actually are the different beliefs we have”, that were so important that an angel had to come to upstate New York in the 1800s and reveal them to Joseph smith?
I could list a few very important differences of belief. The nature of God certainly doesn't count among them, both because it's not nearly important enough and because it's not even official LDS doctrine. As @MadMonzer says the most important thing is the restoration of priesthood authority. Related to that, I'll add:
Some less important differences that I personally find very significant:
You said the whole "God was once a man" thing was "a pretty unambiguous teaching which is routinely affirmed by their leadership." This is just wrong. It's not that I don't accept that as a different belief we have, it's just obviously wrong to anyone who knows what they're talking about. Given that I've corrected you on one single point of doctrine, it's hardly time to get on your high horse with this implication that I'm pretending there are no differences between LDS doctrine and broader Christian doctrine.
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Valid Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthoods, and the teachings about the essential nature of those priesthoods required to transmit them effectively by laying on hands. (In all Christian denominations with ordination, ordination only works if both minister and ordinand know what they are doing.)
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Is Christ himself a follower of Christ? It seems like a bad case to build your definition on.
The point of the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, at any rate, is to clarify and define the apostolic faith, particularly in order to draw clear lines that include the orthodox and exclude heretics. Obviously Jesus himself didn't know the Nicene Creed in its exact terms, but considering that the Creed is defined in particular reference to Jesus' life, words, and death, I think it's reasonable to say there's some relationship between him and the Creed?
In any case, as regards Mormonism specifically, the point is that when we talk about 'historical' or 'orthodox' Christianity, we talk about a large community or set of communities which has defined its belief in particular ways. Creeds are among the various tools that the church has used to do this. It is, I think, objectively the case that Mormonism exists outside of these historical definitions. Mormons themselves would accept this - Mormons believe that there was a great apostasy that led to pretty much the entire Christian world falling into error and unbelief.
When I say "Mormons aren't Christians", what I mean is that Mormon beliefs are outside of and contradictory to historical definitions of orthodoxy. We can dispute the exact words appropriate to describe that situation - non-Christian, heretic, unorthodox, heck if you ask a Mormon they might prefer 'restoration' or something - but I think the words point to a real fact about the world.
But I think if you called Mormons heretics people would have less issue. I certainly would. It seems silly to exclude Mormons when their service are so essentially American and Protestant and they were just one of many sects to come of the great awakening with a founder and a new theology but those groups are generally referred to as Christians.
Well, I don't think that being American has anything to do with anything, and imitating the form of a Protestant worship service doesn't seem relevant to me either? Unitarian Universalists are non-Christian. Sunday Assembly are non-Christian. At some point Christianity has to be about what a person believes.
Well but they celebrate the Eucharist, sing hymns, pray to Jesus, worship Jesus, put up Christmas trees, study the Bible for moral lessons, the content as well is virtually the same if you don't notice some of the books have different titles. It's not just the form is the same but the content as well. And the different scriptures thing while taken farther isn't really that unique. Protestants, Catholics and the Ethiopian Orthodox all have different scriptures. Their canon isn't the same. Catholics have Popes and Saints and pray to Mary, which Protestants don't. I agree Mormons fall outside modern Ecumenical orthodoxy. But I don't think their practices or even beliefs are farther apart then Catholics are from Protestants.
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Every Christian who professes the Nicene Creed does so because they do know that Jesus professed its tenets. If we didn't believe that we wouldn't profess it.
If you didn't believe that you wouldn't profess it, but how do you know that Jesus agreed with it? I'm no New Testament scholar, but from what I've read from it, I don't see how it would be possible to be sure that Jesus actually agreed with it.
The entire Christian religion is predicated on the assumption that Jesus would have agreed with it.
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Would it help to go through the Creed line by line?
It seems pretty clear that Jesus believed in one God, the father almighty, maker of heaven and earth. Did Jesus believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only son of God, eternally begotten of the Father? Jesus does not offer a programmatic Christology in the gospels, unless you want to go fairly deep into John, but even in the synoptics it seems fair to say that Jesus identifies himself with the Father in a profoundly intimate way, even if he does not spell it out in these terms.
Did Jesus believe that he came down from heaven for us and for our salvation? That seems pretty clear in the gospels - he talks about the Son of Man coming to save sinners. Did he believe he was born of the virgin Mary? Well, certainly he knew who his mother was, though depending on which gospel you read some might argue about the virgin birth. If we accept the Resurrection at all, presumably Jesus believed that he was crucified and rose again and ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the father, and in the gospels Jesus mentions the future coming of the Son of Man and judgement of the nations plenty of times.
Did Jesus believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life? Jesus doesn't talk about the Spirit that explicitly outside of the gospel of John, though he does mention the Spirit a few times. I'm happy to give this one a check though I'll admit that a lot of things are a bit hazier if you don't accept John.
Did Jesus believe that the Spirit spoke through the prophets? That one's easy. In one holy catholic and apostolic church? He does talk about the church or the community of his disciples a bit in the synoptics - I think that counts. Baptism for the forgiveness of sins, absolutely, if we accept the Great Commission as historical. That was his idea to begin with. And the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come - yes, Jesus is recorded arguing in favour of those beliefs.
It seems like most of it is pretty safe. If you're interested in the quest for the historical Jesus and you're skeptical of the gospels, especially John but also to an extent Luke (for the virgin birth), you might question whether Jesus believed most of this, but if you do accept the gospels (and surely Christians do), the Nicene Creed seems quite consistent with how Jesus described himself and his Father. It is sometimes more specific or explicit than Jesus himself was, but that doesn't seem fatal to me.
But then why are Mormons not Christians in your view? Granted I don't know much about their views, but from the little I know, it doesn't seem more different from the Nicene Creed than Matthew 24's Jesus quote: "But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."
Because I think that historically the Christian community has defined and policed its boundaries in ways that place Mormons outside of it - I apologise if that was not clear.
Did they police the boundaries of Christianity that way? Or the boundaries of heresy and orthodoxy that way?
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It's actually fairly common in many religious based homeschool groups to write out mandatory statements of faith that exclude members of the LDS faith, so yes, several protestant groups do gatekeep them out. Of course, my family left one such group when we figured out their history curriculum was littered with references on how the evil Romanists ruined things in history...
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Fair enough. I've probably underestimated the degree to which Mormon theology differs from mainstream Christian theology, cause of how much Mormons and mainstream Christians in the US at least largely seem to me to behave the same and live very similar lifestyles. Maybe I'm not aware of differences in lifestyles, either.
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I see you, Arius of Cyrenaica, trying to spread your homoiousian nonsense. Of course we know Jesus agreed to it, because Christ was of the same substance as God the Father, as decided by a council of bishops brought together by God's chosen representative on Earth, Constantine the Great. Being of the same substance logically follows that Christ knew of the true formulation of God's church, even after his death.
The Motte is no place for you or the Arians who hold to your corrupted image of the triune nature of God.
Almost good satire, but just a tad too obviously ridiculous here.
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