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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.
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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