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I feel like this is an obvious place to taboo "Christianity," though of course--I can't imagine any self-identified Christians lightly acceding to that. In my years I have been fascinated to hear from Evangelicals that Catholics are not Christian; from Jehovah's Witnesses that Protestants are not Christian; from Wokists that Christians are not Christian. I have heard arguments about the "historical Jesus" and the "historical creeds," I've met "restorationist Christians" in the form of Seventh Day Adventists and Mormons, and I have to say: it sounds like a whole lot of wildly unproductive verbal disagreement to me. I've read my share of Kierkegaard and C.S. Lewis and others who have weighed in on the debate, I'm not ignorant of the stakes. But I haven't got a horse in the race, so to speak, so while that probably makes me a nicely impartial judge of the matter, it also seems like maybe the kind of disagreement for which none of the relevant parties want an impartial judge!
(FWIW, my own heuristic is that anyone who thinks Jesus was Divine can be comfortably regarded as a "Christian" for every practical purpose imaginable, and people who gatekeep categories with such practical value can in almost all cases just be safely ignored. Surely Mormonism as at least as much a "Christian faith" as, say, Denmark is a "Christian nation." I assume that I would probably feel differently if I subscribed to a different metaphysics, though!)
So it's hard for me to say that Trump's interpretation of the shooting is wrong, even though it is almost certainly clumsy. This was a targeted attack, and it was an attack on self-identified (if plausibly heretical) Christians, and it appears to have been an attack on their faith for adherence to their faith (as opposed to e.g. for their race or their presumed politics), which is a surprising and unusual thing here in the United States--though, crucially, not a historically unprecedented thing for Mormon congregations.
And I have to seriously wonder--did Trey Parker and Matt Stone have something to do with this? Did Hugh Grant, or Netflix, or FX, or Netflix, or Hulu, or Netflix? Other than the musical, those are all productions from the last four years--at what point would it be plausible for the Mormons to begin to worry that society is prosecuting an active vendetta against them?
One response might be that (at least some--there is no "Quran the Musical") other faiths also catch Netflix shade--Unorthodox and One of Us are relatively recent productions touching on Judaism, Midnight Mass and The Sinner seem arguably critical of Catholicism, etc. The Mormons aren't unusually persecuted, rather, Netflix (and perhaps Hollywood more generally) portrays all religion in maximally negative light!
And this is where I think Trump's comment becomes clumsy--or, if you believe some of the more extreme things sometimes said of him, not clumsy but deliberately Christian nationalist. This appears to be a possible case of genuine sectarian violence. How often does that happen, here? This Wikipedia list of attacks on churches in the United States is quite interesting to me, especially the "motive" column. "Anti-Christian" violence is clearly a thing, but it would probably be more accurate (and inclusive) to suggest that anti-religious violence is a thing.
Whether or not they are ultimately part of the "Christian" coalition, the Mormons are clearly part of the coalition backing Trump. I don't personally think Trump is actually trying to move the United States toward Christian nationalism, but if he were, it would have to be a Christian nationalism inclusive of Mormons--or else a Christian nationalism with no hope at all of maintaining rule over the Rocky Mountains.
Well, I think I was implicitly tabooing 'Christianity' here. What I assert is that there is a broad category of belief into which Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants generally fit, but which Mormons do not fit into. I assert that Mormon belief and doctrine is significantly qualitatively dissimilar to that of these other groups.
It seems to me that two things are going on when people say "Mormons aren't Christian". The first thing is just "you don't believe what I believe" or "you don't worship what I worship". There are implicit claims about differences in doctrine and practice. The second is "you are not my people". They are attempting to differentiate themselves from Mormons in a tribal sense.
Thus when I, for instance, say "Mormons aren't Christianity", what I'm actually saying is "you're not affiliated with me!"
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