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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.
Well, that’s why this is a point of confessional faith. Saying “x is a Christian, y is not” is another way of describing what you believe to be essential to your religion in one way or another. It’s a faith statement of boundaries, not an attempt at a dispassionate analysis.
It’s painfully obvious to me that Mormons are Christians in a sociological sense — they’re very concerned about Jesus Christ (as they like to remind everyone constantly) and believe in their own interpretation of the Bible. Historically it’s evident that LDS doctrines have much in common with 19th century restorationism, but with a unique spin.
But I would also argue that their beliefs are about as distinct from other forms of Christianity, in terms that are seriously important to those other forms, as Christianity is from Judaism.
The big tension between Judaism and Christianity is that Jews believe Christians have fundamentally altered the nature of G-d by proposing the Trinity and associating Jesus of Nazareth with absolute divinity. And the big tension between Nicene Creed stans and Mormons is the former believe the latter have fundamentally altered the nature of God by rejecting the Nicene model of the Trinity, and insufficiently associating Jesus of Nazareth with absolute divinity!
It also goes almost without saying that the big accusation of Muslims against Christians is they believe Christians have lessened God by proposing that God can have a son who bore flesh, just as the big accusation of Nicene Christians against Mormons is they believe Mormons have lessened God by proposing -- at the very least, in the personal views and sermons of essential early LDS leaders like Joseph Smith and Brigham Young -- that the father of Jesus Christ once bore flesh. These are the kind of weighty debates that have always raged within and between Abrahamic sects, and divided one from another.
So it seems to be entirely predictable that Christians for whom the Nicene concept of the Trinity is the absolute most important element of their faith would look at the different LDS doctrine and go, “absolutely not.”
It’s also important to remember that the origin story of the LDS includes the belief that all other forms of Christianity underwent a Great Apostasy, which means that the authority of the apostolic faith and the associated priesthood were lost from the earth -- and Joseph Smith was tasked with recovering and restoring it. (Hence, discovering the undiscovered sacred texts written on gold plates.)
So it’s written deeply into the self-understandings of both Mormons and their Christian opponents that the other has broken in an important way from the truth about Christianity, even if Mormons are nicer with how they state it nowadays. But it’s embedded in the very name of the LDS church that it believes its membership to be uniquely the Saints of these Latter Days; “Christian”, as a term, just has less exclusive meaning to them. The actual equivalent question to “Are Mormons Christians?”, posed from the other side, is “Are Protestants and Catholics Saints?”
So, all that to say, of course Mormons are sociologically Christians. But Christians who are wary of applying the term aren’t idiots, and they know exactly what they’re doing, and why. And their position is far from unique among Abrahamic religious perspectives.
I suppose what this boils down to is the question of what you think is important in defining Christianity. I take faith and belief to be central. If Christianity is about, as I would argue it is, who God is, then a group's position on the Trinity or on Christology is extremely important.
I certainly grant that Mormonism is what you call 'sociologically Christian'. They are Christian-ish - they gather in buildings that look like church buildings (mostly; they reject crosses), they read from the Bible, they talk a lot about Jesus. I just don't think that any of that is enough to make a person or a group Christian. They themselves presumably agree on this principle, because as you note, they believe that all traditional churches have fallen from the faith.
My last conversation here was about precisely this though I don't think I did a good job of explaining myself.
We still think traditional churches are Christian, though.
I agree that at some point it's reasonable to have a dividing line. Simply worshipping an entity called "Jesus", whatever the nature of your worship and your idea of who Jesus is, is not enough to be Christian. On the other hand, was the thief on the cross Christian? Sociologically, absolutely not, but in truth I'd argue that he was Christian, despite probably knowing virtually nothing of even core Christian doctrine.
Categories in general are made for man, and when it really comes down to it, which category to sort a group into depends on what you are using that category for. If your main use of the term "Christian," like most Christians, is to identify people who you believe are saved (whose faith is not misplaced, whose doctrine about Christ is close enough to reality, etc.), you probably don't consider Mormons part of that group. But I hope you recognize this is a more complex theological issue than it appears at first glance, and the assertion that "Mormons aren't Christian" is primarily a theological point, fairly irrelevant to those who do not recognize your theology as true.
I don't think one needs a detailed knowledge of theology to be a Christian. The good thief addressed Jesus directly and appears to have perceived him to be the messiah and believed that he would be the ruler of the kingdom. The reference to the kingdom of God as well as the good thief's confidence that Jesus had done nothing wrong suggests that the thief was aware of at least the basic outline of Jesus' preaching. At any rate, he put his faith in Christ to the best of his ability. That would appear to meet most minimal definitions of Christian faith. (Some definitions might add something like "faith in Christ as God", but I think we can safely presume that the thief had that.)
I don't think that scenario is directly comparable to Mormons, though. The thief would naturally have been unaware of doctrines formally laid out after him - doctrines intended to clarify and explain the nature of what the good thief was privileged to witness directly - but ignorance does not constitute denial. Likewise for, even today, the Catholic or Protestant in the pews who happens to be theologically ignorant. The issue with Mormons is not ignorance, but rather denial of core doctrines.
For what it's worth, I specifically do not use the word 'Christian' to mean people that I believe are saved. I do not think that the categories 'Christian' and 'saved' are coextensive. There are Christians who are not saved (cf. Matthew 7:22-23), and there are non-Christians who are saved (cf. Luke 16:22).
You could draw a distinction whereby people who call themselves Christians, are recognised as Christians by the world, and appear in good standing in the church are not real Christians if they are rejected by Christ, and likewise that people who in their lives were never aware of Christ or put any explicit faith in him (like Abraham) are in some way implicitly Christian, but I think that does too much damage to the everyday uses of the words. My understanding is that all salvation is from Christ (cf. John 14:6), but that not all who are called by the name Christian partake of this, and that some who do not call themselves Christians do. The power of God is not constrained by human labels or categorisations.
My main use of the word 'Christian' is to identify members of the church. I believe Peter van Inwagen once argued that the word 'Christianity' is itself a mistake - there is no such thing as Christianity. There is only the church, and its various members. I'm not as rigid about the word as he is, and I'm happy to use the word 'Christianity' to mean 'that which the church professes', but I think there's something to be said for the basic point. Christians are the fellowship or the community of those who follow Christ - or perhaps more properly, those who follow the triune God, because I would probably exclude Christian atheists. I exclude Mormons because I do not understand them to follow Christ in the sense that Christians do. As the Catholic document you cited says, the Mormon understanding of who 'the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit' are is so divergent 'from the Christian meaning' as to not even be heresy. The utility of the ecumenical creeds is as guardrails - they lay out a basic minimum understanding of who God is and of the economy of salvation.
Not Tenaz but my take, and I think you even concede this at one point, is that the word Christian itself is best understood as a perspective looking from the outside, not an inward one of self-identity. A Muslim or atheist will feel labeling Christians as such quite natural, because the doctrine emphasizes, well, Christ. I feel even better about this definition because it’s the one the Bible itself uses! At least initially. Note Acts 11, the first usage, is strongly implied to be a moniker given by the crowds to these new-breed not-quite-Jews, and even predates the official expansion to Gentiles.
One could argue, actually, that 1 Corinthians 1:12 condemns the name 'Christian', at least implicitly. The word 'Christian' suggests the party of Christ, as it were, over against other parties or factions, and Paul expressly condemns people quarrelling and identifying themselves as belonging to Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or Christ.
The endonyms that we hear for early believers in the New Testament are terms like 'the believers', 'the brothers', 'the saints', 'the disciples', and so on. These are not terms that would be used by outsiders, or which might lead to confusion.
(I believe that the most common term the Qur'an uses for Muslims is not in fact Muslim, but mu'min, from iman, faith, and means 'believer' or 'faithful'. If Christians and Muslims both publicly called themselves the Believers, it would be unnecessarily confusing.)
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My point is not that ignorant people can be Christian (though this is true). My point is that your use of the word is primarily theological; it has more to do with your beliefs regarding our standing before God than with anything else.
There's so obviously more to it than this, though. If it were really about "following Christ" then the majority of Mormons would be Christian. The parts of our doctrine so repugnant to you, such as our belief in the Godhead vs. the Trinity, are utterly beyond not only the awareness, but probably even the mental capacity, of the vast majority of both Christians and Mormons. If you actually believed the creeds were a "basic minimum understanding" then you'd say the vast majority of Christians aren't Christian either. Those guardrails aren't working, yet you consider the people they have failed Christians nonetheless. Perhaps there actually is a deeper, more meaningful definition of "Christian" to you than the one you've put forward here.
Are you doing ok? I know we just had a long back-and-forth about the nature of God (except you might not agree with the word Nature, so just substitute what-God-is-ness.) And this is the "arguing about things politely" website. But I want to express to you how sad I was to hear the news, and how much I hope that LDS and Catholics can stand against desecration of safe and holy places.
There are some Protestants who do not consider Catholics to be Christians because we don't "Believe in the Gospel" which is reduced to Sola Fide. Who gets to be The Gatekeeper of what a Christian is? I don't know. I know you're not Catholic and I'm not LDS - that's something that we get to decide within our sects. But the term Christianity is so broad that no single group can claim the authority to gatekeep. If you consider yourself Christian, then that's good enough for me.
The Medievals believed Islam to be a Christian Heresy. If muslims count, LDS certainly does.
Thanks, I appreciate it. I'm doing fine.
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I... don't see how one can comment on the meaning of the word 'Christian' without being primarily theological. 'Christian' is a theological term.
I am actually, like C. S. Lewis, willing to bite the bullet on many, or even most, self-proclaimed Christians not really being Christians. I'm not hugely strict about this in practice where I tend to think that any good-faith attempt to genuinely know and follow God, to the best of one's limited ability, is acceptable worship, and in that light, sure, there are no doubt individual Mormons who render that worship. I don't claim that no Mormons are saved or anything like that. But if you ask me to accept that most Americans who call themselves Christians are not meaningfully Christian, then I will do that. That is probably and unfortunately the case.
(I am not quite as pessimistic as your linked study - I think survey design can be unreliable, most people struggle with theological language, and there is often a sensus fidei that exceeds the ability of people to explicate their faith. If a Catholic says the Nicene Creed every Sunday at mass, sincerely intending to believe it, but when asked to define the Trinity during the week descends into waffle, I would extend some charity. The linked paper doesn't include the questions themselves and has some red flags for me - who the heck are 'Integrated Disciples'? they possess a 'biblical worldview'? huh? - so I'm skeptical. Nonetheless, no one could deny that ignorance or confusion around the Trinity is very common.)
So perhaps it would be helpful to refine a little. I claim that Mormonism, which is to say that which the Mormon church presents for belief, is not a form of Christianity.
Others want to use "Christian" as a group signifier, but your definition here is closer to something that would exclude Judas and include devout atheists who were baptized as children. It can also be a theological term without referring to one's standing before God--you could argue that being Christian means believing in certain key characteristics about Jesus.
Yeah, I couldn't find any others, but the linked study definitely isn't great.
Here we differ. If the thief on the cross practiced a form of Christianity (as I believe he did) then we can accept extreme diversions from and gaps in knowledge of Truth, and still ultimately call a belief system Christianity. Yes, the thief was perhaps justifiably ignorant where later groups are not, but belief systems are not ignorant or informed. They are ideas, they are the things about which we are ignorant or informed. A belief system is either true or false, valid or invalid, Christianity or not Christianity. You could say something like "nobody nowadays is as ignorant as the thief on the cross, and therefore no practicing Mormon is a valid Christian" but this is just not true--the thief was a whole lot more informed than, for example, your average 2-week-old.
In other words, let's say you have a 60 IQ and have only ever been exposed to Mormonism. You don't even know what the godhead or the trinity are; you just believe in God and his Son in very general terms. Is that belief system Christianity? Is it Mormonism? I don't think ideas exist outside of people's heads, so if someone can be both a practicing Christian and a practicing Mormon, then Mormonism is a form of Christianity.
Fair enough, I just hope you keep this in mind the next time this debate comes up.
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I think this is the key issue we've been going round on. Mormons don't see Christianity as synonymous with the true faith. The see Christianity as a big tent full of many denominations and their own Church as the true faith within that big tent. This is also why I don't think the trinity is a useful tenant for determining what is and isn't Christianity. Because from extremely early on the umbrella of Christianity. This is my personal view as well. I see Christianity as a big movement of many mutually exclusive Christianities even from the beginning. (see Paul's letters) And I don't think removing them from the category of Christianity is much use, we'd just have to come up with another term to categorize these Jesus worshipping movements. Also for someone without a Christian background the trinity may not even seem that that important. To someone not primed to see it, the father son and holy ghost being one in purpose but not in being versus different aspects of God together and separate in divine mystery, doesn't seem THAT different. Especially compared to things like worshipping graven images or praying to the saints and Mary.
Just as many Sunni Muslims try to exclude the Shia from Islam and insist they aren't Muslims. This just devolves into silly language games. The Ebionites, the Marcionites, the Arians obviously all fit under some category with the Orthodox. Virtually every university and textbook everywhere calls that thing Christianity and if we exclude them from it then we need to create an umbrella term for them. Which again seems redundant when we already have terms for these. But this debate actually only seems to come up in relation to modern American religions because Mormons seem weird to Americans and nobody uses they word Heretic anymore so they get excluded from Christianity.
But I think Christianity is too big a tent to do that. Fundamentally woke high church Episcopalians and Independent Fundamentalist Baptists believe extremely different things and live extremely different lives if they can be under the umbrella of Christianity so can the Mormons because the word Christianity does not describe one particular tradition but rather many disparate traditions which is the whole reason we have denominations in the first place!
The reason I see it as pretty central is that basically the Trinity goes back pretty far in the historical record, and was dogmatically declared around the same time the New Testament was canonized. It’s really hard to claim one without the other. If you’re calling the New Testament without reservations The Canon as opposed to other writings, it’s really hard to consistently also say “but they are wrong about these other things.”
Sure, but that also gets to the problem with Protestants. Treating a book as infallible that was created by a church you reject. You could make some apologism for this by pointing out the books of the Bible were really written separately until they were compiled but yeah I think it's a big problem for anyone not Catholic or Orthodox.
I think it depends on the flavor of Protestant. If you’re talking about low church Bible thumping evangelicals, I get it, but I think most high church Protestants respect the councils and the dogmas of the early church. The Anglo Catholic movement actually accepts the dogmas and canons of the first seven councils so they’d be pretty in line with the Roman Church and the various Orthodox Churches. Lutherans still informally accept quite a bit of that dogma through the Augustine Confessions and Book of Concord.
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Eh. This isn't really true. "The true faith" is faith in Christ, meaning love, obedience, loyalty, worship, and trust in the Son of God, qualities not confined to people in any particular religion. The LDS church doctrinally being "the true church" doesn't mean we have a monopoly on truth or even that in every respect we have more truth than any other denomination; it means we have the most truth and, perhaps even more important, God's authority to establish his kingdom on earth. This is quite comparable to the Catholic view of the nature of the Catholic church.
Critically, it is a claim that you are the only church with real priests whose ordinances (sacraments to Catholics, cleric spells to unchurched nerds) actually work.
American folk Christianity avoids the question, but the combination of scaraments that actually work, ordained ministry, and apostolic succession (as believed by Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, LDS and some Lutherans) gives "real Church" vs "fake Church" a different and more significant meaning that it has in sola fide priesthood-of-all-believers Protestantism.
True, but our belief in a single authorized baptism is also accompanied by a belief that said baptism can be accepted even after death, so it’s not exclusionary as a complete package! And you really do need to include both, seems to me. It’s not as if this is the only very significant theological difference among Christian sects.
Well, qualified in one respect. It’s not as if we think that God ignores the prayers or genuine authentic intentions toward God of others. Functionally someone who confesses a sin to a Catholic priest, exercises faith in Christ, repents of their ways, is essentially forgiven (or will be) - just the priest didn’t actually serve an official role in it. So I guess I still don’t quite see it. Perhaps similar to how many Christian sects have walked back beliefs that the unbaptized can literally never enter heaven and won’t get a chance to, Mormons have also toned back the emphasis on how other sects are all extremely misled people. Early LDS history, (in)famously, was not quite the same - many especially older Mormons even thought of the Catholic Church as a somewhat devilish deception. So in that sense there’s an argument to be made that this distinction is no longer as true as it used to be.
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An even better comparison is Ahmadiyya, who claim to be Muslims, but every other denomination rejects them.
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Nitpick: in my experience Sunni Muslims and Shia Muslims do not try to exclude each other from Islam. In Islam there is a very strong consensus that anybody who says and sincerely believes the shahada is a Muslim. Sunni-Shia differences are obviously very important and a major driver of violence even today, and heaven help you if try to change from one to the other, but I have never heard a Muslim trying to suggest that a member of the other party is not a Muslim.
That said, I don't like the analogy to early Christianity that much because I think what we're looking at in early Christianity is a young tradition forming itself, and as part of that formation, it went through a process of debating and coming to understand its own doctrine. 'Christianity' as we know it today is largely a product of that process.
I'd suggest that most people have an intuitive sense that there is a point at which a Christian-derived or Christian-influenced religious movement ceases to be Christianity. The most famous example is probably Islam itself. We know that the first Christians to come into contact with Islam understood it to be a heresy - Muhammad was a deluded man who misunderstood the scriptures and preached his own revelation. I think we have a spectrum of dissent where, say, Protestantism is clearly Christianity, Islam is clearly not Christianity, and in the middle there's a grey area. Pentecostals? Christian. Adventists? Christian. Jehovah's Witnesses? Ehh, getting pretty heretical. Mormons? A bit further out. Candomblé? Influenced by Christianity but definitely not. And so on. I understand that different people will, in good faith, draw the Christian/non-Christian line in different places.
My personal model would be concentric circles, if that makes sense? At the centre we have 'Christianity', which I define in terms of the ecumenical creeds. It contains Catholicism, Protestantism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and maybe Oriental Orthodoxy. The next circle out is what I term 'Jesusism', which includes any religious tradition in which Jesus Christ is the central or decisive figure: this includes Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Iglesia ni Cristo, Hong Xiuquan, and so on. The next circle after that is 'Jesus-influenced': this includes any religious tradition in which Jesus is a major figure, but not the central one. This would include Islam, the Baha'i Faith, CaoDai, and so on. Finally, beyond that, we have religions that have nothing to do with Jesus whatsoever: Hinduism, Daoism, Scientology, and so forth.
But I grant that there are plenty of people for whom 'Christianity' means everything within my 'Jesusist' circle.
None of these other guys believe in the atonement, though, or that Jesus is God. Really LDS is just its own thing, not neatly slotted into a category of churches that see Jesus as a cool holy guy.
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Ackchyually, some Hindus consider Jesus to have been an avatar of Vishnu.
Would you call those Hindus Christian?
I'd put them in the 'Jesus-influenced' circle, or possibly add an intermediate circle between it and the outermost category.
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Ethnic cleansings have been done for precisely that distinction. The doers may have been 'bad' muslims doctrinally as well as ethically, and the determinations often coincide with political differences people feel worth killing over, but it has (and, occasionally, does) happen even if it's not the civilized norm.
Sunni and Shia have absolutely killed each other over the distinction, yes. There are rivers of blood between those parties. I'm just not aware of cases of Sunni or Shia declaring the other party not Muslims.
Them not being Real Muslims is the justification for why killing them is okay / moral / righteous, rather than theological fratricide. Sometimes its claimed on grounds of apostasy, sometimes that they are heathens, and sometimes qualified theological language is thrown out the door as well as any religious principles of how you should/should not treat other Muslims.
It's the same twisting of categories for why [insert denomination of Christianity] isn't Christian. Tailor a definition of the [Good Group] to some theological claim of [Subgroup], declare opponent outside the bounds of [Good Group], categorical ejection removes the target from the beneificary/protected claimed macro-group.
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