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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.
I think you're muddling two things here. With the good thief, the question you asked was, "is he a Christian?" With the 60 IQ believer, the question you ask is, "Is that belief system Christianity?" Those are different types of question, and their answers don't necessarily always correlate. In almost all real cases they will, but I can imagine scenarios where they do not.
(One example might be someone in a coma or someone who has suffered significant age-related cognitive decline and is no longer capable of understanding or of holding propositional belief. Can such a person be a Christian? I'm inclined to say yes. On the other end of things, we can imagine a person who believes that all of a particular mass of Christian doctrine is true, but who, notwithstanding, renounces any kind of loyalty or obedience towards God, and in fact hates God. Satan is presumably such a figure - aware of all the facts of Christian doctrine, but nonetheless not a Christian himself.)
I'll also note that even granting that this 60 IQ individual is both a Christian (he is, to the best of his ability, seeking to know, love, and follow Christ) and a Mormon (he is likewise attempting to conform to Mormon doctrine and practice as best he can), it does not therefore follow that Mormonism is a form of Christianity. "If someone can be both a practicing Christian and a practicing Mormon, then Mormonism is a form of Christianity" seems like a mistake. For a counterexample, as I understand it, Mormons are religiously required to be teetotallers. It is obviously possible to be both a practicing teetotaller and a practicing Mormon. Would you say that Mormonism is a form of teetotalling? Or we can go past that - Mormons are not required to be vegetarians, but it is certainly possible to be both a practicing vegetarian and a practicing Mormon. It is possible to be both a practicing socialist and a practicing Mormon. That it is possible to be something else alongside a Mormon does not show that Mormonism is a form of that something else.
In this particular case, the argument would be that the Mormon understandings of who Christ is and who God is are sufficiently different to the Christian understandings of the same that it is misleading to describe them as instances of the same belief. It is possible to combine the two - that is, to believe in Christ in the Christian sense, and to believe in Christ in the Mormon sense - only through conceptual confusion. Our poor 60 IQ believer might be, through no failure of his own, one such case.
That 60 IQ person's belief system is both creedal Christian and Mormon. I contend that this "minimum viable Christianity" is in fact the definition you should be using. If a person can be fairly described as Christian, then their belief system can (outside of irrelevant edge cases, such as when identifying someone based on what they used to be before cognitive decline) be fairly described as Christian. Thus, it is not necessary to believe in the Nicene Creed to be Christian, nor do those who believe in a belief system that lacks such creeds believe in some other non-Christian belief system.
This is why I said "I don't think ideas exist outside of people's heads". If Christianity is a belief system, then nobody besides God himself believes in it. Every single human's individual beliefs will, to some extent, in some (possibly insignificant) particular, deviate from the true belief system to something adjacent and nigh-identical. Is someone Christian if they are Christian in every respect but think that putting a star on the Christmas tree is a commandment? Yes, of course. And if we want words to have useful meanings, then their belief system is still Christianity.
Do the ignorant majority of Christians who fail to understand the Nicene Creed believe in something other than Christianity? Do they follow a different belief system, besides Christianity? I contend that they still do follow Christianity, and therefore the Nicene Creed, and the Trinity, are not core, essential parts of Christianity as a belief system. Nor for that matter is the LDS concept of the Godhead--we will still accept you as LDS so long as you are exercising faith in Christ. You still meaningfully follow the "LDS belief system" if your attempts to follow Christ are within the bounds of our organized religion.
The creeds are, definitionally, an attempt to set a boundary of some kind. The function of the Nicene Creed is to define, as the 4th century councils understood it, the true faith over against heresy. One is free to disagree with the creeds, but surely to use the creeds as setting the boundaries of acceptable faith is simply to use the creeds as they are designed to be used.
I don't think the 60 IQ's person's belief system can be both creedal Christianity and Mormonism in the absence of some sort of deep confusion, at least insofar as we agree that creedal Christianity and Mormonism are mutually exclusive. I grant that deep confusion of this kind frequently occurs in real life, and in practice people of many religions often believe in idiosyncratic fusions unique to themselves, but the fact of human confusion and vagueness does not seem to me to be a reason to abandon the project of clarification entirely.
When it comes to belief, I think that people can implicitly assent to positions that they are not consciously aware of. A person who recites and assents to the Nicene Creed every Sunday at mass does, in sense, believe the content of the creed, even if he or she cannot articulate the meaning of every line. If you read much catechetical material, even across different religions, I think this is understood. I have read, for instance, both Catholic and Islamic books that frame themselves as "explaining your faith". As (presumably, for I am neither) a good Catholic or Muslim you have assented to this large body of doctrine, some explicitly (e.g. by reciting creeds), some by extension (e.g. "I assent to everything that the church holds necessary for salvation"), and some only implicitly (e.g. as logical corollary of something explicitly assented to), and I see how there is value, catechetically, in exploring and spelling out what that means.
The Trinity is, in principle, something like this. I think the average Catholic or Protestant knows that the Father is God, that Jesus Christ is God, and that the Spirit is God, but is probably less than wholly clear on what that means or how it's possible. They know these things in the same way that the New Testament states them. The developed doctrine teases out and says explicitly that which is necessarily implied by the top-level beliefs, so when a theologian of the Trinity presents the doctrine, it is not being presented as something additional for belief, but rather as an explication of that which the church already believes.
I think something like this is the case when we consider ignorant Joe Catholic and ignorant Bob Mormon in the pews. Probably neither of them are capable of defining the fundamental differences in doctrine between them. But Joe believes that developed Catholic theology expresses, in a more refined way, that which he holds in his heart; and likewise Bob for the leaders of his own tradition. The difference is that if I ask Joe what all these doctrines he believes really mean, Joe will point at the bishop or the pope or someone and say, "Ask him, he knows", and if I ask Bob, he will point at a Mormon authority. And at that point it is certainly meaningful to compare the mature doctrines that those authorities will explain.
They are, in other words, members of communities of faith. They assent to what their community presents for belief - and levels of personal ignorance, however lamentable in practice, don't remove that sense of communal loyalty and identification. In some cases we say this holds even in cases of individual defiance or disagreement - I think it's meaningful to say "Catholics hold that contraception is morally wrong" even though most individual Catholics (in the US at least) observably don't. In the same way, it's meaningful to say "Christians believe X about God, Mormons believe Y about God, and these are not compatible", even if particular individuals in each tradition may be ignorant or even defiant of those particular beliefs.
I just don't think the creeds are a good basis for defining Christianity. Most Christians do not understand the creeds; many who think they do actually believe in one heresy or another. I say they're still Christian. "Ask him, he knows" is a pretty good start to justifying why these people may remain Christian, but I say extend that further to God himself. God's nature, his physical characteristics, the precise meaning of the term "omnipotence", are not all that important to me compared to other aspects of God. If you asked me what Jesus' resurrected body were made of I'd say "pray to him, he knows."
Someone with this attitude and an extremely primitive idea of who Christ is is still Christian. Thus the thief on the cross is Christian even if he hasn't yet found a church, even if he's been an atheist for 40 years and just stepped foot into an LDS church for the first time because it was the closest to his house. Thus LDS people are Christian even if our doctrine is wholly incompatible with the creeds, because the creeds are not actually the authority regarding the definition of "Christian."
"Christians believe X, Mormons believe Y, and these are not compatible" is itself not incompatible with Mormons being Christians. There are doctrinal disagreements that are not heresies, there are heresies that do not exclude one from Christianity. The question is how big of a disagreement is big enough. We believe all the core things about Christ--we believe he is divine, he is God, he performed the atonement for us, his teachings are correct, he is the only way we can be justified and saved. The only thing we don't believe is that he's consubstantial in essence with the Father. I just don't think this last thing is a core part of Christianity. If it were, if creedalists were to be trusted that this question is so important that getting it right is vital to salvation, I think he simply would have been clearer about that in his sermons. All of that hogwash about grace and charity and the sermon on the mount is of no importance at all compared to ensuring everyone knows the nature of the Trinity, since a proper understanding of grace is not necessary for salvation, but a proper understanding of the Trinity apparently is.
We can keep discussing very esoteric principles and fine-tuning our definitions of belief systems vs. believers vs. believing communities, but in the end what it boils down to is that you believe God will damn me and my family for eternity because, while we accept his divinity and worship him, and accept his Son as our Savior, we don't have the nature of the relationship between them quite right, and unlike others with those same misunderstandings we're not part of a creedal Christian community. Does this not strike you as obviously wrong?
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