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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.
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!
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.
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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