Are Mormons Christian?

The topic is a bit of a digression, and it's not the hot topic now that it was when Mitt Romney was
running for president. Of course republicans are hierarchical creatures, so there's a significant
chance that he'll be back, what with McCain being four years older. At any rate, I've been promising
this to a friend for some time.

It's a question that I'm rather uniquely qualified to answer. When I took religion seriously, I was
a Mormon bishop, so I have a pretty clear sense of how the world looks from that viewpoint. Now that
I no longer do, I have no particular axes to grind, so I'm not bound to apologize for that view.

To ask if Mormons are Christian is a lot like asking if Fraptillians are Scushnarians. Until it's
clear what each word means, it's not terribly meaningful to ask how they relate. Each word is
surprisingly hard to nail down, and for the same reason, which we'll get to.

The most general useful definition of Mormon is probably "somebody who takes the Book of Mormon
seriously as a religious text", that book being an 1830 publication of Joseph Smith, which narrates migrations from the Middle East to the Americas of two families, one at the time of the
biblical tower of Babel story, the other from Jerusalem in the times of Jeremiah, author of a book
in the collection of Jewish religious writings.

In parallel, the most general useful definition of Christian is probably "somebody who takes Jesus
of Nazareth seriously as fulfilling the predictions of an 'anointed one' in the Jewish religious
tradition". Not that there's any doubt that Jesus was anointed - at least according to all the
people who wrote "according to" books. But a specific anointed one was predicted to be the
deliverer of the Jewish people. The defining schism between Jews and Christians is, first of all,
whether "spiritual deliverance" counts as "deliverance", and whether Jesus did actually provide
the former. The disappointment that gave rise to the distinction, the death of Jesus, spawned the
high level of Christian missionary effort that gave the modern world of tens of millions of
self-described Jews, and hundreds of millions of self-described Christians.

By this definition, Mormons are Christian, but significant numbers of Christians would find that
definition unacceptable. For Christians seeking to exclude Mormons, the commonly heard definition
is "someone who takes the Bible to be the literal complete word of God". That's a fascinating
definition, stunning in its naivete, even if you take seriously the idea of gods in the first
place. The first problem is to say what you actually mean by "the Bible". The word itself is no
help, biblia just means "books", begging the question "which books?". The collection of books
accepted by Jews is different from the collection accepted by Catholics, which in turn is
different from the collection accepted by, say, the king James translators. A more embarrassing
indictment of the concept is found in one of the books that all of them accept, that of Jeremiah,
who attacks the claims of the Jewish people of his day to special holiness by virtue of possessing
their version of the Bible, with the assertion that "the lying pen of scribes has made it a lie".
You won't find that in chapter 8, verse 8, of James' translation, because, well, the lying pen of
translators made it a lie..., but oddly enough the Jewish scribes saw no need to alter the Hebrew
manuscripts, which have survived. So, if you can believe the Bible, you can't really believe the
Bible!

(Perhaps the best way to slip that noose is to fall back on the line used by the Texas
superintendent of schools to kill the teaching of foreign languages - "if English was good enough
for Jesus, it's good enough for our kids". )

The word they really want you to notice in that definition, however, is "complete"; their
rejection of Mormons is the argument that the Book of Mormon purports to "add to" the "word of
God", and point to a proof-text in "John's unveiling", invoking curses on anyone who "adds to"
"this book". The Mormon response to that is two-fold. The first embarrassing fact is that the
same incantation is found in what Christians call "the old testament", and what Jews call "the
bible". The same logic would invalidate "the new testament". The second embarrassing fact is that
John's revelation is not the last book of the Christian bible. Quite a few of the other books
in "the new testament" were actually written later. They are not, traditionally, printed in
chronological order. So the same logic invalidates significant portions of well-accepted Christian
writings, and perhaps even "according to John".

Another amusing difficulty with this definition of Christian, is that it excludes as Christian
both Martin Luther and John Calvin, as "Martin Luther found it an offensive piece of work" and "John Calvin had grave doubts about its value."[32] in reference to ... John's unveiling.

The other line of attack on Mormons is the "cult" charge. Cult is just an old French word meaning
religion, but they mean by that something sinister and eerie. And there are sinister, eerie
aspects to Mormon history, which are strictly bush-league on the scale of, say, the Catholic
inquisition. In some ways, the comparison of Mormons to Catholics is most apt. Both are rigidly
hierarchical, with significant adulation focused on a single leader, Both claim an exclusive right
to control the "priesthood", an obviously related phenomenon. Both have a history of abusing that
claim for sexual predation, also an obviously related phenomenon. Both have buried all the (potentially embarrassing) historical documents they have been able to get their hands on into
secret archives. Both wear peculiar clothes as a form of priestly display. Both hide their gayness
behind virulent anti-gay rhetoric. Both have built significant financial empires. To be fair, both
have devoted significant resources to the needs of the poor.

Today, I suspect, only the most lunatic fringe of self-described Christians would call the
Catholic church a cult. We can safely say, then, that a religion is a cult which has grown rich
enough to hire a publicist. By that standard neither the Catholic church nor the Mormon one can
be called a cult.

Of course what is meant by "the Mormon church" requires some qualification. The organization that
Joseph Smith assembled fractured on his death. The two largest fractions coalesced around (one of)
Smith's widow(s), Emma, and Brigham Young. The former stayed in the midwest, the latter migrated
to Utah, spreading into Canada and Mexico, and west to the coast. Each denies the legitimacy of
the other, quite bitterly up until very recently. Part of the bitterness is that typical of all
family businesses. Somebody always ends up getting screwed. The Missouri church ended up being the
property of Joseph's family, while the Utah church ended up being the property of his brother
Hiram's family. (Even most devout Mormons of the Utah church on't realize the extent to which
their religion is a family business. At one point in the 80's nearly all of the 15 men who make
up the controlling leadership of the organization had in common a single first/second cousin.)

Of course Mormons will claim that the leadership is not paid, which is no longer true. The low
level leadership is still volunteer, But even in the low levels, the pay is significant in the
only coin that biologically matters - eggs. No, not chicken eggs. You may have seen the pictures
circulating, showing an implausibly ugly man in close company with an incredibly attractive woman,
with the caption "how to spot a millionaire". In Utah, the caption would read "how to spot the
son of a Mormon church leader." The sexual reward system was rather more formal and outlandish in
the last two centuries. Brigham Young had 50+ women. And there are Mormon groups that to this day
reward themselves and their supporters with the sexual favors of multiple underage women.

Which introduces the next complication in the meaning of the word Mormon. When Brigham Young
arrived in Utah, he proceeded to assemble a western empire. He nearly succeeded, and was only
thwarted by the California gold rush, and then the transcontinental railway, which brought a
massive migration to the West of people he couldn't control. To this day, his successors
completely control the state of Utah, with significant influence in Idaho, Arizona, and even the
coastal states. The senior senator from Nevada, of all places, is Mormon, and the
anti-gay-marriage effort in California was truly touching to see - Mormons, who have a deeply
racist history, and a history of denied civil rights, united with Blacks, to deny civil
rights to gay people.

The non-Mormon political leadership in the West was dismayed by the immense sway of the Utah
church in the West, and devised a means to curtail it. They needed muscle from the East, but
Easterners couldn't care less about power struggles on the frontier. What would get them riled up,
though, was polygamy. Sex and drugs always sell newspapers. The republicans came into power on the
"twin relics of barbarism" crusade - ending slavery, and ending polygamy. The "ending polygamy"
part was mostly rhetorical for the duration of the civil war, but also for some time afterward.
While he lived, nobody took on Brigham Young. Not long after his death, however, the republicans
used laws against polygamy as the tool for dismantling the power of the Utah church. This posed
a significant dilemma, because religions have to pretend not to change. Their claim, after all, is
to divine and therefor timeless doctrines. For a time, Mormons fought the denial of their civil
right to marry anyone(s) they chose, as well as their civil right to exercise their religion.
But the fight had never been about marriage in the first place. It was about the balance of power
in the West. There would be and could be no letup on the putative grounds.

Dealing with this ruinous pressure took three forms.

One was a claim to a new divine revelation, ending (new) polygamy. It was announced, but has
never been published. No Utah Mormon leader, including Brigham Young, has dared to expose their
rhetorical style to comparison with Joseph Smith's.

Another was to continue the practice, but secretly, and limited to only the top leadership. That blew up under public scrutiny in the first decades of the last century.

The third was to create small groups of colonies, in remote places in the United States, as well
as in Mexico and Canada, to continue the practice. Polygamous groups thrive throughout rural Utah,
with large numbers in (and, pace Dave Barry, I am not making this up), the Fillmore-Beaver area.
Even in Provo I knew a girl who married her sister's husband. All the parties involved were
apparently willing, and I would be unable to speculate that either had better options than the one
that they chose.

The majority market share church disavows these groups, and claims that the top leadership exception was renegade, not official.To the Utah church, "Mormon" means exclusively members of
that organization, in part working to distance themselves from these embarrassing relics of its
history.

But there's another facet to this exclusion, which goes to the heart of the central phenomenon in
the Jewish religions, including, of course, Christianity, Islam, Protestantism, Mormonism. It's
inherit in the concept on "one god". The logic goes like this: there's only one god, so there's
only one truth, so there's only one true religion. The consequence of that logic is that it
centralizes religious power. Religion emerged, recall, as a kind of "7 habits of highly
successful people" set to personifiers. If we were creating that kind of system today, there'd
be a "god of being smart", a "god of being witty", a "god of being strong", a "god of being nice",
a "god of being honest", a "god of being reliable", a "god of having big boobs", and so on, each
with its own temple, Come to think of it, we do have that - we call them "the discovery channel",
"comedy central", "ESPN", "lifetime", "judge judy", "golf channel", and "cinemax", respectively.

But the Jewish religion centralizes all that power into a single personifier. Controlling that one
legacy means controlling the entire religion. The key insight, which goes back to Nathan, is that
this centralization of power has a deadly flaw - it sets a standard which is impossible to
sustain. On the face of it, that's useful, because it puts followers in a perpetual one-down
position. No matter how hard they try they will never measure up. But it also means that the
religious establishment can never measure up, either. If you're a priestess to the goddess of big
boobs, then it's clear what it means to measure up. If you're deficient in other ways, that can't
really be held against you. You never claimed to be a priestess to the goddess of being smart.

So a monotheistic religion is impervious to attacks from the left, but defenseless against attack
from the right. You can't convincingly tell a monotheist to lighten up, you can very convincingly
tell them that they're failing to measure up. You can't argue that the standards are wrong, but
it's easy to argue that the embodiment of those standards has become corrupt and fails to live
up to the ideals that those standards aspire to. While practically every book in "the Bible" was
written by a successful practitioner of this attack, the first wildly successful hijacking of the
religion, using this strategy, was that of Jesus.

To hijack a monotheistic system, however, it's not enough to offer an alternative of reform. You
must indict the incumbent. "Scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites, a generation of vipers". When the
great East/West split of Christianity occurred, each bishop excommunicated the other.
Protestantism, in turn, sprang from an indictment of the Western church, a denial of its
legitimacy. Joseph Smith fits squarely in this tradition, claiming a vision where Jesus told him
that "their creeds are an abomination", referring to all of the Christian sects at the time.

We can confidently predict that this pattern will continue for as long as the Jewish religious
tradition has power worth hijacking. And recall how dominant that tradition is: a billion
followers of Islam, half a billion Catholics, hundreds of millions of others. A significant
fraction of the world's population. Each must begin with an indictment of the old; the old will
always respond by excommunicating the new.

So we can answer the question. Just as Christians and Muslims are part of the Jewish religious
tradition, Mormons are a part of the Christian tradition. Just as Jews reject Christians as not
being Jewish, and Catholics reject Protestants as not being fully Christians, Protestants reject
Mormons as not being truly Christian. Mormons clearly are a distinct bifurcation of the tradition,
while claiming (as do they all) to be the authentic branch.

If you don't take religion seriously, more than that doesn't really matter. If you do, you put
down your money and you take your chances.




32 Drane, John. An Introduction to The Bible. ISBN 0745919103 p 778