On the other hand, the Mormon who wishes to understand evangelical Christianity takes up quite the task of her own. I’ll be the first to admit that we’re a large, unruly, confusing movement, and if you’re looking to me to sort things out for you, you’re already on the wrong track because so far I’ve been formally trained by Mormon scholars, not evangelical Christian ones. I’m still trying to understand all that there is to us, which is part of why I’m looking to attend an evangelical Christian college in the fall. I do know enough to know that if you’re interested in us, you’re going to have to study and understand the following: Arminians v. Calvinists v. Open Theists, Credobaptists v. Paedobaptists, Complementarians v. Egalitarians, Charismatics v. Cessationists, Creationism (of the soul, not protological) v. Traducianism, Regula Fidei v. Sola Scriptura v. Solo Scriptura, and Justification v. Sanctification v. Glorification. If you’re really dedicated, you can add our various beliefs on protology and eschatology to your study, and those are just the basics. It won’t help that some evangelicals are a little bitter about these divides and will misrepresent the opposing positions when asked about it. As Douglas A. Sweeney put it in The American Evangelical Story, “In short, when viewed from the perspective of our multiplicity, we evangelicals hold hardly anything in common. We are a people more remarkable for our differences than our union.”²

However, there’s more to consider as we search for the wellspring of our mutual confusion. Evangelical Christianity is a movement whose estimated adherents number somewhere between 700 million and 812 million.³ Mormonism’s boasted 13 million membership figure pales in comparison to those numbers, with Mormonism being about the size of a single Protestant denomination, say the United Methodist Church (12 million members) or the Southern Baptist Convention (16.2 million members). Does the diversity and variety found throughout all of evangelical Christianity outdo Mormonism’s diversity and variety? Definitely. Does the diversity and variety found within a single Protestant denomination of comparable size outdo that of Mormonism? Unlikely, and there’s a good reason for that. A Mormon who begins to reject some of the positions being officially articulated by church leaders or desires to see change within the church is still going to believe that those leaders are God’s prophets who hold the keys to the priesthood, so he’ll probably stay in the church. A Southern Baptist who begins to disagree with some of the pronouncements and beliefs of her denomination will likely shift to another Baptist denomination more suited to her beliefs, or another form of Christianity altogether. There’s a reason there isn’t a sprawling network of UMC or SBC bloggers discussing doctrine, analyzing the statements of leaders and suggesting changes those denominations could make like there is with Mormonism and the Bloggernacle. In Protestantism, it’s more trouble to reform your own denomination than it is to simply move on to one that suits you better. In Mormonism, you have no where else to go.

In conclusion, you’re confused by us because we’re big and confusing, and we’re confused by you because we’re not used to encountering so much diversity within such a (comparatively) small religious movement.

In my next post, I hope to cover the specifics of some of that diversity and focus on how we can categorize common strains of LDS thought and positions for the benefit of non-members in general and evangelical Christians in particular.

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[1] Fair is fair: I do believe that there are some Mormons who only study evangelicalism for the purpose of looking for the best place to hang a target. They don’t have the grassroots organizational presence that evangelical anti-Mormons do, but they do exist. For my own part, I try to be an adherent of the interfaith dialogue philosophy of Krister Stendahl: If we’re going to compare, let’s compare your best with our best, though I sometimes fail in this goal.

[2] Douglas A. Sweeney, The American Evangelical Story: A History of the Movement (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005), 20.

[3] See Robert L. Millet and Gregory C.V. Johnson, Bridging the Divide: The Continuing Conversation Between a Mormon and an Evangelical (Rhinebeck: Monkfish, 2007), 124 and Sweeney, 9. Sweeney estimates that there are 570 million Pentecostals and charismatics alone in addition to 242 million other types of evangelicals; however, there is some debate among scholars as to whether or not Pentecostalism should continue to be counted as part of evangelical and therefore Protestant Christianity or if it should be considered a new, fourth major wing of Christianity. See this post at Todd Wood’s “Heart Issues For LDS” blog for some discussion of this.

My brother’s new wife curls up against him on the pew, toying with his hair. Two of my little girls sit on his lap. A third stands on the bench next to him to better rub his back. He stares rigidly at the speaker and blushes. His wife smirks.

A morose priest slouches morosely to the podium and morosely gives a 15-minute talk he wrote himself. He morosely bears his testimony and sinks back into his chair.

My girls tire of my brother. They squall up and down the bench, bearing their testimony in ribbons and ruffles of the natural man.

Comment at the Junior Ganymede.

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
This is the first and great acommandment.
And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Thus Christ’s summary of the Mosaic law.

But Christ came to fulfill the law. He gave a new commandment:

As I have loved you, love one another.

Loving our neighbors the way we love ourselves is no longer enough. We must love our neighbors with the love that Christ has–swift, implacable, the love that moves the stars.

Comment here.

He tells the Nephites that they are “lifted up in the pride of their hearts.” . He says that “pride” and “being proud in your heart” are “abominable to him who created all flesh.” He is not pulling punches.

But then he says,

And now I make an end of speaking unto you concerning this pride. And were it not that I must speak unto you concerning a grosser crime, my heart would rejoice exceedingly because of you.

He then speaks against unchastity. So according to Jacob, pride is bad but sexual sins are lots, lots worse.

That’s interesting because, well, President Ezra Taft Benson said differently.

He gave a talk famous among Mormons called Beware of Pride. Like Jacob, he’s against it, but he doesn’t say that pride is relatively minor when compared to sexual sin.

In fact, President Benson says that

Pride is the universal sin, the great vice. Yes, pride is the universal sin, the great vice.

President Benson draws heavily on C.S. Lewis, who also thought that pride was the worse sin, certainly worse than unchastity. Remember The Great Divorce? The sinner who is afflicted with sexual sin (in the form of a lizard) is in a bad way, but the sinners who suffer from naked pride are much worse off. The sexual sinner repents and sees his sin turn to glory. The proud sinners do not and are condemned to hell.

Each prophet has a message for his own time, so they can contradict each other. But we should go out of our way to avoid dismissing *anything* we have that came through one of God’s mouthpieces. So how to reconcile the American prophet Ezra Taft Benson with the Nephite Prophet Jacob?

My opinion: the key is in President Benson’s statement that “pride is the universal sin.” Unlike Jacob, he is not talking about pride as one specific kind of sin. He is talking about pride as the common factor in every sin. If President Benson had written Jacob 2, he would have denounced the pride that led the Nephites to get wealth and think well of themselves, but he would have denounced even more the pride that led them to use women as status symbols and tools for the satisfaction of lust.

There’s pride, and then there’s pride.

Comment here.

[they] are necessary for you, after you have departed this life, to enable you to walk back to the presence of the Father, passing the angels who stand as sentinels, being enabled to give them the key words, the signs and tokens

So, the deepest, most mystical, most mind-blowing things are . . . passwords? Secret handshakes? Door codes? Jon Stewart says, “Really, Brigham Young? Angel security guards. Really?”

How crude. How earthy. How unspiritual. Its like God is some kind of man and salvation is a thing and the Kingdom isn’t a metaphor. Really.

Mormonism is the deal God makes us:
Less vanity, more reality.
Less discussion, more answers.
Less everywhere, more somewhere.
Less theology, more God.

A prophet has no honor in his own country, Jesus says. In Mormonism, God asks us to honor a prophet from our own country. He asks us to honor a God from our own country.

If I had to bet, I’d bet that the Navajo didn’t really used to do that, or if they did they didn’t do it to all adulterers, male and female, in-group or out-group, alike. But that’s not the point. Adultery is something that matters a lot to people. It hits them in the gut. And widespread tolerance of adultery is an acid to the institution of marriage. But our law hardly does anything about it.

Today Maggie Gallagher proposed a revived adultery tort (alienation of affection) that would make the other man or the other woman liable to the wronged spouse. Something like it sounds like a good idea to me.

I would also favor making adultery a prominent factor in determining custody in a divorce. Making adultery a crime again has its attractions to, though whether we should have laws on the books that rarely get enforced is a question.

My (limited) understanding is that a law to this effect has been in place for awhile but that the current budget bill overrides this law. The amendment that was just defeated sought to restore it.

I suppose a Mormon could make an argument for involuntary sterilization under some circumstances. Is there any Mormon argument to be made coerced abortion? I don’t see any, but the bloggernacle often surprises me. What about this amendment–is there anyone out there convinced that the United Nations Population Fund is doing such good work that the good outweighs the bad? Or has China been misrepresented and local authorities there aren’t really coercing abortions like people say?

When I was a law clerk, I worked on a fair number of immigration cases. Chinese often claimed asylum because of fear of coerced abortion or sterilization or severe persecution for having more than one kid. Under the circumstances, they would have an incentive to lie, of course. But much of the evidence, including some medical evidence, seemed credible to me. Still, the scope of the problem might be exaggerated, at least.

Maybe its the achievement of Godhood in family, you could make an argument for that. Although that’s pretty remote and abstract. We don’t have any visuals or stories about that.

In the temple, and in our central book, the Book of Mormon, and in its central passages, the 3 Nephi narrative of Christ in the Americas, the central experience is seeing Christ, and hearing his voice, and pressing his wounds.

Note that D&C 130 (the one on marriage) implicitly combines these two.

See also here.

http://timesandseasons.org/index.php/2008/12/relics-2/#comment-280569