It is an honor to be here today. This is an inspiring place because of you and the First Lady and because of the film exhibited across the way in the Presidential library. For those who have not seen it, it shows the President as a young pilot, shot down during the Second World War, being rescued from his life-raft by the crew of an American submarine. It is a moving reminder that when America has faced challenge and peril, Americans rise to the occasion, willing to risk their very lives to defend freedom and preserve our nation. We are in your debt. Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. President, your generation rose to the occasion, first to defeat Fascism and then to vanquish the Soviet Union. You left us, your children, a free and strong America. It is why we call yours the greatest generation. It is now my generation’s turn. How we respond to today’s challenges will define our generation. And it will determine what kind of America we will leave our children, and theirs.

America faces a new generation of challenges. Radical violent Islam seeks to destroy us. An emerging China endeavors to surpass our economic leadership. And we are troubled at home by government overspending, overuse of foreign oil, and the breakdown of the family.

Over the last year, we have embarked on a national debate on how best to preserve American leadership. Today, I wish to address a topic which I believe is fundamental to America’s greatness: our religious liberty. I will also offer perspectives on how my own faith would inform my Presidency, if I were elected.

There are some who may feel that religion is not a matter to be seriously considered in the context of the weighty threats that face us. If so, they are at odds with the nation’s founders, for they, when our nation faced its greatest peril, sought the blessings of the Creator. And further, they discovered the essential connection between the survival of a free land and the protection of religious freedom. In John Adams’ words: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion… Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people.”

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

Given our grand tradition of religious tolerance and liberty, some wonder whether there are any questions regarding an aspiring candidate’s religion that are appropriate. I believe there are. And I will answer them today.

Almost 50 years ago another candidate from Massachusetts explained that he was an American running for president, not a Catholic running for president. Like him, I am an American running for president. I do not define my candidacy by my religion. A person should not be elected because of his faith nor should he be rejected because of his faith.

Let me assure you that no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions. Their authority is theirs, within the province of church affairs, and it ends where the affairs of the nation begin.

As governor, I tried to do the right as best I knew it, serving the law and answering to the Constitution. I did not confuse the particular teachings of my church with the obligations of the office and of the Constitution—and of course, I would not do so as President. I will put no doctrine of any church above the plain duties of the office and the sovereign authority of the law.

As a young man, Lincoln described what he called America’s “political religion” — the commitment to defend the rule of law and the Constitution. When I place my hand on the Bible and take the oath of office, that oath becomes my highest promise to God. If I am fortunate to become your president, I will serve no one religion, no one group, no one cause, and no one interest. A President must serve only the common cause of the people of the United States.

There are some for whom these commitments are not enough. They would prefer it if I would simply distance myself from my religion, say that it is more a tradition than my personal conviction, or disavow one or another of its precepts. That I will not do. I believe in my Mormon faith and I endeavor to live by it. My faith is the faith of my fathers; I will be true to them and to my beliefs.

Some believe that such a confession of my faith will sink my candidacy. If they are right, so be it. But I think they underestimate the American people. Americans do not respect believers of convenience.

Americans tire of those who would jettison their beliefs, even to gain the world.

There is one fundamental question about which I often am asked. What do I believe about Jesus Christ? I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind. My church’s beliefs about Christ may not all be the same as those of other faiths. Each religion has its own unique doctrines and history. These are not bases for criticism but rather a test of our tolerance. Religious tolerance would be a shallow principle indeed if it were reserved only for faiths with which we agree.

There are some who would have a presidential candidate describe and explain his church’s distinctive doctrines. To do so would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution. No candidate should become the spokesman for his faith. For if he becomes President he will need the prayers of the people of all faiths.

I believe that every faith I have encountered draws its adherents closer to God. And in every faith I have come to know, there are features I wish were in my own: I love the profound ceremony of the Catholic Mass, the approachability of God in the prayers of the Evangelicals, the tenderness of spirit among the Pentecostals, the confident independence of the Lutherans, the ancient traditions of the Jews, unchanged through the ages, and the commitment to frequent prayer of the Muslims. As I travel across the country and see our towns and cities, I am always moved by the many houses of worship with their steeples, all pointing to heaven, reminding us of the source of life’s blessings.

It is important to recognize that while differences in theology exist between the churches in America, we share a common creed of moral convictions. And where the affairs of our nation are concerned, it’s usually a sound rule to focus on the latter — on the great moral principles that urge us all on a common course. Whether it was the cause of abolition, or civil rights, or the right to life itself, no movement of conscience can succeed in America that cannot speak to the convictions of religious people.

We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America — the religion of secularism. They are wrong.

The founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation “Under God” and in God, we do indeed trust.

We should acknowledge the Creator as did the Founders — in ceremony and word. He should remain on our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our history, and during the holiday season, nativity scenes and menorahs should be welcome in our public places. Our greatness would not long endure without judges who respect the foundation of faith upon which our constitution rests. I will take care to separate the affairs of government from any religion, but I will not separate us from “the God who gave us liberty.”

Nor would I separate us from our religious heritage. Perhaps the most important question to ask a person of faith who seeks a political office, is this: does he share these American values: the equality of human kind, the obligation to serve one another, and a steadfast commitment to liberty?

They are not unique to any one denomination. They belong to the great moral inheritance we hold in common. They are the firm ground on which Americans of different faiths meet and stand as a nation, united.

We believe that every single human being is a child of God — we are all part of the human family. The conviction of the inherent and inalienable worth of every life is still the most revolutionary political proposition ever advanced. John Adams put it that we are “thrown into the world all equal and alike.”

The consequence of our common humanity is our responsibility to one another, to our fellow Americans foremost, but also to every child of God. It is an obligation which is fulfilled by Americans every day, here and across the globe, without regard to creed or race or nationality.

Americans acknowledge that liberty is a gift of God, not an indulgence of government. No people in the history of the world have sacrificed as much for liberty. The lives of hundreds of thousands of America’s sons and daughters were laid down during the last century to preserve freedom, for us and for freedom loving people throughout the world. America took nothing from that Century’s terrible wars — no land from Germany or Japan or Korea; no treasure; no oath of fealty. America’s resolve in the defense of liberty has been tested time and again. It has not been found wanting, nor must it ever be. America must never falter in holding high the banner of freedom.

These American values, this great moral heritage, is shared and lived in my religion as it is in yours. I was taught in my home to honor God and love my neighbor. I saw my father march with Martin Luther King. I saw my parents provide compassionate care to others, in personal ways to people nearby, and in just as consequential ways in leading national volunteer movements. I am moved by the Lord’s words: “For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: naked, and ye clothed me…”

My faith is grounded on these truths. You can witness them in Ann and my marriage and in our family. We are a long way from perfect and we have surely stumbled along the way, but our aspirations, our values, are the self-same as those from the other faiths that stand upon this common foundation. And these convictions will indeed inform my presidency.

Today’s generations of Americans have always known religious liberty. Perhaps we forget the long and arduous path our nation’s forbearers took to achieve it. They came here from England to seek freedom of religion. But upon finding it for themselves, they at first denied it to others. Because of their diverse beliefs, Ann Hutchinson was exiled from Massachusetts Bay, a banished Roger Williams founded Rhode Island, and two centuries later, Brigham Young set out for the West. Americans were unable to accommodate their commitment to their own faith with an appreciation for the convictions of others to different faiths. In this, they were very much like those of the European nations they had left.

It was in Philadelphia that our founding fathers defined a revolutionary vision of liberty, grounded on self evident truths about the equality of all, and the inalienable rights with which each is endowed by his Creator.

We cherish these sacred rights, and secure them in our Constitutional order. Foremost do we protect religious liberty, not as a matter of policy but as a matter of right. There will be no established church, and we are guaranteed the free exercise of our religion.

I’m not sure that we fully appreciate the profound implications of our tradition of religious liberty. I have visited many of the magnificent cathedrals in Europe. They are so inspired! so grand! so empty. Raised up over generations, long ago, so many of the cathedrals now stand as the postcard backdrop to societies just too busy or too “enlightened” to venture inside and kneel in prayer. The establishment of state religions in Europe did no favor to Europe’s churches. And though you will find many people of strong faith there, the churches themselves seem to be withering away.

Infinitely worse is the other extreme, the creed of conversion by conquest: violent Jihad, murder as martyrdom… killing Christians, Jews, and Muslims with equal indifference. These radical Islamists do their preaching not by reason or example, but in the coercion of minds and the shedding of blood. We face no greater danger today than theocratic tyranny, and the boundless suffering these states and groups could inflict if given the chance.

The diversity of our cultural expression, and the vibrancy of our religious dialogue, has kept America in the forefront of civilized nations even as others regard religious freedom as something to be destroyed.

In such a world, we can be deeply thankful that we live in a land where reason and religion are friends and allies in the cause of liberty, joined against the evils and dangers of the day. And you can be certain of this: Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me. And so it is for hundreds of millions of our countrymen: we do not insist on a single strain of religion — rather, we welcome our nation’s symphony of faith.

Recall the early days of the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, during the fall of 1774. With Boston occupied by British troops, there were rumors of imminent hostilities and fears of an impending war. In this time of peril, someone suggested that they pray. But there were objections. They were too divided in religious sentiments, what with Episcopalians and Quakers, Anabaptists and Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Catholics.

Then Sam Adams rose, and said he would hear a prayer from anyone of piety and good character, as long as they were a patriot.

And so together they prayed, and together they fought, and together, by the grace of God … they founded this great nation.

In that spirit, let us give thanks to the divine “author of liberty.” And together, let us pray that this land may always be blessed, “with freedom’s holy light.”

God bless the United States of America.

———————
From Adam Greenwood:

Matt E. has the prepared text of the speech above, or you can read it at this link. The video is here and http://www.timesandseasons.org/?p=4094 A First Things writer reckons that the West needs a pagan revival before it can have a Christian revival. In Africa and in the ancient world, the theory goes, Christianity flourished because the people were afraid of the capricious spiritual powers and principalities and were glad to find refuge in a God who could love and be loved; who would free them from demons; who did not demand sacrifice.

I don’t know if he’s right about the conditions in which Christianity flourishes. Rodney Stark argues that the average convert to early Christianity didn’t have theology on the mind. Instead, Christianity looked good because Christians didn’t practice infanticide, respected women, and took care of each other.

And while its true that African Christianity is very much about the power of Jesus Christ smashing the the felt presence of the devil
–one hymn goes

If Satan troubles us
Jesus Christ
You who are the lion of the grasslands
You whose claws are sharp
Will tear out his entrails
And leave them on the ground
For the flies to eat.

–the African converts are predominantly from the big new cities where people feel their old ethnic ties dissolving and want to be part of something permanent. This fits better with Franz Rosenzweig’s notion that paganism is the religion of a People and Christianity and its new, deathless, universal People replaces paganism when the old particular People is seen to be mortal.

But no matter what theory you pick to explain the rise of Christianity over paganism, its pretty unlikely that neo-paganism will bring back a demon-haunted world, frightened sacrifice and propitiation, or the grim tribe and polis of the old pagans.

Neo-paganism can still spread, though. That recent Wiccan lottery winner reminded me that I’ve seen it spread. In happened in boot camp.

Besides the training battalions, Fort Jackson had holding battalions where new recruits waited a few days until they could be assigned to a training battalion. There was also a holding battalion for recruits who have washed out of basic training, either due to injury or glaring physical, spiritual, or character deficits. New recruits who were considered too hapless to even be sent to training were also put in this battalion. They were supposed to work on their problems until they were well enough to go through basic traning. They were often there for weeks.

Because of scheduling problems, we were held over in our holding battalion for a week. We hated it. But conditions in the wash-out holding battalion were worse. The recruits were confined to their barracks and a smaller area outside and for the most part had nothing to do all day and weren’t allowed to do much anyway. They also had no self-respect. In those conditions a grass roots Wiccanism spread like a weed. It was something to do, a little exciting in a forbidden-fruits kind of way, and it made a lot of the recruits feel better about sex (this holding battalion was disproportionately female) because they could get “married” by jumping a straw or somesuch. The main tenet–”do as thou wilt, an thou harm none”–also helped them feel better about it. Christianity, especially evangelical Christianity, can often help lift people like these but in the military the main function of Christianity seems to be overcoming racial, ethnic, and class antagonisms in forging a brotherhood. These recruits, largely failures and often female, were not interested in that brotherhood.

I don’t know if many of these people remained Wiccan in any sense. My own guess is that in the long term their variety of Wiccanism would be spiritually unsatisfying. Its too adaptable, too customized and customizable, to meet the real human need to find something outside oneself. But if they do remain Wiccans, I hope they start to take their main tenet as more than just an injunction to party. The hedonism of ‘Do as thou wilt’, if taken seriously, should lead to the moderation and restraint of the Epicures. “An thou harm none,” if taken seriously, should lead to begging Someone for guidance and for lifting the burden of guilt.

It is called the Holy Land for a reason – religion is inescapable. Even when you’re not in the Old City (where most of the holy sites are), you can’t escape religion — the Dome of the Rock and church spires dominate the skyline, you see orthodox Jews in their distinctive clothing, and you hear the Muslim call to prayer over the loudspeakers several times a day. In a place where the absolute and transcendent are so ingrained in the land and the daily rhythms of life, it’s not a surprise that people feel so deeply about their conflicting identities.

In many ways it verified for me, in very tangible ways, that extremism is in fact the religious norm, given religion’s claim on the ultimate, and that it is moderation that we have to explain and work toward. (Here I am borrowing from the argument in Charles Liebman, “Extremism as a Religious Norm,â€? Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 22 (1983): 75-86.) Of course, religion can also work for peace and justice, not just violence and exclusion—Martin Luther King was proud to call himself an extremist in the Letter from a Birmingham Jail, and used the same term to describe Jesus and Paul. But it takes considerable courage, creativity, and strength to work for peace – it is much easier to channel one’s absolutism into a desire for domination, especially in a historically conflictive locale.

The reason we went was for a conference called “Whence the Heavenly Jerusalem? The Politics of Sacred Space and the Pursuit of Peace.” It was about as interesting as academic conferences get, largely because it wasn’t all academics. There were several panelists and presenters from the area, representing secular and religious Jews (including two Jewish settler women), Muslims, and Palestinian Christians. I’ve never been in an academic setting where two women got into a sustained shouting match, in this case over the use of the word “holocaust,” but it was revealing as to the depth of feeling over history and words, and how those things have real meaning in people’s lives and worldviews. My paper, on Mormonism’s presence in the Holy Land, was well received but ultimately unimportant in the larger scheme of things — the LDS presence simply isn’t very significant over there, and I said as much. (It’s not often that I give conference presentations in which a major part of my argument is that my topic isn’t all that important, but I felt it would trivialize the real parties in the contest if I were to pretend that Mormons had some deep stake in the matter.)

Besides the conference, we had about four days to explore, which we took full advantage of. Obviously we couldn’t see everything, but we got a very good sense of the Old City, seeing all the major sites and many of the other less famous sites that we had identified as interesting. The Western Wall (actually the retaining wall of the temple, not the actual wall), Judaism’s most holy place, is really quite remarkable. We visited twice, and I had a deep spiritual feeling about it the second time — particularly as I sensed how meaningful it was to all the people around me who were praying. I said a prayer for peace as I stood at the wall; I was jarred when I turned around and saw a young man praying just a few feet away with an automatic rifle slung on his shoulder (probably a soldier on break).

I also loved the Haram al-Sharieff (sp?), or the Temple Mount. Non-Muslims aren’t allowed in the Dome of the Rock or the Al-Aqsa Mosque, but it was impressive just to be up on the mount where so much sacred history has occurred — from Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac/Ishmael to Solomon’s temple to Herod’s temple (where Jesus taught) to the current Dome (the third holiest site for Islam). It’s too bad the conflict keeps us out of some of Islam’s holy places, as I would have liked to have visited, less as a tourist and more as a fellow
religious traveler.

Also intriguing, although simultaneously disappointing, was the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the holiest site for Catholic and Orthodox Christians (most Protestants believe the crucifixion and tomb are at the Garden Tomb, which is outside the city walls and more pleasing to modern Western sensibilities). I was moved by the faith of the Lenten pilgrims, for whom this was clearly an incredibly momentous occasion, but it was so crowded, and several people acted quite rudely and un-Christian, that it was hard for me to get a sense of the holiness of the place. There was a nice moment, however, when a beam of sunlight from a skylight above shone down on Christ’s tomb. Most disappointing is that the church is in relative disrepair because the six churches that own it hate each other so much that they can’t come up with a plan to renovate and restore the church; they each have their own little fiefdoms within the church and are quite territorial — the tomb has had scaffolding on it since the 1920s because they can’t agree on a plan for how to restore it. Conflict is often the
most bitter between close brothers, not among distant cousins.

Walking along and then down the side of the Mount of Olives was a wonderful experience, particularly as I thought about how much Jesus loved to visit the Mount to pray and teach his disciples. When we went in the grotto at Gethsemane where some believe He performed the Atonement, there was a group of Asian Christians singing “Nearer My God to Thee” (in their native tongue), which was simple and touching. Seeing believers from around the world gave me more of a sense of the global reach of Christianity than anything I’ve ever experienced.

The most educational part of the trip was our trip to Hebron, which is a Palestinian city in the West Bank, but which was the first site of Jewish settlements after the 1967 war and which is now occupied by Israeli troops (approx. 1800 troops to protect 500-600 settlers). We went to see the Tomb of the Patriarchs (which houses Abraham & Sarah, Isaac & Rebekah, and Jacob & Leah), which itself is a sad testimony to the division of the place – since a massacre of praying Muslims by a Jewish doctor several years ago, it has been separated into Jewish and Muslim sides, so Jews cannot enter the Muslim side and vice versa (Christians can go in either side). This complicated things for our group, since we had Christians, Jews, and Muslims, but the Jews agreed to not admit they were Jewish (which was a poor compromise but perhaps our only option), and we went in the Muslim side.

On our way back to the bus from the tomb, we were walking through some very dilapidated neighborhoods. Palestinian communities are typically poor, but these were even worse. Even stranger was that there was a fence above our heads with all kinds of garbage and debris on it. My first impression was that it was a dirty ghetto, but then our guide explained that we were walking under one of the areas of Jewish settlement, and the Palestinians put up the fence above the walkway because the settlers constantly throw trash, baby diapers, rotten food, etc. on people walking below. In addition, the Israeli soldiers block off any of the roads near the settlements and patrol heavily, so Palestinians have basically abandoned those areas, which means people losing their homes and businesses with no compensation.

It was at this point that we walked past a guard tower, on the corner of the settlers’ school, and were stopped by the squad of teenage soldiers stationed there. There was no reason for them to stop us, other than boredom on their part, and even less reason to detain us for over an hour — we were clearly an international group, mostly Americans, walking back to our tour bus. But we were forced to stop and stand in the sun — if we were Palestinians it would have been with our faces against the wall — and they even slipped a microphone out the window to listen to our riveting conversation. Although the situation was less than ideal, it gave us a chance to meet several Palestinian boys, teenagers and younger, who flocked around us. Some of them tried to act tough, but one boy in particular was eager to engage us in conversation. He told us he didn’t smoke (as opposed to one of the “toughsâ€? who was puffing away), clearly trying to communicate that he was a good kid. When the guards finally let us go, he smiled and said, “I love you.â€? In the midst of terribly dehumanizing circumstances, it was one of the most deeply human moments of my life.

The experience in Hebron gave me the smallest flavor of the degrading nature of the Israeli occupation–there really is no other word–and the deep damage that they are doing to Palestinian communities. The only parallels I could draw were to the Jim Crow South and to South Africa under apartheid. This is not a holocaust, as some Palestinians in their anger are wont to say, but it does feature many of the worst forms of colonialism, imperialism, occupation, exploitation, racism, and the ugliness of brute power.

I am sympathetic to the Israeli desire (and need) for security, but they are mortgaging their long-term security and even their humanity for short-term solutions that are in fact only exacerbating Palestinian disappointment, frustration, resentment, and ultimately rage and hatred. It doesn’t help that the Palestinians spend so much time fighting each other that they can’t provide a unified voice against Israeli abuses, or to stop terror from within their communities. The policy of the US and Israel to undermine confidence in the new Hamas government is working brilliantly, although I’m not sure that a plan leading to brilliant failure of a democratically elected government and then a brilliant escalation in violence is all that brilliant.

Clare Middlemiss, President McKay’s secretary for 35 years, spent tens of thousands of hours of her own time in compiling an unprecedented record of his activities, well over 100,000 pages, with the intent of writing his biography. While he was alive, however, she didn’t have the time to write it, and following his death her own health deteriorated. Not long before she died, she conveyed all of her papers to her nephew, Wm. Robert Wright, co-author of David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism. In addition to her papers and other archival sources, we drew on some 200 interviews that we conducted with those who had known and worked with David O. McKay. The result is an administrative biography, primarily covering his presidential years, that presents in great detail the important thoughts, events and personalities that transformed Mormonism from a provincial-thinking Great Basin organization into a global church.

The chapter headings convey the breadth of the book: Prophet and Man; Revelation and Prophecy; Free Agency and Tolerance; Blacks, Civil Rights, and the Priesthood; Ecumenical Outreach; Radio and Television Broadcasting; Correlation and Church Administration; The Education System; The Building Program; The Missionary Program; Temple Building; Confrontation with Communism; Politics and the Church; An International Church; Final Years; Epilogue. The sheer mass of primary source material that comprised the final database (15,000 pages) ensured that much in-depth discussion would have to take place beyond the printed pages.

I have been invited to be a guest blogger at Times and Seasons, and welcome discussion of topics in or related to the McKay book.

Greg Prince

Certainly we share some things with other churches that grew out of nineteenth-century America, but I have a hard time seeing that we have much more in common than the temporal and spatial coordinates of our founding moments. But if we relax those petty restrictions of time and space a bit…If Mormons had existed in sixteenth-century Europe, you and I would have been called Anabaptists.

I’ve been reading for some time, as an outsider to religious studies and a Germanist who knows too little about the Reformation, about what some have called the Radical Reformation, which encompassed movements both within and outside orthodox Catholicism and the Protestant mainstream. In my reading I keep experiencing the shock of the familiar.

The Anabaptists, as their name implies, were rebaptizers. That is, most Anabaptist movements rejected the practice of infant baptism and the authority with which those ordinances had previously been performed, instead insisting upon the rebaptism of their adherents. They usually rejected any religious role for secular government: believers should follow their own convictions, not the religious practices ordained by the laws of the land and enforced by the prince’s sword. We share with the Anabaptists several elements of our history (temporary refuges in Strasbourg/Nauvoo, exile under duress to make the desert blossom like a rose in Moravia/Utah, persecution and martyrdom of the founders), and many elements of our theology have parallels somewhere along the Anabaptist spectrum (for example, in the relative importance of prophecy and scripture). Enormities like reflections on eternal marriage and trifles like using water in the sacrament can also be found in one Anabaptist group or another. Just as the Mormon pioneers kept travelling farther in search of refuge, many Anabaptist movements undertook migrations that took them far from their central European homes, into Russia, Canada, and the infant United States. Above all, we share with the Anabaptists the claim that we are the one true Church, restored in the last days after a millennium or more of Apostasy, and we feel the burden of the Great Commission to preach the gospel throughout the world. None of these parallels are by themselves unique, but taken together they suggest that we could learn something about ourselves by thinking about the Anabaptist experience.

For example: Many Anabaptist movements gained their initial impulse from the observation that the Reformation had not resulted in any improvement in human behavior. The Anabaptist solution was the ban: to remain the true body of Christ, they needed to bar grievously sinful members from fellowship until they repented. After the first few decades of Anabaptism, most who were baptized as adults were no longer converts, but rather those who were being baptized into their parents’ faith, with the consequence that adult baptism became a marginal element of personal religious experience. Instead of baptism, the ban became the ordinance that marked the boundary between believers and unbelievers. Some have suggested a greater use of disfellowship and excommunication in Mormonism than in other churches, but I think the better parallel with the Anabaptists is in the conversion narratives of lifelong members, where baptism at eight is often not a terribly significant event. What takes the place of baptism in many cases are periods of inactivity followed by a new commitment to the church and the gaining of personal conviction as an older adolescent or adult. Has reactivation replaced baptism as the defining moment of our spiritual lives?

If we agree that similarities exist between the Mormon and Anabaptist experience, what significance do they have? There are several possibilities.

1. The similarities are structural: any Christian restitutionist movement by its nature believes certain things, makes particular claims about itself, and behaves in certain ways. The realization that no church is true suggests an attempt to restore a church that claims to be true, and everything else that follows is merely a logical consequence.

2. The similarities indicate direct influence: the religious ecology of early America was shaped by Anabaptist refugees from Europe. Joseph Smith copied from their playbook.

3. The similarities indicate that the Anabaptist experience prepared the way for the Restoration: the religious climate in which Joseph Smith found himself was informed by Anabaptist thought; it didn’t give Joseph Smith his answers, but it did influence the questions he asked.

Coming up next: how we are not like the Anabaptists.

In spite of that, our view of history is closely aligned with the Protestant view, a view we take in with mother’s milk. (See this site for a Protestant version of history that looks a lot like what I hear from Mormons.) From that perspective, the Catholic Church was bad and the Protestant churches were good–or at least better.

We talk about “the Dark Ages” by which we mean “anything prior to the Protestant Reformation,” collapsing 1,400 years of Western history into an unfortunate and inaccurate phrase. Oddly, we assume that the great apostasy was brought about by the Catholic Church, though on our view the Catholic Church didn’t come into being until after the apostasy had already occurred. We read scriptures referring to “the whore of all the earth” (1 Nephi 14:10) or “the great and abominable church” (1 Nephi 11:13), and we assume that the phrase refers to the Catholic Church, in spite of the fact that scripture defines that whore as “he that fighteth against Zion, both Jew and Gentile, both bond and free, both male and female” (2 Nephi 10:16). Presumably that includes more than just Catholics, and not all Catholics at that. I strongly suspect that it also includes a few Mormons.

We tell each other that prior to the Protestant Reformation no one was allowed to read the Bible, though that distorts the facts (among them that reading was not a wide-spread skill until after the invention of printing–printing was barely 50 years old when Luther nailed his theses to the cathedral door), confusing who was allowed to read the Bible (individuals who could read) with who was allowed to give authoritative interpretation of it (the Church through those authorized). We honor Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, and other of the reformers, overlooking their dogmatism and complicity in horrible events. We ignore Catholics like Erasmus, St. Teresa, Thomas More, Ignatius of Loyola, and Vincent de Paul, or if we take notice of them, it is almost always to focus on their weaknesses.

The idea of a great apostasy is central to our self-understanding as the restoration of the Primitive Church. Without the Protestant Reformation, it would have been impossible for that restoration to have occurred, at least because the Reformation made it possible for Joseph Smith to believe that he could find an answer to his question by reading the Bible, and because it helped make new forms of government possible and, so, religious freedom. But neither the fact of the apostasy nor the necessity of the Reformation requires that we understand history in the black and white terms that we so often use. In fact, we are more likely to understand the significance of the Restoration if we understand the Protestant Reformation as not only its necessary precursor, but also as the culmination of the apostasy (in, for example, Luther’s version of salvation by faith alone, which entails that ordinances are not essential, and the denial of priesthood authority).

For balanced views of the Protestant Reformation, see here and here. (For an explanation of indulgences (you are in for some surprises), look here).

For a Catholic view of the Reformation as a whole, here is one entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia. And here is one for Luther.

In any case, I though I would share the facts of religion, as culled from this paper. Note that this is all from a 1996 paper by Laurence Iannaccone. I should almost put quote marks around it, but it isn’t verbatim so I won’t.

1. American Church membership has risen throughout our history, from 17% in the beginning to 60% today.

2. We have, in the U.S., about 1.2 clergy per thousand people. This number has been about the same for 150 years.

3. Since polling was available in the 30′s, a stable 40% of the population calls itself churchgoing (in a typical week). The only noticeable pattern is a drop among Catholics after the papal announcements in the 60′s.

4. 95% of Americans believe in the existence of God. This number hasn’t moved since it was first surveyed in 1945. Also stable is the number believing in an afterlife (71%), heaven (72%), or hell (60%).

5. Total contributions to Churches are stable at about 1% of GNP. This accounts for half of all charitable giving. Most volunteer work is also religious.

6. Religious belief and activity do not decline with income (though giving rises with income). Most religious indicators rise with education. But income and education do predict the type of religion, with more liberal, less-demanding religions drawing more from the wealthy and educated.

7. College professors are a little bit less religious on average than the population. This is most pronounced in the humanities and social sciences. The bastions of personal antagonism to religion in the academy are the same fields that have pushed the claim that society is secularizing and that there is a tension between science and religion, namely psychology, anthropology, and sociology. Those in the physical sciences, who actually deal with, you know, science, are comparatively much more likely to attend church and/or profess faith.

8. The fastest growing religions require adherence to strict rules. There is some nice, but simple, economic theory about why this occurs.