Maybe regional differences then (CA, FL, and TX for me)? I can’t recollect them ever being specifically called “American Jews”, but another explanation is that I just never noticed it.

It’s also possible, given that the tribe of Manasseh was taken captive and the northern Kingdom destroyed, that they see themselves as being culturally Jewish. i.e. of the southern Kingdom. But I suspect that primarily this is just an artifact of translation and they simply mean Jewish as to loose modern sense of descended from Jacob.

I’d also quibble about whether contemporary Mormons call them Jewish. I hear them called that all the time in Sunday School.

Actually, many facets of Joseph Smith’s and later Mormon teachings about the nature of Christ have been echoed throughout the history of Christianity. Just a quick glance through the Nontrinitarianism article on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontrinitarianism) highlights several different interpretations of Christ that are similar to that of Mormonism.

Arianism – Core tenant is that God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit are separate beings. This strain of Christianity lead to the the Council of Nicaea which established Trinitarianism as the orthodox belief and Arianism as a heretical belief.

Likewise there are Trinitarian Christians who believe that Christ still has his body of flesh and bone: http://www.jesus.org/death-and-resurrection/ascension/did-jesus-shed-his-humanity-at-the-ascension.html

Actually most Mormons believe that Lehi and his family were of the tribe of Manasseh and typically refer to the Nephites and Lamanites as “of the house of Israel” or “Israelites”, not specifically as “American Jews”. Interestingly, Lehi and his descendants will occasionally refer to themselves as “Jews” in the Book of Mormon, but most members of the LDS Church do not call them “Jews”. This is probably due to the modern cultural awareness of modern Jewish culture and not wishing to conflate the Nephites and Lamanites with modern Jewish peoples.

To your point about inquiry, this seems the broader issue of expertise which is a big public issue at the moment due to the place of populist movements on both the right and left that tend to disparage expertise. However I think I was pretty careful how I responded. I think the leadership have experience I don’t and skills I don’t (and from a theological perspective a gift of discernment tied to their stewardship I don’t). That doesn’t mean I automatically think they are correct. However it does mean I give them the benefit of doubt. What I believe though is a trickier business, not the least of which because I don’t think belief is volitional. That is I simply believe or doubt but can’t choose to do so. I can merely inquire. What you are saying is that I don’t inquire to which I can but say I actually do read most of the critiques of my religion. I bet there are few you could bring up I’ve not already heard. Indeed at many points of my life it would have been much easier to disbelieve than to believe. Yet I find myself unable to relinquish my belief presumably because of the experiences I have both recent and in the past.

The big problem I have with your approach is that you presume that if I come to the conclusions I do that somehow I must not be sincerely inquiring. Interestingly this is the exact reasoning you critique in many Mormons (that if you don’t come to the conclusions they do after Moroni 10:4-5 that you weren’t really inquiring) So there’s a certain irony here to how you approach all this. You end up taking what I’d call the naive Mormon epistemological perspective. You’ve merely shifted how you apply it from a believing perspective to what I suspect is a more secular perspective. Yet the approach appears to be the same.

Finally you presume that the only way Mormons come to these conclusions is apparently due to peer pressure. That is from other contemporary Mormons. That is you don’t even allow for the possibility that people are actually doing careful inquiry and coming to those conclusions independent of their peers (including contemporary leaders). That seems quite dubious at best since it makes a lot of assumptions about how people, like myself, inquire. Why do you assume we don’t look at the same evidence you do? Presumably again because you think if we did we’d come to the same conclusions. Which seems deeply problematic.

How else are LDS people informed of the LDS Christ except through other LDS believers, whose collective belief is informed by LDS leaders? All belief in the LDS Christ can be traced back to Joseph Smith who claimed that Christ was revealing things to him, had a body of flesh and bones, was a distinct personage from God the Father and the Holy Spirit, and a whole host of rather distinct and unique things about Christ. It isn’t as if people are coming up with a concept of Christ that is identical to that promoted by the LDS church independent of contact with LDS believers. The rest of what you said is shrouded in LDS believer rhetoric that is really only intelligible to a believing audience. The concept of planting metaphorical seeds to gain knowledge would make sense only to someone who has internalized Alma 32. You write, “a testimony is a feedback loop with all sorts of inputs.” That wouldn’t make sense to anyone except an LDS believer. Even the very concept of testimony itself when used in the LDS context of “I have a testimony” is different and distinct from the way the term is used in non-LDS settings. Outside the LDS church, the term testimony means a formal declaration, often under oath, of something believed to be true AND evidence that testifies to something. For instance, “the witness took the stand and gave her testimony before the judge,” or “the ink stain on the shirt is a testimony to the leakiness of the pen.” While LDS believers use the term testimony sometimes as synonymous with formal declaration (i.e., “I would like to bear my testimony”), they often use the term as synonymous with strong belief, presumably a belief that was informed by the member of the LDS godhead, the Holy Spirit. In secular discourse, and even in other non-LDS religious discourse, I have never seen the term testimony used as a synonym with strong belief, only as a sort of synonym with formal declaration or evidence.

On openness to inquiry, I’m not taking issue with how you think you know. If you want to loudly proclaim that you believe x because of y evidence, that is fine with me. I really don’t think that you or Nathaniel or other intellectual believers are open to fully investigating reasons why the LDS church’s truth claims might be false or investigating why counterclaims that would falsify LDS teachings might be true (i.e., reincarnation, trinitarianism, etc.). I don’t see you weighing out possibilities as to why other religious explanations of the scriptures would be better (i.e., 1 Corinthians 7 is evidence that priests shouldn’t marry). Also, bear in mind that your target audience for what you write about concerning the LDS church is other intellectual believing LDS people. I doubt that your writings would fly with more general non-LDS intellectual audiences. This whole discussion originated over Nathaniel taking issue with deference to experts on spiritual matters. But that is how he treats the LDS leaders. And you seem to do the same. Clearly you’re more open-minded that many other rank and file believers, but as extensive as your inquiry might be, the result appears to be the same: a core of ideas taught by people you regard to be authorities are absolutely true, and you wouldn’t dare openly challenge it for a host of psychological and social reasons.

JFM, I’m not trying to get Clark to deny anything, but simply acknowledge that he is not as open-minded as he thinks he is with regard to LDS teachings. I see too many believing intellectuals try to rationalize what is ultimately an unrationalizable belief system, when the best explanation for what they believe is what the rank and file say; namely, I feel good about x authority saying this, therefore I believe.

But that’s not my point. My point was more your conflating epistemological concerns with openness to inquiry. That’s an important mistake. I can be completely convinced by something yet still open to arguments against it. I should have up my Peirce post tomorrow which will start to touch on this again (been too busy for blogging unfortunately the past two months). But I’d argue that if you are doing diligence in inquiry then what persists through honest inquiry that you can’t doubt is de facto something you think you know.

Nathan, Mormon believers don’t think that Lehi and his family were Jews and that those who supposedly saw Jesus?

You’re confusing openness to inquiry with justification to knowledge.