1—As many people noted, the government really shouldn’t be involved in deciding who is or isn’t a Christian.
2—I don’t believe leaving us off of the Department of Defense’s new list of Christian churches was a simple mistake. This was a policy announced by the Secretary of Defense himself. Cabinet secretaries have communications staffs that get paid to notice things like this in advance. Notably, the solution was not to apologize and add a few letters to our designation, but to drop “Christian” from everyone else. It’s apparently better for no one to be Christian, than for Mormons to be Christians.
3—Focusing on petty stuff like this, while we’re squandering American power built up over generations as American aircraft are going down while we lose a war in the Persian Gulf, is what makes Pete Hegseth such a bad Secretary of Defense. He is unqualified for his job and has constantly shown poor judgment.
4—Hegseth took his wife and six kids to Europe with him last week. That’s great! I firmly support taking your family to Europe. It’s a beautiful, interesting place, and you see things in a whole new way by having kids with you. If you’re going to be mad at Pete Hegseth, don’t be mad about this.
5—It’s useful to have a senator or three to represent your interests. It turns out that the separation of powers, checks and balances, and representative government are wonderful things. You might even call them inspired. Voters were unhappy, so senators made some noise, and policies changed by the end of the day (and before anyone had to answer awkward questions at their next oversight hearing, or any nominations got delayed).
6—Social media – which is full of the dumbest responses imaginable by the most superficial and thoughtlessly cruel people on Earth – has not been good for Mike Lee. Stewing in social media reinforces your most negative views and worst instincts. It’s not good for any of us. He needs to unplug.
7—Mike Lee is also not good at social media. He’s not a clever poster or gifted communicator, and he’s bad at apologetics and religious outreach. As a lot of people need to remind themselves, if you want to claim an LDS and/or Christian identity online, you have to walk the walk, both online and in real life. I try to be conscious of my own failings in this regard. Mike Lee should turn over the social media duties to an intern or a team of interns.
8—It’s depressing to see how many people are invested in Mormons not being Christians, including some who aren’t among the worst people in the world. There are some things we don’t really care about. Being known as Christians is not one of them.
9—Some people use wildly different standards to answer the questions “Is Donald Trump a Christian?” and “Are Mormons Christians?”
10—We have some decent insight on the issues that animate American Christianity today and the types of books that fly off the bookshelves of Christian bookstores, and “rigorous interpretation of the Athanasian creed” isn’t one of them. It seems to be an issue exclusively when it comes to pushing Mormons out of the tent. Over the last 70 years, we’ve seen a long list of teachings that conservative and liberal strands of Christianity are willing to compromise on, from unfashionable items in the Ten Commandments to Luther’s priesthood of all believers to the reality of the Resurrection – and you’re telling me that the one thing that matters above all else is a particular reading of a non-scriptural three-in-one paradox? Sure, okay.
11—It is true that “not everyone who says ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven,” but the distinguishing factor is whether someone “does the will of my Father who is in heaven,” not formal allegiance to a creed that would be formulated several centuries down the road. “Where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them” seems fairly open-ended. Otherwise, Jesus asked would-be Christians to keep his commandments, love one another, be baptized, and take up their cross and follow him; the part about subscribing to a creed of uncertain authorship to be written some 400 years in the future didn’t make the cut.
12—If you read the history of Christianity, you’ll see most of Mormon weirdness has good Christian precedents; dismiss it as heretical if you want, but the ideas emerge from Christianity.
13—When the question of “Are Mormons Christians?” comes up, modern Protestants seem weirdly attached to creeds formulated during an era that a lot of Reformers identified as one where the church was under the control of Antichrist.
14—The secular Left has its share of bad takes, too. Like, “Mormons should have discovered the separation of church and state sooner” – buddy, we’ve got talks and articles and lessons on the boundary between church and state all over our website. Every congregation in the U.S. reviewed the Constitution less than two weeks ago during Sunday School.
14a—(My personal opinion on why reviewing the Constitution was such a priority is that it’s like that time on your mission when an elder does a Bad Thing, but details are scarce and rumors are flying, and the missionary gets sent to another mission, while his companion gets banished to a branch in a distant farming community with orders not to talk to anyone, and everyone has to review pp. 10-12 in the mission handbook and read Spencer Kimball’s “Lock Your Heart” in the next district meeting. When it comes to the Constitution, we done screwed up bad.)
15—Another uninformed secular Left response was, “Mormons are finally discovering that they’ll get left out in the cold under Christian Nationalism” – like, no, we’re very aware of that fact. We don’t all vote lockstep Republican. I’m so old I can remember when a Mormon was the Democratic Senate majority leader. There is no interest whatsoever in any form of Christian Nationalism among Church leaders or any member of note. The last time we had this discussion, the best anyone could come up with was some anonymous film reviewer on Substack. We get semi-regular articles in The Atlantic on the topic of “What has gone wrong with American Christianity,” with the latest entry published just this week. If the authors would take notice of the interesting stretch of American Christianity over here, they might discover a helpful point of comparison and useful evidence that the malaise in their own districts wasn’t inevitable. But that would require them to admit that Mormons might in some sense be Christians after all.
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