1\u2014As many people noted, the government really shouldn’t be involved in deciding who is or isn\u2019t a Christian.<\/p>\n
2\u2014I don\u2019t believe leaving us off of the Department of Defense\u2019s 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 \u201cChristian\u201d from everyone else. It\u2019s apparently better for no one to be Christian, than for Mormons to be Christians.<\/p>\n
3\u2014Focusing on petty stuff like this, while we\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n
4\u2014Hegseth took his wife and six kids to Europe with him last week. That\u2019s great! I firmly support taking your family to Europe. It\u2019s a beautiful, interesting place, and you see things in a whole new way by having kids with you. If you\u2019re going to be mad at Pete Hegseth, don\u2019t be mad about this.<\/p>\n
5\u2014It\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n
6\u2014Social media \u2013 which is full of the dumbest responses imaginable by the most superficial and thoughtlessly cruel people on Earth \u2013 has not been good for Mike Lee. Stewing in social media reinforces your most negative views and worst instincts. It\u2019s not good for any of us. He needs to unplug.<\/p>\n
7\u2014Mike Lee is also not good at social media. He\u2019s not a clever poster or gifted communicator, and he\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
8\u2014It\u2019s depressing to see how many people are invested in Mormons not being Christians, including some who aren\u2019t among the worst people in the world. There are some things we don\u2019t really care about. Being known as Christians is not one of them.<\/p>\n
9\u2014Some people use wildly different standards to answer the questions \u201cIs Donald Trump a Christian?\u201d and \u201cAre Mormons Christians?\u201d<\/p>\n
10\u2014We 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 \u201crigorous interpretation of the Athanasian creed\u201d isn\u2019t 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\u2019ve 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\u2019s priesthood of all believers to the reality of the Resurrection \u2013 and you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n
11\u2014It is true that \u201cnot everyone who says \u2018Lord, Lord\u2019 will enter the kingdom of heaven,\u201d but the distinguishing factor is whether someone \u201cdoes the will of my Father who is in heaven<\/a>,\u201d not formal allegiance to a creed that would be formulated several centuries down the road. \u201cWhere two or three gather in my name, there am I with them<\/a>\u201d 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\u2019t make the cut.<\/p>\n 12\u2014If you read the history of Christianity, you\u2019ll see most of Mormon weirdness has good Christian precedents; dismiss it as heretical if you want, but the ideas emerge from Christianity.<\/p>\n 13\u2014When the question of \u201cAre Mormons Christians?\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 14\u2014The secular Left has its share of bad takes, too. Like, \u201cMormons should have discovered the separation of church and state sooner\u201d \u2013 buddy, we\u2019ve got talks and articles and lessons on the boundary between church and state all over our website<\/a>. Every congregation in the U.S. reviewed the Constitution less than two weeks ago during Sunday School.<\/p>\n 14a\u2014(My personal opinion on why reviewing the Constitution was such a priority is that it\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201cLock Your Heart\u201d in the next district meeting. When it comes to the Constitution, we done screwed up bad.)<\/p>\n 15\u2014Another uninformed secular Left response was, \u201cMormons are finally discovering that they\u2019ll get left out in the cold under Christian Nationalism\u201d \u2013 like, no, we\u2019re very aware of that fact. We don\u2019t all vote lockstep Republican. I\u2019m so old I can remember when a Mormon was the Democratic Senate majority leader<\/a>. 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<\/em> on the topic of “What has gone wrong with American Christianity,” with the latest entry<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 1\u2014As many people noted, the government really shouldn’t be involved in deciding who is or isn\u2019t a Christian.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":67,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latter-day-saint-thought"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/67"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53796"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53816,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53796\/revisions\/53816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}