A good essay from Salon's Laura Miller, on the seedy underbelly of Mormon fundamentalism. The LDS church is struggling to distance itself from a legacy of polygamy and "blood atonement." (In the most extreme Mormon subcultures, men can pretty much sleep with and kill whoever they think God wants them to. It's a lot like "Bad Boys II.")
Miller notes, "the problem with a religion founded on the idea that its leaders get their marching orders straight from the Almighty is that members who quarrel with how things are being run have a tendency to start receiving their own contradictory commandments. That's why there are around 200 Mormon splinter groups throughout North America -- impressive in a religion that's not even 200 years old."
Marching orders directly from God... No wonder Mormonism is growing so fast in this country. (Mormons now outnumber Presbyterians in the USA.) It's an American individualist religion with the compensations of community. Get messages factory-direct from heaven, enter a loyal, exclusionary social group: it's the shortcut to religious and relational contentment. Sounds shallow to me, but there's no accounting for taste.
Posted by mesh at July 28, 2003 12:37 PM | TrackBackThey're also Aryan too. I swear, Mormon's are American's own Scandanavians.
On a theological level, interesting thing about Mormonism, is that it completely chucks any of the ecumenical creeds. Inherent to their theology is that the early "church" lost its authority and power sometime after the apostles, and therefor any church doctrine immediately prior to the first ecumenical creed all the way up to Joseph Smith is null and void.
Which is fascinating, given that the early creeds were written to guard against the corruption of church doctrine and truth by certain philosophical schools, such as the late Platonic idea of God the Father giving birth to creation through his Son into the Body of the Holy Spirit (representing time).
Which interestingly, is very VERY similar to the Mormon idea of as God once was we are, as God is we will be. Hence we go to planets and populate them, giving birth to tons of "babies" etc. etc. It's a platonic idea of creation that the ecumenical creeds stamped out 2000 years ago.
Anyways, I just found the whole thing fascinating, and taught me just how damn important those early creeds were. They really do protect the essential things of the Gospel, and if you're gonna draw a line anywhere on what actually IS Christianity and isn't, it's a fairly decent place to start.
Posted by: JosiahQ at July 28, 2003 01:13 PMThere's a great book that deals with the Mormon experience entitled Acts of Faith by Rodney Stark and Roger Finke (I'm a broken record about this book). Smith's family is an interesting case study - maybe - in some of the problems with dispensational theology. Apparently, they were all church-hoppers and had rotated attendance at many different churches over a few short years. Secondly, they were really into this dispensational-revivalist movements of the time. In fact, Mormonism seems to me to be rooted, sociologically and biographically, in that 19th century Christian theology. It's kind of interesting. Their growth in a few short years mirrors the kind of growth Christianity experienced in its first hundred or two hundred years - they grew 40% each decade, and as a result, have quickly become one of the fastest growing religions in history.
Posted by: scott cunningham at July 29, 2003 11:08 AMI just read that Salon aritcle you linked to, mesh (or at least, the first paragraph or two since I don't have a subscription). That Jon Krakeur (sp?) sounds fascinating. I don't know the murder they're talking about, but I'm guessing it was probably big news in 1984.
Posted by: scott cunningham at July 29, 2003 11:10 AMMormonism also has quite a procedure for proselytizing. Every young Mormon is expected to spend two years serving in a developing country as a missionary. How many (middle-class white Prebyterian) Christians have that kind of committment?
Posted by: Krista at July 30, 2003 03:24 AM