Do you think of Mormons as Christians?

Here is what I wonder about mostly when I think about religion

Why do some monks live austerely but other monks get to brew and sell beer and get drunk?

What's the difference between a priest and a minister? I gather the priest has to wear a collar and all black and it definitely is a cool looking collar

Relating to above

Why do some church speakers get to have wives and children but others have to be celibate

When a ventriloquist dies what happens to his dummy?

Actually that last one was answered by the Simpsons

it was pretty crazy taking my boyfriend of ~2 years who grew up Episocpal in AZ to go meet my Mormon family in ID
his dad is a pipe organist and played for a lot of liberal strains of protestant faiths
he has never really been outside Tucson (according to the phone book there are 4 Mormon church buildings in Tucson)
on the way up we listened to a Maron podcast where Maron mentioned having just been in SLC, which he called "America's only working theocracy"
which, if you're going to call a U.S. city formed and governed by its constituent post-second-great-awakening faith members as a majority, SLC is not the only city in that category (maybe not doing my argument any favors but clearwater, fla., would be un ejemplo)

anyway the first day we were there in idaho and utah he had a panic attack of culture shock
he was freaked out that it was mostly white people
he was freaked out that it was "run by a cult"
he found my family's wholesome mormonnness foreign
he found my dad offputting – my dad managed to tell some racist and violent story about "Indians" raping a woman in the oil town where he works in ND, because my dad is just tactless at best

he eventually calmed down and I introduced him to some non-white, non-mormon idahoans

but last night I asked him out of curiosity if he thought mormons were xtian and he said "no" after a lot of hemming and hawing
that's why i started this thread

don't think i met any mormons until college

my first was this super nice guy (hi mike!) who had the misfortune of spending freshman year in a triple with an in-your-face evangelical and an asian hip-hop dude

tbf i'd not really met those stereotypes previously either

Speaking of priest v minister, what about a reverend? And no pun in ten did, an abbot?

pretty sure that evangelical did not consider mormons christian. dunno about catholics, but in any case they were of course going to hell

Like I know 'catholic guilt' is a thing but I have never heard of 'Christian guilt' so I did figure Catholics have more shame about everything

Would 'what does Protestant guilt look like' be a good thread?

I roomed with a Mormon freshman year

We didn't talk about his faith much

He was and still is a smilebot

the south park guys defs nailed what mormon guilt looks like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNEh4bm6rNQ

protestant guilt is a vague feeling that historically ye did awful things to the Catholics and it manifests itself as social justice campaigns on the internet iirc

I mean pretty much?

do mormons consider jews catholic

The very last thing I know about religion is that I know what a catechism is because I read Ulysses / Gawker sports explanatories

do muslims consider mormons people of the book

never satisfactorily picked through catholic views on Jews but I guess its like eh having someone ahead of you for an uncertain inheritance or something idk

I don't know what the hell Protestants are so smug about -- they're going to hell.

good q mookie

where are ilx Muslims BTW I did wonder this the other day

feel like j-smitty had his vision on my birthday, but i could be remembering wrong

Scared off by mordy xp

donnie and marie halal-you-can-eat branson buffet would do a lot of bridge-building.

where are ilx Muslims BTW I did wonder this the other day

why did u killfile horseshoe

I wd never u brute

@ Crabbits :(

When I said upthread that I don't think of Mormons as Christians, and I think others mean the same, I was saying that Mormonism is unique enough to be its own defined belief, the same way I don't think of Unitarians as Christians, or Ba'hai as Muslims, and make distinctions between country and bluegrass, or whatever. Specificity, not "Mormons aren't Christians".

I can see where your bf's culture shock came from. For me I had culture shock when I went to visit my Mormon grandparents, but it was positive, just because I was suddenly the child of all the families on the block, always invited over for dinner or for football or to play Zelda. Even now when I visit friends in SLC I'm amazed at the level of openness and comfort my Mormon friends have in discussing really heavy shit, like a trans friend getting specific about what the church teaches about queerness, about his fears toward missing his family in the afterlife, and the line his family walks between acceptance and sorrow, which is such a complicated thought and one that could only come from that specific wholesome attitude.

mormons r cool

― the late great, Monday, September 1, 2014 9:04 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think just about every Mormon I currently know is lapsed, but they are cool.

― Everyone's a closet ned. (Johnny Fever), Monday, September 1, 2014 9:08 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Why are Mormons ~cool~ ? Why would one think of any denomination as cool?

I'm a Mormophile and find them cool bc either they don't drink at all and are fun to do non-drinky things with, or they are lapsed and do everything

everything?

Always thought it weird that LDS wards/churches don't feature crosses on display.

Then again, I grew up Catholic where anything less than an effigy of Christ with blood pouring out of his palms and eyes rolled back was considered a poor effort.

w/ johnny fever: i know a bunch of jack mormons (some of who may just be low-profile regular mormons), and they are awesome people. super friendly, huggy, tight-knit but welcoming, emotionally open to an almost startling degree. rockers.

i do think of mormons as christians, but also sufficiently unique in their faith to be somewhat separate from the generic mass of protestant and evangelical "christianity".

do muslims consider mormons people of the book

― mookieproof, Monday, September 1, 2014 7:58 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

can't really see why not. in sunday school growing up, no one ever went into details of protestants v catholics being people of the book, it was just christians and jews. (i think this is because nobody but christians cares that much about those divisions.)

honestly, i feel like Mormonism is not that different from certain versions of Islam. you can't drink alcohol, right? can you gamble? i feel like there's an austerity that's kindred.

i know that most mainstream LDS followers don't believe in polygamy (neither do mainstream Muslims) but that's another similarity.

the main values/social norms I retain from growing up mormon would be:
- a loathing/discomfort of gambling (which holds up – 'the house always wins')
– 'preparedness'
– feeling like your actions represent/are judged as some subsection of humanity...feeling like you are always under the microscope...but not in such a derisive way that it can't be counteracted with some 'how to win friends and influence people'/customer service attitude, which can certainly be disingenuous...not generalizing these things to anyone but myself
– oh also they put you up in front of everyone enough that you get sort of good at public speaking/presentation....

in the 'young women's' group as a teenager you had to set a goal that took 20 hours to achieve...I tried to argue my goal could be 'growing my hair out' and they did not fall for it

how much does mormonism represent a culture that has arised within the anglo-american population

not that mormons trace their ancestry exclusive from the british isles but those maps of ancestries most commonly represented in a county show show that utah is one of the few places in america outside of new england where the most common reported ancestry is english

and most of the mormon luminaries seem very anglo but in a way that is culturally distinct from other such populations in the east, or the scots-irish of the upland south

i don't see mormons as christians bc of some pretty essential theological differences. my cynical view of mormons and claiming "christian" status is that it makes it much easier for mormons to engage with potential converts. like, most ppl have some cultural affinity for christianity but no one wants to be told they're joining a weird sect.

as noted upthread, mormons are generally rejected by other protestant/evangelical denominations. where i am baptist/low anglican/independent evangelical churches are happy to share resources and in some cases accept ministers from another denomination's bible college. mormons, sevvies, roman catholics and the more "out there" pentecostals operate as independent enterprises.

i'm also surprised by the apparent general ignorance of the reformation itt. it's still kind of a big deal for a lot of people.

thot i covered that w/ 'splitters'

the mandatory missions are pretty aggressively spread all over the world.
maybe the success rate is not so good if the stars are still phenotypically osmond-esque?

'mission to burma' would be a good name for a post punk mormon band.

thot i covered that w/ 'splitters'
― j., Tuesday, September 2, 2014 1:33 PM

if you have any special insight i would sure love to hear it

no really, is there some special knowledge of the reformation you are expecting of people in 2014

no, no, no. a "splitter" is type of fastball thrown with a minimum of rotation so it has more erratic movement than a normal fastball.

no really, is there some special knowledge of the reformation you are expecting of people in 2014

― j., Tuesday, 2 September 2014 04:52 (17 minutes ago)

tough trying to win an argument about religion with a character from the old testament

feeling like your actions represent/are judged as some subsection of humanity...feeling like you are always under the microscope...but not in such a derisive way that it can't be counteracted with some 'how to win friends and influence people'/customer service attitude, which can certainly be disingenuous

Well now, this just has me thinking mormons are the same as Minnesotans, based on my Fargo-watching anyways.

Minnesotans are stereotypically Lutheran

'minnestoa nice' seems more like a reflection of nordic politeness / janteloven culture rather than a religiously infomed thing

mormons are or believe themselves to be 'under the microscope' because other people think of them as strange, possibly sinister, possibly heretical and beholden unto private hierachies and their values (parallels with the panic about jfk's allegiance to the pope in 1960)

that is, insofar as nordic culture is separable from its gloomy lutheran inheritance

Ime as an evangelical, Mormons and Witnesses were all considered equally heretical and not Christian (and therefore not Saved), with Seventh Day Adventists having a slight edge in respectability but if you talked to one you'd prob be expecting them to traipse off into some theological thicket that mainstream evangelicalism didn't teach.

Otoh Catholics were Christians but only if they were Saved, otherwise they were just fake Sunday Christians who didn't live their faith and you should urge them to accept Jesus.

^^

I personally consider Mormons to be Christians, though.

i think nakh is otm about utah and utah-settlement mormons representing a distinct branch of anglo immigration than what you might find elsewhere in the u.s. the civil war-era overland migration is still the source of a lot of new-birth identification among people here but as the rest of the country asserted itself the zion-founding heritage and impulse mostly mainstreamed along to larger power lines in the blinkered and naive way that can only come from the strange mix of self-righteous self-identification persecution entitlement plus ultimately favored supreme whiteness in the eyes of the larger culture, and by 'people' it is obv. very male-centered. the offshoots (flds, etc.) are re-fundamentalizations of the 'zion' story which show the audacity of the whole thing in the first place, oddly assembled 5000 sq ft complexes in small wayward towns "hidden" in the network of the west/southwest. this whole heritage is very mystical-phallic homosocial and misogynistic which i think explains the high-level homophobia in the church administration and the vibrant underground metal scene in salt lake city among other phenomena.

the 'christian' campaign which afaict originated in the 50s was an attempt by the church to break into the protestant power currents of the time, which of course they did through both sheer ability to remake themselves and their sheer anglo ancestry, although there is still a lot of self-protective denials of mormon christian-ness from strongly evangelical camps esp. in the south (xps). of course 'christian' is not about 'christ' as if it ever could have been, that stand-in from 2000 years ago.

I think they're Christians too. I'm not one to judge.

However, I completely see where the other side is coming from. I mean, you can't tack on your own books to the Bible. (Right, Jews?)

http://i.imgur.com/xsLfe4q.jpg

But in the end, it's like arguing whether or not "Trapper John MD" is part of "M*A*S*H" canon or not.

I consider Mormons, Catholics, etc. to be Christians. Raised protestant, in a swings-both-ways Methodist and Presbyterian congregation (I know, I know. How could you reconcile the differences?) that itself was housed in a larger interfaith center. So I was completely baffled the first time I heard someone ask "are you Catholic or are you Christian?" I wish I had paid more attention to whoever asked that. Seems like something you'd want to keep tabs on somebody about.