Of course but even they must realize thats not how laws work. They would need a precisely worded verbiage that includes their chosen denomination but not the LDS
Not necessarily, once they’ve installed judges who can be relied upon to accurately identify True Christians. At that point, the vaguer the actual written laws are, the better.
I’m sorry, but laws work the way they are (sometimes very selectively) enforced.
Oh, that was rich. The Mormon leader claiming that raising Navajo kids in White homes would literally turn their skin white. Now I’ve heard it all.
About as rich as stealing Native American children, putting them in schools far away and denying them their ways and language out of a White fear of uprisings.
Well, for starters, they won’t be able to hold office in the state, since public offices would require a religious test, and the test would be construed such that Latter-Day Saints would fail.
For a start. Of course they’re going to go further.
Well, it goes a little further than that. Non-Jews are still expected to follow the Seven Noahide Commandments. But they’re certainly not expected to follow the 613 Commandments.
Personally, I’m a Catholic, but I don’t have any problem with stating that Mormons, Quakers, Muslims, and Pastafarians all worship the same God that I do. We might interpret God differently, because of course we mere temporal beings are incapable of fully understanding God, but it’s still the same God.
When someone says “We all worship the same God”, it is very hard not to hear the unspoken “But the others just aren’t worshipping as correctly as we are.”
From the article:
Conzatti does not advocate for states to put their stamp of approval on one specific denomination but he does draw a line between “historic Christianity,” based on the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, and the faith of Latter-day Saints.
I notice that apparently there is no specific legislative language still drafted. But basically, the implication is that the definition is of historic Nicene Christianity. Which BTW means the Orthodox, Catholic, and mainstream Protestant churches dating to the Reformation are included.
That not following the major points of the Athanasian and Nicene (with or without Filiuoque) Creeds puts you outside the proper definition of Christianity and in the realm of heretics, is not a fringe extreme position, BTW, it has been the posture of the magisterium of the historic churches …well, since Nicaea.
Major components of LDS theology both official and popular are at odds with Nicene mainstream theology. IAIATheoligian but as I understand it the Big Issue at Nicaea was the nature of Jesus Christ Son of God and his place in the Trinity. To begin with, THE base foundational resolution is that the Godhead is one and eternal as the Trinity and that it is Topmost Tier heresy to deny the Trinity as defined in the founding Councils (you may argue on semantic details of the procedence of the Spirit, but not on that it’s three distinct homeostases/persons AND One single divine being/ouision, and if you can’t wrap your mind around that it’s your problem) ; that said then, the Creator Father is not an elevated mortal, the only human manifestation of the God is the incarnation, by the power of the Holy Spirit in Mary (NO heaveny consorts!) in the time of Augustus, of Jesus the Son who so happens, this Council finds and you better believe it or else, is fully truly God coequal and eternal, and truly fully human and this is no problem either.
Not in the creed but implicit in it is also that Jesus was never Adam or the Archangel Michael nor are scriptural references to Jehovah and Adonai Elohim addressing different characters, which various nontraditional splinters have argued as well.
Defining “historic Christianity” as that which follows the Nicene Council does not only exclude LDS but also the likes of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, Oneness Pentecostals, Christadelphians, Swedenborgians, etc. Sure, some of those groups voluntarily withdraw from political participation, but for example it took a SCOTUS ruling to allow the JW’s to refrain from saying the Pledge of Allegiance so life could be made hard for them if Establishment of Religion were to return this way.
And i think few of those same Christians would consider a Jew or a Moslem to be a godless apostate. Most modern Christians recognize that there are other religions that are “basically okay, if not ideal” out there.
But yes, at the time the LDS Church was founded, there was a general feeling that there was no true spirituality that wasn’t Christian. And, IMHO, that’s why the early Mormons choose to identify as Christians.
Well sure. But there’s a pretty big gulf between that and, “we must change that”. Some groups cross that gulf, but many choose not to.
Yup. And also Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and atheists, all of whom are protected under the first amendment.
Yeah but, hey, that was understood. But it still left us with WTF do these guys mean by “Christian”.
Anyway, I’ve been to a Mormon meeting where one of the members talked about his belief, and he pretty much said, “of course I’ve always been a Christian, and I’m still a Christian, because I’m spiritual”, and i was, honestly, pretty offended. “Christians” don’t have a monopoly on spirituality.
Yeah but they wouldn’t consider them Christians. Not because they don’t believe every clause in the nicene creed, but because they don’t believe Jesus is the son of God.
But they would consider someone who worships Jesus as the son of God, even someone like a LDS or Nestorian who doesn’t believe everything in the nicean creed.
The kind of people doing this in Idaho are an extreme minority even within Christians.
This is kinda obscuring that the Mormons don’t think Jesus is God, exactly. They think he’s just the son, a completely separate person from the Creator.
This is the whole poly/monophysite debate that the nicean creed was a failed attempt to solve (basically with a comma in the ‘of one substance with the Father’ line), and was major bone among different denominations for centuries. Nowadays very few Christians would claim someone on the wrong side of that argument wasn’t a Christian
Yeah, nowadays if you ask a random Christian they’re very likely to say “well yeah Jesus is a completely separate person from God the Father!” even if they belong to a denomination that does indeed make use of the Niceaen creed.
Source: at one point, when I was trying to make sense of all this stuff, I would go around asking my Catholic/Protestant friends what they thought about the whole Trinity thing, and they’d all be like “uhhhh, well, yeah, we learned this thing about three persons and one substance; I guess that means that they’re separate people but have the same goals,” and I’d be like, well… no, I actually don’t think that’s what it means, but hey, that’s what my religion teaches too, so cool!
I have had “good Christians” tell me that
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I worship Satan because I don’t worship Jesus as the Son of God
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I will burn in hell for eternity
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The US should be run good (their sect) pastors and not secular people
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I you don’t like that convert to the One True Faith
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Even if I did convert to Christianity (their version) I’d need to go to a church of “Messianic Jews” because that’s my place.
Granted, that was a very small minority of the Chistians I’ve met in my life, but these folks are out there. Don’t minimize the danger.
For them, there is no “there are other religions that are “basically okay, if not ideal” out there’. You’re either in their particular group or you are a Satan worshiping sinner. They do concede that many don’t realize their worshiping Satan, but if you aren’t in their sect that is exactly what you are doing.
That’s not true. Even in autocracies laws have precise written definitions. If mad King Donald suddenly develops an irrational fear of oranges but still likes apples, he’ll write a decree that makes carrying an orange, but not an apple, within city boundaries punishable by burning at the stake.
If these dickheads want to write their specific denomination into Idaho law but not anyone else’s they’ll need to come up with text for the law that somehow includes their denomination but not everyone else’s
But that may have more to do with the fact that some religious groups have (or think they have) the power to do so, and others are just waiting their turn. Peacefulness and convenience have more to do with each other than some think.
Fred Clark, an interesting guy, went to a small fundamentalist school - with the problem that fundamentalist groups were too small to support a school, so they had to dance around (if they weren’t anti-dancing) the fact that every one of the groups that sent children to that school believed all the others were heretics
He writes:
When I was a student at TCS, I had many classmates and teachers who were members of Pentecostal and Assemblies of God churches. Those churches were just as fundamentalist as my own, and our churches were fully in agreement on many points of fundie doctrine — young-earth creationism, Rapture prophecy, inerrantism, literalism, KJV-onlyism, etc.
But those Pentecostal and AofG churches also taught the charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit, including a big emphasis on speaking in tongues, which they taught was the sign of the baptism in the Spirit and a necessary mark for any true Christian.
At my independent, fundamentalist Baptist church, speaking in tongues was forbidden. It was seen as, at best, a heresy, and at worst as evidence of demonic possession. Anything even slightly charismatic-seeming was frowned on at my church. I remember once someone raised their hands above their head during worship. Once.