I’ve made no secret on this board of my membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For many years, I was registered to vote in California. Now I’m registered to vote in Georgia. Basically my votes now are more of a protest than an actual attempt to get the candidate I support into office. I am definitely not registered to vote in Idaho. Evidently many members of my faith who do live in that state are leopard bait now.
I’ve also mentioned on the board before the Christian agenda types my fellow LDS are prone to elect do not consider us to be Christians. So, hey, if you’re going to walk right into the leopards’ face buffet, why not bring the plates and flatware yourself?
Please forgive me for asking, but how does this specifically affect LDS people? As long as those policies are enacted, they still get what they voted for, right? If they are not considered Christian Enough, that’s apparently not a new issue, so I don’t really see how their faces are getting eaten here. (Of course, I, too, question the sanity of people who vote for candidates that openly despise them, such as Gays for Trump.)
So… I’m guessing based on that statement that you’ve never been a member of an oppressed minority group? Which is fine (and if I’m wrong apologies) but let me see if I can explain even if this is in the Pit.
How could it affect them? Probably not much at first. But historically that sort of thing has been used to bar people from any public office whatsoever, bar them from voting, bar them from government contracts, bar them from employment by the state, create zoning laws preventing any new religious buildings outside the state religion from being built, barring the use of existing buildings by religions outside the state sect for worship, allow the creation of conditions on the sale of property leading to restricting where religious minorities can live, barring them from institutions of higher education, and so on and so forth.
Again, historically, converts from minority religions to the state religion are frequently viewed with suspicion of not actually converting, hence the origin of the term “lip service” and may still be subjected to prejudice and discrimination.
Although the LDS Church considers themselves to be Christian many Protestant groups do not. I will leave it to @Monty to talk about the historical oppression of Mormons in the US (there’s a reason the majority of them all hiked out to Utah) but suffice to say they have experienced some nasty discrimination, even brutality. The fact they themselves weren’t always nice, either, and did their share of oppressing others in the past doesn’t excuse abusing them in the present or future.
I’m neither Christian nor Mormon and frankly from the outside both of them do weird stuff but I don’t have a problem with any of them exercising their religion as a general principal.
Anyone voting to have their state declared “Christian”, even if they themselves are some stripe of Christian, is a fucking moron because who is in the proper sect usually gets more and more narrowly defined over time. Unless you go to the exact same church as the fanatics proposing this shit you will, eventually, be on The List of Undesirables.
It does so amuse me that there are Protestant Christians, Catholic Christians, and Orthodox Christians that all want Christian Nationalists to take over the country . . . while denying that the other groups are True™ Christians.
The bloodbath they want as part of their take over is going to seem quaint compared to the blood bath after they take over.
I don’t want to delve into the details of the LDS church, particularly the details of those rituals outsiders (and even Mormons without Temple access) aren’t supposed to know about but suffice to say that the accusation is not entirely unfounded. From my perspective it’s a blend of Christianity and Masonry with some original additions added on but I’m totally OK with calling them Christians as they do believe in Jesus. Then again, I have a very broad and open umbrella when it comes to these things. Other people feel calling Mormons Christian is like calling Christians Jews - sure, there are roots there but they’ve become something else. And then there’s the crowd that likes to scream HERETIC! and use it to condone violence. That last group is the one you really have to watch out for, they’re the sort that in the end gives us things like the Spanish Inquisition, who went after anyone who wasn’t the proper sort of Roman Catholic.
A lot of members of fundamentalist and evangelical Christian sects believe that many other large Christian sects aren’t Christian, either. Historically, they particularly singled out the Roman Catholic Church, referring to them as “papists,” and holding that Catholics don’t follow God, but the Pope.
FWIW, when I was in college, I knew a guy who was a member of the fundamentalist Church of Christ (not to be confused with the liberal United Church of Christ), who told me that they believed that any denomination which did not specifically conduct their baptisms via full-body immersion were not Christian, and anyone who had not been baptized in this manner was not a Christian, either.
Many years ago I was kinda bored and randomly flipping through TV channels, when I landed on The 700 Club with Pat Robertson. I had paused because he was speaking with a big graphic of South America on screen. Turns out he was talking about evangelism in Brazil and the great strides they were making in converting Brazil to “Christianity.” Then he brought up a pie graph that laid out the percentages of Christians vs other religions in Brazil, with by far the largest chunk of said others being Catholics. I remember goggling at that for a second and then just quietly shaking my head, followed by changing the channel.
The hardline evangelical Protestant Christian right in the United States will happily make common cause with the likes of conservative Catholics (or Israeli Jews) when it suits their purposes. But ecumenical they are not. Lie in bed with them long enough and eventually they will attempt to eat your face.
That’s true, but honestly, traditional Christians have a lot more reason to think that Mormons aren’t Christians than evangelical Christians have of rejecting Catholicism as a form of Christianity. Sure, Mormons use the same names for their gods as traditional Christians do, but their theology is at least as different from traditional Christian theology as Christianity is from Judaism.
I suspect the reason that Mormons are invested in calling themselves Christians, rather than than just going with, “we are the one true church, and those Christians lost their way”, is that the religion was founded in a time and place where Christianity was normative and “Christian” was a synonym for “morally good”.
Whereas when the Christians split off from the Jews, the Jews were in some trouble in the Roman empire, and it was often advantageous to use a different name and deny bring the same faith.
Today we have some Messianic Jews who are Christians who want to identify as a type of Jew. I see them as similar to the Mormons identifying as traditional Christians.
I mean, what’s in a name? The Mormons worship a deity called “Jesus Christ”. But in a lot of ways, including that their Jesus is explicitly not God the Creator and Father of Jesus, their Jesus is pretty different from the Jesus most Christians worship.
In my Weltanschauung, we’re all climbing the same mountain. You know why I say that? Because there is only one mountain.
The other day I clicked into a YouTube short (yeah, I know… ) and it was some super fundamentalist Christian type (‘cause they are a type) showing a video of Joel Olsteen being interviewed by someone else. Olsteen was saying that he believes in Jesus as his Savior and has chosen to follow Jesus’ path and His teaching, BUT Joel (went on to say) that he has spent time in India and has known many followers of the Hindu religion and that they (and here’s where the other guy’s head exploded)“ALSO LOVE GOD.”
The guy accused Joel of repudiating Jesus and his teachings by making this statement, namely, that non-Christians can also love God.
He didn’t continue the video of the interview with any more of Joel’s comments, so I don’t know if Joel went on to say that after death, Hindus are doomed to purgatory or limbo or some form of Outer Darkness. I don’t know what Joel preaches–never watched him.
But it shows you how narrow the thinking of some fundamentalist Christians can be. No one except Christians are allowed to say they love God.
This is the hellfire and brimstone church I grew up in. Twice a day on Sunday and also Wednesday night services no matter what. The thing that always confused me was how every other religion, and that includes other christian religions, were all going to hell. Baptist → hell. Mormon → hell. Catholic → For sure hell. Etc, etc, etc.
Guess what religion I am today? None. They are all wrong. Particularly the christian nationalist bent types. Just finished reading the new Jess Walter book, So Far Gone, and it resonates since I live in that neck of the woods.
If God really had a narrow and specific path They wanted us to follow, you would think They would have left more obvious and unambiguous evidence of it.
Which is a major reason why most separation of church and state lawsuits come from religious minorities. Quite a few of them are rational enough to realize that if the government is enforcing religion on people, it won’t be their religion and so they act accordingly.
The Republican base however is composed of leopard bait sublimely sure that if a dictatorship is installed, it’ll be enforcing their personal religious and political beliefs, not anyone else’s.
. I remember goggling at that for a second and then just quietly shaking my head, followed by changing the channel.
) and it was some super fundamentalist Christian type (‘cause they are a type) showing a video of Joel Olsteen being interviewed by someone else. Olsteen was saying that he believes in Jesus as his Savior and has chosen to follow Jesus’ path and His teaching, BUT Joel (went on to say) that he has spent time in India and has known many followers of the Hindu religion and that they (and here’s where the other guy’s head exploded) “ALSO LOVE GOD.”