Embarrassed By My Brethren…
. . . At Christmas time no less! A press release went out early this morning:
Focus on the Family has a story on Glenn Beck, a Mormon, on their CitizenLink Website. Glenn Beck was a CNN host and will move to Fox News in January. Beck is currently promoting his book, “The Christmas Sweater.” The CitizenLink story focuses on Beck’s faith and why he wrote “The Christmas Sweater.”
While Glenn’s social views are compatible with many Christian views, his beliefs in Mormonism are not. Clearly, Mormonism is a cult. The CitizenLink story does not mention Beck’s Mormon faith, however, the story makes it look as if Beck is a Christian who believes in the essential doctrines of the faith.
Through the years, Focus on the Family has done great things to help the family and has brought attention to the many social ills that are attacking the family.
Moreover, to promote a Mormon as a Christian is not helpful to the cause of Jesus Christ. For Christians to influence society, Christians should be promoting the central issues of the faith properly without opening the door to false religions.
Give me a break – PLEASE! First of all, it was Lowell’s and my pleasure to meet Glenn Beck at Mitt Romney’s “Faith in America” speech last December. Incredibly nice guy – one of the good ones.
This move by the Dobson organization should be applauded loudly and long. Nobody can swing more evangelical votes than James Dobson – NOBODY. During the primaries, Dobson’s fence sitting on Romney, presumably becasue of a fear of criticism like this, when combined with the Huckabee plasibly-deniable-bigoted-insult campaign, likely cost Romney the election. Imagine the campaign just past with a Dobson saying things like those denounced in this press release, and in turn denouncing the bigoted Huckabee-backers of the world (I’ll bet even money that Steve McConkey, who put out this release, was one of them) for putting their theology ahead of, oh I don’t know - winning the election for our viewpoint if not our theology. Such a primary would have had a very different result indeed. Conservatives might now be talking about what we can accomplish instead of playing hard defense.
Lowell interjects: I have little empirical data on which to base my view, but after the last 30 months or so I am convinced that people like Mr. McConkey are a fringe minority within the Evangelical movement. Still, as we have learned, they wield considerable influence. My greatest disappointment through all of this has been the absence of high-profile denunciation of the religious bigotry that the Romney campaign exposed. I am confident that will come in time.
Back to John . . . .
Of course, if we are lucky, this blog will be the only outlet in the world to pay attention to this press release.
You want to know what I really think!?
Merry Christmas Glenn Beck! Merry Christmas Lowell, Sonja and family! Merry Christmas Mitt Romney, family and team! Merry Christmas to all my Mormon friends and acquaintances! Heck, Merry Christmas Steve McConkey!
I am celebrating the birth of my Savior. Let’s do it together – we can iron out the details later.
Lowell adds: Amen!
Posted in Political Strategy, Religious Bigotry, Understanding Religion | 5 Comments » | 
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Mormons Are Christian on 22 Dec 2008 at 12:36 pm #
Catholic San Francisco, Archbishop George H. Niederauer reports that it was he – a Roman Catholic prelate – who recruited the Mormon Church into the battle over Prop. 8.
“Last May,” recalls Niederauer, “the staff of the [state Catholic] Conference office informed me that leaders and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had given their support to the campaign for Proposition 22 in the year 2000, and were already considering an involvement in connection with Proposition 8. Accordingly, I was asked to contact leaders of the LDS Church whom I had come to know during my eleven years as Bishop of Salt Lake City, to ask them to cooperate again, in this election cycle. I did write to them and they urged the members of their Church, especially those in California, to become involved.”
Given the very different theological perspectives of Catholics, Mormons, and Evangelicals, it becomes perfectly obvious that they were not trying to write theology into the constitution. Instead, what they were doing was re-establishing the status quo ante, one that had been based on the consensus beliefs of the population, regardless of religious background, that had existed since the founding of the republic, and for millennia prior.
The following chart shows the amounts of money contributed by both in-state and out-of-state individuals and groups to each side.
In-State Donations Out-of-State Donations Total Donations
For Proposition 8 $25,388,955 $10,733,582 $36,122,538
Against Proposition 8 $26,464,589 $11,968,285 $38,432,873
Totals $51,853,544 $22,701,867 $74,555,411
Source: Tracking the money, Los Angeles Times
Note that out-of-state contributions to the “No” side were over $1.2 million higher than the out-of-state contributions to the “Yes” side. Another claim is that the Church violated its tax-exempt status by participating in the “Yes on 8″ campaign. According to IRS rules, a tax-exempt organization may not support particular candidates or parties. However, the church did not participate in or intervene in any of the political campaigns for any of the candidates running in the 2008 election. The IRS does, however, permit a Church to take positions on issues.
CarlH on 23 Dec 2008 at 9:04 am #
The idea that, for Steven McConkey and his ilk, the theological orthodoxy of the author of a Christmas story is somehow a big issue frankly boggles the mind, even for one who is pretty much inured to the anti-Mormon bigotry of some loud voices within Evangelicalism (and other parts of “orthodox” Christianity).
If some of Glenn Beck’s “false” Christianity crept into the story he’s written, then point that out. That would certainly be fair criticism. But it appears that Beck’s Mormonism itself is the issue here. This looks like an extension–almost to the point of silliness of the angst, hand-wringing and worse in reaction to Romney’s presidential campaign–where the mere fact that someone is a Mormon automatically and irretrievably de-legitimizes any public activity in which they may engage–at least if the stage is big and public enough.
Could the fact that Glenn Beck is a radio and cable TV personality with a fairly decent listener-viewership have something to do with this particular reaction? I fully realize that I am at least dipping my toe in the fever swamp of conspiratorial thinking here–but is the nut-wing branch of Evangelicalism now going to begin insisting that the only legitimate conservative voices must also be theologically “pure”? Come to think of it, how are Huckabee’s Nielsen’s comparing with Beck’s these days?
pdale on 28 Dec 2008 at 12:10 am #
Evangelicals have done a pretty good job of demonizing we Mormons. I guess when the flock has been warned the flock is less likely to listen to anything new. One of the common attack lines is “Mormons don’t believe in the Nicene Creed, so they can’t be Christians”. Another argument is “Mormons believe in revelations that aren’t found in the Bible”. My only question is why isn’t the Nicene Creed found in the Bible?
I apologize for touching on doctrine; I normally just ignore the “Mormons are a cult” croud and move on. But every now and then it feels good to at least point out that Mormon doctrine is very defendable, and some of what is thrown at us is not.
But there really is so much that Mormons and Evangelicals have in common. Doctrinally, we’re a lot closer than many of us think. And I’m talking about the core issues, because Mormons definitely believe “there is none other name given under heaven save it be this Jesus Christ, of which I have spoken, whereby man can be saved” (2 Nephi 25:20).
John Schroeder on 28 Dec 2008 at 7:52 am #
Look folks, we really try to stay away from doctrine here, and I hope you all know that I am the last person you have to convince on much of this, but I don’t want Mormons to be ignorant of Evangelicals any more than I want Evangelicals to be ignorant of Mormons.
The “creedal/non-creedal” distinction is useful, but not the bottom line on why most Evangelicals do not consider Mormons Christians. There are many non-creedal protestant denominations (Church of Christ – most Pentecostal denominations…)
The bottom line differences are in two areas. 1) Extra biblical specially revealed scripture. Most traditional Christians rely on any number of extra-biblical materials for all sorts of things, but they do not elevate it to the level of scripture – even the creeds. Anything other than scripture must be tested against scripture, or better derived from it. Special revelation – that is God speaking directly to someone – is a huge subject and widely debated amongst traditional Christians, but even those that believe such can and does occur think such revelation must be “tested” against scripture, that it can never supplant it, and thus such speeches or writing will always be secondary sources.
2) The Mormon view of the Godhead is, as formally stated, non-Trinitarian. And this by the way is the big bug-a-boo. Now, it is my personal opinion that Mormon thought on the Godhead is functionally trinitarian, if not academically so, but traditional Christians just are not willing to buy that argument. I will not begin to bore you with the details of what all that means, if you are really interested, there is plenty of material available throughout the internet.
Now, with those clarifications of what Evangelicals think and believe, I ask respectfully that doctrinal discussion cease.
Article VI Blog » Friends of Friends, The “Invisible Primary,” Religious Discrimination and more on 09 Oct 2009 at 10:10 am #
[...] a surrogate for religiously based attacks on Romney. We saw inklings of it last Christmas. (See here – here – here – here – here) Looks like I was right to [...]