Regarding Restorationism

[Kubra]

So why that kid gotta have the mark if he ain't cursed no more

Genetics

you're telling me god genetically encoded the mark of the curse of Ham, even though he'd lift it later?
Kinda sounds, shitty, man.

[Neutraligon]

I actually like Mormons. I grew up around a lot of 'em, and while I find their Church to be odd, some of their beliefs to be strange, and their leaders to be corrupt, I still like them. I can say a lot of nasty things about my own religious background (Catholicism), but that doesn't mean I shit-talk Catholics. For the same reason, I won't shit-ta Mormons when most that I've associated with are very kind, generous, and family-oriented.

The FLDS, though? That is a nightmarish cult.

I have issues with them due to their actions dealing with homosexuality. They did a shit ton of harm, and will likely do a shit ton of harm when it comes to Trans individuals.

[Major-Tom]

I actually like Mormons. I grew up around a lot of 'em, and while I find their Church to be odd, some of their beliefs to be strange, and their leaders to be corrupt, I still like them. I can say a lot of nasty things about my own religious background (Catholicism), but that doesn't mean I shit-talk Catholics. For the same reason, I won't shit-ta Mormons when most that I've associated with are very kind, generous, and family-oriented.

The FLDS, though? That is a nightmarish cult.

I have issues with them due to their actions dealing with homosexuality. They did a shit ton of harm, and will likely do a shit ton of harm when it comes to Trans individuals.

I don't disagree with you. I have a lot of qualms with their Church as an institution for that, among many other reasons.

But I won't judge Mormons as individuals. On the contrary, I've tended to like most of the ones I've met. Take my anecdote with a grain of salt, since I'm a white guy from the suburbs who looks pretty straight.

[Floofybit]

The FLDS, though? That is a nightmarish cult.

Lol

[Major-Tom]

The FLDS, though? That is a nightmarish cult.

Lol

I take it you agree...?

[Neutraligon]

I have issues with them due to their actions dealing with homosexuality. They did a shit ton of harm, and will likely do a shit ton of harm when it comes to Trans individuals.

I don't disagree with you. I have a lot of qualms with their Church as an institution for that, among many other reasons.

But I won't judge Mormons as individuals. On the contrary, I've tended to like most of the ones I've met. Take my anecdote with a grain of salt, since I'm a white guy from the suburbs who looks pretty straight.

My issue is the same as when individuals continue to support an institution that has perpetuated harm. I will have issue with those who support the police because of the brutality the police in the US have. I have issues with those who continue to support the Catholic church considering the history of abuse and coverup within the church. That does not prevent me from liking an individual, but the continued support gives me pause.

[Floofybit]

Lol

I take it you agree...?

Ye

[Major-Tom]

I don't disagree with you. I have a lot of qualms with their Church as an institution for that, among many other reasons.

But I won't judge Mormons as individuals. On the contrary, I've tended to like most of the ones I've met. Take my anecdote with a grain of salt, since I'm a white guy from the suburbs who looks pretty straight.

My issue is the same as when individuals continue to support an institution that has perpetuated harm. I will have issue with those who support the police because of the brutality the police in the US have. I have issues with those who continue to support the Catholic church considering the history of abuse and coverup within the church. That does not prevent me from liking an individual, but the continued support gives me pause.

I get that, but as somebody who grew up in a pretty Catholic family, I can say this much - it's tough to shed the dissonance between your good nature and some of the heinous actions of your respective church. It's tough because many people associate their religion with their community, their family, their friends, and their entire life outside themselves. I don't mean that to say that religious people should get a pass for using their religion to hate others, quite the contrary, I just get why otherwise good people sometimes ascribe to religions that often perpetrate a lot of bad.

For Mormons in particular, my understanding is that the difficulty is ten-fold. Because of how engrained and ubiquitous Mormonism is in the lives of most LDS people, it is hard to break away from it. For example, my best friend is an Ex-Mormon, and he compared leaving the church to The Truman Show; where Jim Carey finally realizes his entire world is farcical after decades of not knowing anything else.

[Floofybit]

Genetics

you're telling me god genetically encoded the mark of the curse of Ham, even though he'd lift it later?
Kinda sounds, shitty, man.

Look man, I don't know. The church has denounced the curse as a reason for discrimination. I'm not a historian, I mostly focus on the morals and the non-mortal ideas

[North Jus Intius]

I would rather join the church of scientology than come within 10 miles of the LDS

[Ikania]

Mormonism as a religion is fine, they've earned their right to not be labelled wackos. Hell, they fought in the Civil War, how can I complain? But the modern LDS church is just as much an abomination as all the other major organized religions. And the practices of the JWs are barbaric when it comes to blood transfusions - that needs to be legislated against, pronto.

[Neanderthaland]

you're telling me god genetically encoded the mark of the curse of Ham, even though he'd lift it later?
Kinda sounds, shitty, man.

Look man, I don't know. The church has denounced the curse as a reason for discrimination. I'm not a historian, I mostly focus on the morals and the non-mortal ideas

The fact that you think that the "curse" even exists in the first place is just incredibly racist. If God did that, then God is an irredeemable racist. Of course, he didn't. The story is made up. By a racist.

[United Calanworie]

Mormonism as a religion is fine, they've earned their right to not be labelled wackos. Hell, they fought in the Civil War, how can I complain? But the modern LDS church is just as much an abomination as all the other major organized religions. And the practices of the JWs are barbaric when it comes to blood transfusions - that needs to be legislated against, pronto.

I dunno. One of the very first things they taught me in school as an EMT is *consent*. They have every right to refuse consent to blood transfusions. Legislating a mandate to force them to accept blood is a violation of consent and their bodily autonomy. You may not like it, but it's their decision to make.

[Ikania]

Mormonism as a religion is fine, they've earned their right to not be labelled wackos. Hell, they fought in the Civil War, how can I complain? But the modern LDS church is just as much an abomination as all the other major organized religions. And the practices of the JWs are barbaric when it comes to blood transfusions - that needs to be legislated against, pronto.

I dunno. One of the very first things they taught me in school as an EMT is *consent*. They have every right to refuse consent to blood transfusions. Legislating a mandate to force them to accept blood is a violation of consent and their bodily autonomy. You may not like it, but it's their decision to make.

It's when they start withholding consent on behalf of their children that it becomes an issue. Nevermind my views on organized religion harming adults, we absolutely cannot allow superstition to jeopardize the lives of children.

[Neanderthaland]

Mormonism as a religion is fine, they've earned their right to not be labelled wackos. Hell, they fought in the Civil War, how can I complain? But the modern LDS church is just as much an abomination as all the other major organized religions. And the practices of the JWs are barbaric when it comes to blood transfusions - that needs to be legislated against, pronto.

I dunno. One of the very first things they taught me in school as an EMT is *consent*. They have every right to refuse consent to blood transfusions. Legislating a mandate to force them to accept blood is a violation of consent and their bodily autonomy. You may not like it, but it's their decision to make.

This confuses the issue. You're trying to make it about an individual's right to refuse treatment, but the problem is an organization spreading medical misinformation. It's the difference between outlawing the purchase of homeopathic products, and saying that homeopaths aren't allowed to make false claims about the efficacy of their treatments.

Mind you, I don't actually agree that the JWs should be "legislated against." Freedom of religion is something I believe in. But they are still fundamentally evil for spreading the beliefs that they spread. And that has nothing to do with patient rights.

[Maricela Gutierrez]

On the matter of the anti-Black priesthood and temple exclusion, growing scholarly historical consensus is that it was an unsuccessful attempt by Brigham Young in the 1850s to assert Mormons as "white." During the 1800s, it was popular in American culture to caricature Mormons as "heathen barbarians" (similar to the then-contemporary racialization of Irish immigrants as "apes") and therefore not "white." Young's racist strategy did not work, and Americans kept hating Mormons. In the meantime, Young's ban calcified into a dogma, and later church leaders decided it was fundamental. The "curse" idea developed after the ban was instituted to retroactively justify it (though it was inspired by existing racist ideas in wider American Christianity). Black members throughout the church's existence contested the policy, eventually leading to its overturn in 1978.

Church policy today is to say that all previously given justifications for the ban are false and racist, but the institution itself has been slow to concede that Young's decision to institute the ban itself was rooted in anti-Black prejudice. That hesitancy to outright condemn Young may be why non-Black lay members continue to propound the curse idea. The Church continues to struggle with many of the legacies of that exclusion policy, much like how the United States, despite having long since abolished anti-Black chattel slavery, continues to struggle with those legacies. Meanwhile, Young, in a horrifying way, got his wish: the church, once seen as not white enough to fit in in America, now is seen as too white to fit in in the modern world, much to the frustration of its members of color.

Sources: What I have written above is based on Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (Oxford University Press, 2015). For more on the lives of early Black Latter-day Saints, see the University of Utah's online public history project Century of Black Mormons.

To answer the poll: Latter-day Saints, Community of Christ, and the other denominations of Mormonism have as much right to exist as other denominations. Most Mormon bigotries are, in the experience I have gained studying Mormon history, not uniquely Mormon. They are refractions of the bigotries manifest in the wider society these denominations participate in. If anything, making much ado about alleged "Mormon backwardness" is less a productive move toward fighting oppression and more conducive to retrenching it in wider American society. Mocking Mormonism is a subconscious national project to cleanse the American state of its sins by pretending that only Mormons commit them. Source for that: K. Mohrman, Exceptionally Queer: Mormon Peculiarity and US Nationalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2022). That's not to say Latter-day Saints and other Mormons should get off scot free. But I consider it more productive to identify the wider structures of prejudice and oppression that are transmitted through, not created by, their churches (and through other Christian churches as well).

As for the allegation that "superstition" is dangerous and/or evil—that supposedly atheist line historically cites not back to principled scientific stands but instead to anti-Catholic assertions by Protestants from the Reformation onward. The science versus religion debate started out as a Protestantism versus Catholicism debate, and I'm not interested in recapitulating medieval apologetics. For some of this, see the first two chapters of Robert Orsi, History and Presence (Harvard University Press, 2016).

[North Jus Intius]

On the matter of the anti-Black priesthood and temple exclusion, growing scholarly historical consensus is that it was an unsuccessful attempt by Brigham Young in the 1850s to assert Mormons as "white." During the 1800s, it was popular in American culture to caricature Mormons as "heathen barbarians" (similar to the then-contemporary racialization of Irish immigrants as "apes") and therefore not "white." Young's racist strategy did not work, and Americans kept hating Mormons. In the meantime, Young's ban calcified into a dogma, and later church leaders decided it was fundamental. The "curse" idea developed after the ban was instituted to retroactively justify it (though it was inspired by existing racist ideas in wider American Christianity). Black members throughout the church's existence contested the policy, eventually leading to its overturn in 1978.

Church policy today is to say that all previously given justifications for the ban are false and racist, but the institution itself has been slow to concede that Young's decision to institute the ban itself was rooted in anti-Black prejudice. That hesitancy to outright condemn Young may be why non-Black lay members continue to propound the curse idea. The Church continues to struggle with many of the legacies of that exclusion policy, much like how the United States, despite having long since abolished anti-Black chattel slavery, continues to struggle with those legacies. Meanwhile, Young, in a horrifying way, got his wish: the church, once seen as not white enough to fit in in America, now is seen as too white to fit in in the modern world, much to the frustration of its members of color.

Sources: What I have written above is based on Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (Oxford University Press, 2015). For more on the lives of early Black Latter-day Saints, see the University of Utah's online public history project Century of Black Mormons.

To answer the poll: Latter-day Saints, Community of Christ, and the other denominations of Mormonism have as much right to exist as other denominations. Most Mormon bigotries are, in the experience I have gained studying Mormon history, not uniquely Mormon. They are refractions of the bigotries manifest in the wider society these denominations participate in. If anything, making much ado about alleged "Mormon backwardness" is less a productive move toward fighting oppression and more conducive to retrenching it in wider American society. Mocking Mormonism is a subconscious national project to cleanse the American state of its sins by pretending that only Mormons commit them. Source for that: K. Mohrman, Exceptionally Queer: Mormon Peculiarity and US Nationalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2022). That's not to say Latter-day Saints and other Mormons should get off scot free. But I consider it more productive to identify the wider structures of prejudice and oppression that are transmitted through, not created by, their churches (and through other Christian churches as well).

As for the allegation that "superstition" is dangerous and/or evil—that supposedly atheist line historically cites not back to principled scientific stands but instead to anti-Catholic assertions by Protestants from the Reformation onward. The science versus religion debate started out as a Protestantism versus Catholicism debate, and I'm not interested in recapitulating medieval apologetics. For some of this, see the first two chapters of Robert Orsi, History and Presence (Harvard University Press, 2016).

This seems to prove that even in the past the Mormon church was backwards, which makes sense given that young churches haven't the theological history nor membership to keep up with the church itself, let alone modern society.

[Floofybit]

I would rather join the church of scientology than come within 10 miles of the LDS

Explain

[Maricela Gutierrez]

This seems to prove that even in the past the Mormon church was backwards, which makes sense given that young churches haven't the theological history nor membership to keep up with the church itself, let alone modern society.

What in my post leads you to believe that "even in the past the Mormon church was backwards"? Do you think the United States' racially-inflected invectives against Mormons was forward-thinking on the Americans' part?

If anything, Latter-day Saints in the nineteenth century were at the theological cutting edge. They advanced belief in a Divine Feminine,¹ and Mormon-majority territorial Utah instituted the second gender-equal voting rights law in the United States, in 1870 (fifty years before national women's suffrage).² Their new scripture had a postmodern self-awareness that allows it to be read as an anti-imperial manifesto.³ In an era of puritanical, Victorian anxieties around the body and intimacy, early Mormons advanced a materially embodied theology that valued the joys of physical existence and human intimacy as worthwhile parts of life and afterlife.⁴

Say what one will about Mormonism, but these are not backwards ideas. These are interesting, thoughtful engagements with the human experience. That the contemporary Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has made its bed with the mostly-Evangelical Religious Right and its crusade against LGBT folks is, to my mind, a sad turn of affairs and a strange reversal of the church's nineteenth-century history.

But I would again reiterate the point mentioned in my longer post: asserting "Mormon backwardness" is not, in its effect, really about stopping Mormon bigotry. It has much more to do with foisting the blame for national wrongdoings (particularly by the United States, where most discourse about Latter-day Saints takes place, thought not exclusively) onto Mormons in order to make the nation-state look virtuous by comparison. But when one gets down to it, Mormon bigotries are refractions of American bigotries, and tut-tutting Latter-day Saints tends toward retrenching the power of colonial nation-states.⁵

---

1. Fiona Givens, "Feminism and Heavenly Mother," chapter 30 in "The Routledge Handbook of Mormonism and Gender" (Routledge, 2020).

2. For women's suffrage in territorial Utah, see Barbara Jones Brown, Naomi Watkins, and Katherine Kitterman, "Gaining, Losing, and Winning Back the Vote: The Story of Utah Women’s Suffrage," Better Days 2020.

3. Jared Hickman, "The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse," American Literature 86, no. 3 (2014). One grants that it usually isn't read that way, but this counter-reading exists and has been advanced here and there in history.

4. Peter Coviello, "Endless Felicity: The Radiant Body of Early Mormon Theology," second chapter in Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism (University of Chicago Press, 2019).

5. K. Mohrman, Exceptionally Queer: Mormon Peculiarity and US Nationalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2022).

[Risottia]

So, what do y'all think?

*purge the haeretic intensifies*

More seriously, those modern Christian sects look even more weird and cult-like than the major Christian brands to me.

[Senkaku]

By the year 2123, Scientology will have become as respectable as Mormonism today

[Page]

Hot take: Jehovah's Witnesses are one of the least dangerous religions for society, because they completely eschew politics. They don't vote, they don't campaign, they refuse to enlist in the military too. If only the Evangelicals would do that.

[The Second Order of Life]

By the year 2123, Scientology will have become as respectable as Mormonism today

So... not much changes, I take it?

[United Calanworie]

I dunno. One of the very first things they taught me in school as an EMT is *consent*. They have every right to refuse consent to blood transfusions. Legislating a mandate to force them to accept blood is a violation of consent and their bodily autonomy. You may not like it, but it's their decision to make.

It's when they start withholding consent on behalf of their children that it becomes an issue. Nevermind my views on organized religion harming adults, we absolutely cannot allow superstition to jeopardize the lives of children.

Pediatrics are difficult, yes. I don't have a lot to say beyond that, but informed consent is absolutely a problem once children become older -- who's wishes do we as providers adhere to?

I dunno. One of the very first things they taught me in school as an EMT is *consent*. They have every right to refuse consent to blood transfusions. Legislating a mandate to force them to accept blood is a violation of consent and their bodily autonomy. You may not like it, but it's their decision to make.

This confuses the issue. You're trying to make it about an individual's right to refuse treatment, but the problem is an organization spreading medical misinformation. It's the difference between outlawing the purchase of homeopathic products, and saying that homeopaths aren't allowed to make false claims about the efficacy of their treatments.

Mind you, I don't actually agree that the JWs should be "legislated against." Freedom of religion is something I believe in. But they are still fundamentally evil for spreading the beliefs that they spread. And that has nothing to do with patient rights.

I'm not confident that... they spread beliefs like that? They certainly spread their beliefs as a whole, and yes, one of those beliefs is refusal to receive blood products... but it's not like they say "we refuse blood products, and by doing so, we're healthier for it." They *know* that they run the risk of dying if they refuse transfusions. They just believe their religious requirement is greater than that of continuing to exist on this mortal coil. So... it's absolutely about their individual right to refuse treatment.

I'm not a fan of it. But it's their right.

[The Second Order of Life]

This confuses the issue. You're trying to make it about an individual's right to refuse treatment, but the problem is an organization spreading medical misinformation. It's the difference between outlawing the purchase of homeopathic products, and saying that homeopaths aren't allowed to make false claims about the efficacy of their treatments.

Mind you, I don't actually agree that the JWs should be "legislated against." Freedom of religion is something I believe in. But they are still fundamentally evil for spreading the beliefs that they spread. And that has nothing to do with patient rights.

I'm not confident that... they spread beliefs like that? They certainly spread their beliefs as a whole, and yes, one of those beliefs is refusal to receive blood products... but it's not like they say "we refuse blood products, and by doing so, we're healthier for it." They *know* that they run the risk of dying if they refuse transfusions. They just believe their religious requirement is greater than that of continuing to exist on this mortal coil. So... it's absolutely about their individual right to refuse treatment.

I'm not a fan of it. But it's their right.

The perils of religion

I do agree with you here though, they have a right to refuse treatment, but... wouldn't it be less silly if we just didn't do this thing at all? Like, ya know, trick ourselves into having a higher risk of dying for no good reason?