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Wow!
It’s amazing how just about any thread on Mormonism has a tendency of being derailed after the first page! (It seems the same goes with threads on Islam).
In any case; thank you Paul for the interesting article. Having grown up LDS I’m always intrigued by LDS history and what this historian says really resonates with me.
I would be careful though when discussing the anti-Catholicism of past Mormons and the LDS Church in general. I think the phenomenon owes the majority of its existence to the surrounding American culture of the times (after all, the United States has its own legacy of anti-Catholicism that still persists today however small it may be). Of course, American practitioners of religions such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Latter-day Saints, the Seventh-day Adventists, who espouse beliefs in a great apostasy had even more of a vested interest in running with already present anti-Catholicism, indeed magnifying it.
I’m a young tyke (only in my 20s) and while I was growing up in the LDS church in the 90’s, I can honestly say I never experienced anti-Catholicism systematically present in the church. The rantings of my elderly grandparents and others their age is another story. During my era, the “We just prefer to emphasize the risen Christ rather than the dead Christ” justification was typical, and up until reading this article I had assumed that was always the case among the Mormon faithful.
What’s more interesting is the idea of a “return to the basics”. During my last year or so of being LDS, I noticed many my age begin to embrace subtle crosses. My LDS former girlfriend would begin wearing a modest gold cross to Sacrament meeting, and we even had a modest wall cross in our Institute of Religion (things likely unheard of in Mormondom some 20-30 years ago). Now I see this historian is also justifying the reemergence of the cross within Mormon culture and he brings up a very good point at the very end of this article, that the same wounds Christ used to identify himself to his Apostles in Judaea were also used to identify himself (allegedly) to his Saints in ancient America.
I don’t believe the cross/no cross distinction is anything of theological worth. To me, this is purely cultural and members of the LDS church can switch back and forth from affinity to the cross to aversion of the cross numerous times and in my mind it would say absolutely nothing about the theology of the LDS church (no more than if we Catholics were to “purge cultural vestiges which owe their existence to paganism” (such as the Christmas Tree), and then later on reembrace them.
It’s amazing how just about any thread on Mormonism has a tendency of being derailed after the first page! (It seems the same goes with threads on Islam).
In any case; thank you Paul for the interesting article. Having grown up LDS I’m always intrigued by LDS history and what this historian says really resonates with me.
I would be careful though when discussing the anti-Catholicism of past Mormons and the LDS Church in general. I think the phenomenon owes the majority of its existence to the surrounding American culture of the times (after all, the United States has its own legacy of anti-Catholicism that still persists today however small it may be). Of course, American practitioners of religions such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Latter-day Saints, the Seventh-day Adventists, who espouse beliefs in a great apostasy had even more of a vested interest in running with already present anti-Catholicism, indeed magnifying it.
I’m a young tyke (only in my 20s) and while I was growing up in the LDS church in the 90’s, I can honestly say I never experienced anti-Catholicism systematically present in the church. The rantings of my elderly grandparents and others their age is another story. During my era, the “We just prefer to emphasize the risen Christ rather than the dead Christ” justification was typical, and up until reading this article I had assumed that was always the case among the Mormon faithful.
What’s more interesting is the idea of a “return to the basics”. During my last year or so of being LDS, I noticed many my age begin to embrace subtle crosses. My LDS former girlfriend would begin wearing a modest gold cross to Sacrament meeting, and we even had a modest wall cross in our Institute of Religion (things likely unheard of in Mormondom some 20-30 years ago). Now I see this historian is also justifying the reemergence of the cross within Mormon culture and he brings up a very good point at the very end of this article, that the same wounds Christ used to identify himself to his Apostles in Judaea were also used to identify himself (allegedly) to his Saints in ancient America.
I don’t believe the cross/no cross distinction is anything of theological worth. To me, this is purely cultural and members of the LDS church can switch back and forth from affinity to the cross to aversion of the cross numerous times and in my mind it would say absolutely nothing about the theology of the LDS church (no more than if we Catholics were to “purge cultural vestiges which owe their existence to paganism” (such as the Christmas Tree), and then later on reembrace them.
