Dave's Mormon Inquiry

The Brigham Option: Living in a Post-Christian Nation

I have heard a lot about Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (2017), so I finally got a copy and read it. Short summary: Christian writer figures out Protestants no longer enjoy the benefits of informal religious establishment in the USA and goes into panic mode. Maybe that's a little unfair, but I doubt that Catholics or Mormons or Buddhists reading the book have much sympathy for the plight of Evangelicals and mainline Protestants who now have to deal with the same church-state and citizenship issues that we have had to deal with for hundreds of years.

Do Mormons Get a Seat at the Table?

I just started reading the recently published Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise, by Kevin M. Schultz (OUP, 2011). With Mitt Romney's Mormon-ness continuing to be an oddly fascinating topic for the mainstream media, a point of criticism and ridicule for journalist comedians (they think they are journalists, I think they are comedians), and a strategic weakness to be exploited by Rick Perry and possibly other candidates, Tri-Faith America seems like a very timely book.

A Woman's Religion?

That's the title of Chapter 7 in Christianity: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2004) by Linda Woodhead, in which the author tackles the general problem of the gender gap (women are disproportionately represented in the pool of church-goers across all Christian denominations, including the LDS Church). Why so many women and why not more men in most congregations?

Almost Mormon

I recently finished Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church (OUP, 2010) by Kenda Creasy Dean, a professor at the Princeton Theological Seminary. Chapter 3, entitled "Mormon Envy," naturally attracted my attention.

Review: Losing My Religion

I admit that when approaching William Lobdell's Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America — and Found Unexpected Peace (HarperCollins, 2009), I expected the standard debunking treatment that is so familiar in news and entertainment media these days. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to find a balanced and engaging narrative that mixes accounts of the stories Lobell covered while a religion reporter for the Los Angeles Times with details of his own journey into, then out of, faith.

Bart Ehrman on Contradictions in the Bible

I've enjoyed every book I've read by Bart Ehrman, including his latest, Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don't Know About Them). I only had time to read the first couple of chapters carefully (the publisher didn't send a review copy), so I'll only make a few remarks.

Christianity by Continent

I recently read Martin Marty's The Christian World: A Global History (2007). The subtitle is slightly misleading, as Marty recounts Christian history on a continent-by-continent basis. The last two chapters, covering the modern return of Christianity to Africa and Asia, raise issues of particular interest to the LDS experience: correlation and assimilation.

Ehrman Strikes Again

I just put Bart Ehrman's new book, God's Problem, in my featured book box to the right. I've enjoyed every book of Ehrman's that I have read. I'll post on it when I finish reading the book.

Curing Religious Illiteracy

Here's more from Stephen Prothero's Religious Literacy, with my thoughts on some applications to Mormonism at the end. After glowing about the good 'ole days of the religiously literate 18th century — "Colonists did not just believe in the Bible, they knew what it said" — Prothero tries to explain what went wrong. A move from head to heart, from didactic sermons to revivalism of the sort practiced in Joseph Smith's New York, was the big step. Methodists and Baptists led the emotional charge that displaced the stodgier Congregationalists and Anglicans, but newer sects such as the Mormons also appeared in this new pluralistic religious landscape.

Cities of God

Just finished Rodney Stark's new book, Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became An Urban Movement and Conquered Rome (HarperCollins, 2006). Stark centers the book around data he gathered from a variety of scattered sources that address the origin and nature of early Christian congregations in cities of the Roman Empire. Stark crunches the numbers and comes up with some surprising observations. In particular, he looks at the growth of Christianity and its relationship to other religious movements in the Empire: Gnosticism, the Marcionites, the Valentinians, and the Montanists. Isis, Mithras, and Constantine also make appearances. Mormonism even gets a cameo. Here are a few quick points from the book.

The Real Jesus

Just finished The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels (1996) by Luke Timothy Johnson, a Catholic scholar (and previously a Benedictine monk and priest). This is a must-read book for anyone who has delved into the "historical Jesus" literature. Johnson targets the book at the Jesus Seminar, its leading scholars, and their claims to have arrived at a (reduced) set of historical facts and teachings related to Jesus. I won't try to recapitulate every argument in the book against exclusive reliance on history and the historical method (as practiced by the Seminar) — you can certainly get a copy of the book and do this yourself. I'll just give a sentence or two on each chapter of this short book of only 177 pages.

Ehrman Interview

My cable company changed last week, so the entire channel lineup got scrambled. As I was laboriously searching through 200 cable channels (hoping the Military Channel was still in there somewhere) I stumbled across Book TV. This is what C-Span2 does on the weekend. Among the several programs I watched was a short interview with Bart Ehrman, author of two books I have reviewed on this site, Misquoting Jesus and The Lost Gospel of Judas. Ehrman is presently the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at UNC Chapel Hill.

The Judas You Never Knew

This is Part 2 of comments on Bart Ehrman's new book, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot (OUP, 2006). [See Part 1] It's worth reflecting on just why a book about a gnostic manuscript full of speculative musings about Judas and Jesus which almost certainly have no historical basis can be successfully marketed to a general audience. Answer: The Da Vinci Code ("DVC"). The wildly successful novel has created not just one but two new genres: the religious thriller genre and the non-canonical Christian writings genre. There were books in the second genre before DVC (such as Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels) but it has exploded since, with half of them being expressly designed as refutations of DVC itself. Just imagine what Dan Brown's next book will do for the Mormon Studies market!

American Gospel

Just finished Jon Meacham's American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (Random House, 2006). It is an extended essay on how American presidents from Washington to Reagan have practiced and supported public religion. The author takes on the task of defending the middle ground against two extremes. From the right are those who portray America as a Christian nation, which misrepresents public religion as a form of sectarian religion. From the left are those who, relying on Jefferson's metaphor of The Wall (separating Church and State), would like to banish any hint of religious discourse from the public sphere, making no distinction between public religion and sectarian religion. Meacham supports his reasonable middle position with a pleasantly readable sampling of American political history and a wide variety of presidential quotes.

Judas and the Gospels

This is an intro post on Bart Ehrman's The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot (OUP, 2006). Someone at OUP noticed my post on Misquoting Jesus and was kind enough to send me a copy of Lost Gospel to review. My advice: buy it. Buy three or four and give them to friends. Okay, first read my comments, then decide for yourself. But Ehrman writes well and is very informative — without forcing his naturalistic, historical framework on the reader — so you can hardly go wrong with any of his books. In this post, I'll sketch out his review of Judas in the canonical gospels. In a later post I'll get to the new material drawn from the recently discovered Gospel of Judas manuscript.

The Soul of Christianity

Just finished Huston Smith's The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the Great Tradition (2005). Huston Smith is a Christian scholar who stresses the broad, ecumenical themes of religion and Christianity. He was a friend and colleague of Joseph Campbell; he notes that "early on we agreed to divide mythology's turf between us: he would defend its power and I its truth." So Smith is well qualified to identify a handful of doctrines, beliefs, and symbols that constitute the "soul of Christianity." My previous post featured Bertrand Russell's definition of a Christian (to believe in God and immortality, and affirm Jesus Christ as the Son of God or at least as the most exalted of moral teachers), a definition which certainly includes Mormons. I wonder how Mormons match up using Huston Smith's list?

Misquoting Jesus

Just finished Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (HarperCollins, 2005), a review of the current scholarship on the textual state of the New Testament. The author, Bart D. Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at UNC Chapel Hill, has written an eye-opening but amazingly readable presentation detailing just how much damage early scribes did to the text of the New Testament. Any Mormon who has an Evangelical every-word-of-the-Bible-is-true neighbor or work colleague who gives them a hard time about the Book of Mormon ought to consider this book as a Christmas gift. Their criticisms will likely become decidedly more restrained after they read it.

The Churching of America

I just finished a book recommended by Greg Call last month, The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (Rutgers Univ. Press, 1992) by Finke and Stark. The authors spend most of the first six chapters restating the history of religion in America which, in their analysis, most previous writers have gotten completely wrong. Previous writers have seen religion on the decline since the Revolution, viewing mainline Protestant churches (Epicopalians, Lutherans, Prebyterians, old Congregationalists) as the heart of the story and newer denominations or sects (early on, Methodists and Baptists; later, Pentecostals, Evangelicals, and Mormons) as distractions somehow removed from the main storyline. Backed by better data than the traditionalists, Finke and Stark show how wrong this story is.

Modern Fundamentalism, Part I

I just finished Karen Armstrong's The Battle For God (Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 450 pages of historical detail tracing the genesis and evolution of religious fundamentalism in The Big Three: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. I gave it five stars as it is well worth the read. You have to slog through more obscure Jewish rabbis and Islamic mullahs than was probably necessary, but the historical perspective is absolutely necessary to understanding "Fundamentalism." That word is too stereotyped and misunderstood to be used descriptively. Fundamentalist religious movements are better understood as a form of modern, participatory, mobilizing religion. Here's my theory:

Liberal Protestantism poses as "modern" in that it accomodates modern scientific ideas and liberal political goals (tolerance, social improvement) within its vision of Christianity, to the extent that is possible. But it also retains a premodern Enlightenment approach to religion. Modernity as it emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries was democratic and aggressively so. Government, the military, consumer retailing, education, the media in newspapers and cinema, even sports--all these social institutions adopted mass market methods and appeal. They had to in order to survive in the modern world. "Fundamentalist religion" is modern in the sense that it, too, eventually adopted a mass market approach. That's why Evangelicals now define Christianity in America and can build sprawling megachurches. That's also why Liberal Protestantism is dying a slow death--it's a dinosaur in the modern world. It never adapted.

Government adopted modern forms through representative government, elections, and political parties (participatory organizations, mobilizing support, getting people involved and voters out to vote). Notice the mass market, mobilizing aspect of political advertising, simple slogans even the dumbest voter can grasp, and minutely scripted political conventions. It's not a debate, it's Hollywood, DC. Welcome to modernism in the democratic era. Don't fight it, just recognize how it works. We could similarly review such aspects of the other institutions I listed above. For example, the Monday Night Football kickoff extravaganza last week about made me ill. It was a combination of Las Vegas glitz, video music performers of every genre, fireworks galore, talking heads on the TV screen, and precious little football--this is modern sports. I can't even remember the teams, but I'm not sure that's relevant anymore.

Religion became "modern" in this sense by adopting mass market devices. Televangelism reaches believers directly (rather than through a hierarchy or congregation), provides hi-tech, emotionally manipulative TV images and soundtracks to millions of viewers, and builds star power (seems kinder than "brand name recognition") for the more influential evangelists. Modern Fundamentalists/Evangelicals create a broad funding base through contributions. You can't play in the modern world without money--look at how contributions drive modern presidential campaigns. Hey, televangelists and modern Evangelicals can bring in the bucks (megachurches with a pastoral staff of 20 don't come cheap). Fundamentalists have simple slogans: Jesus saves. The Bible is inerrant. God created the world. Modern institutions run on slogans--that's why the Army spends millions advertising "Be All That You Can Be" or "An Army of One." Everyone advertises now. It's how you retain the attention and loyalty of your target market. But can you think of a single Presbetyrian slogan? Ever seen a Methodist PR commercial? An Episcopal rally at your local stadium? These are the premodern, dying denominations. I like them, they're just 200 years behind the times.

Conclusion: So, coming back to The Battle For God, remember that until 1979 religion was regarded as pretty much irrelevant to modern society. Then came 1979 in Iran--huh? Then Moral Majority and the strong role conservative religion now plays in party politics. No one in 1960, for example, foresaw the return of fundamentalism (read "modernized religion"). Amazingly, Armstrong wrote the book before 9/11, but it still reads as a direct hit in the post-9/11 world.

Part II will give links to other sources supporting this view of "Modern Fundamentalism," and Part III will consider Mormonism as Modern Fundamentalism (i.e., as an example, possibly the best example, of a successful, modern, participatory, mobilizing religion). [light edits, 9/14]

Biblical Literary Types

I just finished Making Sense of the Bible: Literary Type as an Approach to Understanding (Eerdmans, 2002) by Marshall D. Johnson. I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the commentary and the boost it gives to understanding the biblical corpus. The eight literary types — sometimes called "genres" — covered in the book, with examples of each, are as follows:

1. Wisdom Literature - Proverbs, James.
2. Hymns and Liturgies - Psalms.
3. Historical Narratives - Samuel/Kings, Acts.
4. Prophetic Literature - Jeremiah, Second Isaiah.
5. Legal Collections - Exodus 20-23, Deuteronomy 12-26.
6. Apocalyptic Literature - Daniel, Revelation.
7. Letters - Jeremiah 29, Galatians, Romans.
8. Gospels - Mark, John.

Christian Replies to The Da Vinci Code

At Christianity Today, there's a short piece titled Speaking in Code that lists several of the recent Christian replies to Da Vinci. Per the Amazon rankings, the two most popular appear to be De-Coding Da Vinci and Cracking Da Vinci's Code. Dan Brown seems to have unintentionally spawned a whole new genre. Has anyone read any of these?