Vaccinating the Well

This the third post in a series about what I am calling Category 2 rhetoric against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - rhetoric directed toward Christians who are not members of the The Church of Jesus Christ, to discourage them from wanting to learn more about The Church. These posts were inspired by a video I came across called "How to Talk to a Mormon," introduced in the first post. The second post was the full text of an email conversation with Tim Hull, a creator of the video. Update 11/27/21: The fourth post describes the reaction of the creators of the "How to Talk to a Mormon" video to my concerns about some of the claims in the video.

Category 1 rhetoric is attacks directed toward members of The Church in an attempt to shake their faith. Category 2 rhetoric is an example of what is called poisoning the well, prophylactically discrediting and ridiculing The Church and its members in the eyes of other Christians. Poisoning the well is sometimes considered an informal logical fallacy, but I am not concerned so long as what is said is truthful - after all, the role of the shepherd is to protect the sheep and warn them from danger. However, a characteristic of Category 2 rhetoric is that its target audience knows little about the church, so this rhetoric need not be truthful or even plausible in order to be effective . And in fact some of it is over-the-top crazy, inflammatory, sexual in nature, and disconnected from reality. 

You may ask why I am so concerned with the unhinged Category 2 rhetoric. The truth is that this kind of well-poisoning is not a victimless crime. The minds of mainstream Christians (mostly evangelical Protestants in my experience) have been vaccinated with the completely made-up idea that members of the Church of Jesus Christ are weird and hold creepy-disgusting-blasphemous ideas as sacred doctrine. The vaccination is not foolproof, but for certain people, when exposure to identified members of The Church occurs, the intellectual/social immune response kicks in and causes a reaction of horror and disgust, leading to rejection of the offending elements. You might think that as a society we have moved past "I don't want my children to play with your children," but unfortunately we have not. My family has been involved in two separate incidents in which we were ostracized from existing friend groups by the discovery that we are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The stories below were mostly cut and pasted from my email conversation with Tim Hull.

Ostracized:

My wife and I homeschool our children, and several years ago we joined a local homeschool group.  The group had a multiple-point statement of faith that we were able to sign with integrity. We took this very seriously - we had a question about the interpretation of one of the questions so we asked the group leadership and we were assured that our interpretation was acceptable. So we paid dues, and my wife volunteered in the group and taught classes and was very involved in the group. Our children had friends in the group and it was a fulfilling thing for our family. Suddenly the leadership of the group changed.  Shortly thereafter a meeting notice was sent out with an agenda item to discuss whether various faiths should be accepted in the group. We were a little concerned, and my wife attended the meeting to see what was going on. It turns out that the whole purpose of the meeting was to talk about my family. Without giving my wife any time to talk except for 2 minutes at the very end, the meeting organizers said they had found evidence that Mormons had joined the group, and read off a litany of horrible-sounding ideas that we supposedly believed, salacious and sexual things that we absolutely do not believe in any sense. They weren't the same claims as were made in the "How to talk to a Mormon" video, but other absurd and unhinged examples of Category 2 rhetoric. These claims were read off in order to justify removing us from the group. At the end of the meeting my wife was given 2 minutes to speak. In tears, she told the group that those things are not at all what we believe, and wasn't this group supposed to be about the unity of faith in Christ? I think the leadership wasn't quite sure what to do with the idea that they had misunderstood our beliefs, and they decided to organize an investigation to determine on what grounds we could be removed from the group. Well, we decided to save them the trouble and left the group at that point since they were determined to remove us anyway. We struggled with the humiliation and rejection for a while, and our children were saddened over losing their friends and sense of belonging, but we have learned to move on and forgive. It turned out that much of the group was in agreement with the leadership decisions, but another large subset of the group was appalled at how we had been treated, and many of those also left the group because of it. The group hasn't quite been the same since then.  

Ostracized again:

I wish that were the end of the story, but it wasn't.  We later were part of another more open homeschool group that didn't have any statement of faith but met in a local church.  After we had been meeting for a while and enjoying the fellowship, and my wife played a significant role in organizing the group and in teaching classes, the church found out that the homeschool group that met in their building had a family that was members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  The church decided they couldn't let the group continue to meet in their building during the week if we were a part of it.  Shocked again, we were forced to leave this second group and our children lost another set of friends and fellow scholars.

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I have to believe that unhinged Category 2 rhetoric works because it is being spread mostly by well-meaning people to protect their congregations or family or friends from the the kind of weird things that they are taught to believe about The Church and its members. The thing is, I can't blame them - I wouldn't want my children indoctrinated by this weird and crazy nonsense either. But look, if you just come talk to me for a few minutes you'll see that you don't need to make stuff up to prove that I'm weird and crazy.  😉  

Here are three examples of Category 2 rhetoric, quotes from the video How to Talk to a Mormon, to give some concreteness to this discussion. The video was framed as helping you understand the "senators, business leaders, and maybe even the neighbor next door who believe in Mormonism." According to the video...

• "They believe that Jesus was indeed married - in fact, was a polygamist with three wives."
• "Get this! They believe that Elohim, you know, impregnated, right, the mother of Jesus, to give birth to Jesus. So there was a physical union."
• "If you are a woman, your future vision is, if your husband lets in to Heaven, and you are able to go there, you can be perpetually pregnant..." 

Those claims are in addition to a laundry list of other more innocent false statements like "there is no archeological backing" for the Book of Mormon, we are polytheistic, we believe in a "works-based salvation," etc. Those potentially debatable claims are great material for discussion, but are not the subject of this post. Here I want to focus on the more absurd and bizarre claims like the 3 bullet points above that are absolutely not a part of my beliefs - in fact I have never heard these weird ideas before by anyone. The idea that "senators, business leaders, and maybe even the neighbor next door" would believe these things is laughable. Simply talking to any member of The Church would easily demonstrate this. The fact that this type of claim is circulating around in the mainstream Christian community implies 2 things:

1. There is someone or some groups of people out there knowingly starting, spreading, or amplifying blatantly false and nasty claims about members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Motivations could vary but Christ-like behavior this is not.
2. That these claims which are easily demonstrated to be false circulate in Christian circles indicates  that there is little overlap between the social circles of mainstream Christianity (Protestants, Catholics, etc.) and the social circles of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 

I will not delve into Point 1, but regarding Point 2 - I have to believe that a critical mass of network connections between mainstream Christians and members of The Church would create the feedback and interaction to diffuse this sort of misinformation. This could be through asking their friends in The Church of Jesus Christ if these wild-sounding claims are true, or simply by already knowing enough about The Church to know that these claims are unlikely to be true. Part of the problem, of course, is simply the numbers - The Church of Jesus Christ has about 7 million members in the US compared to almost 200 million mainstream Christians. But I think both sides could do better to build bridges of good-faith Christian fellowship.