Jim Antle writes on the left’s recent anti-Mormon assaults:
The standards being set by the Mormonphobes could have the effect of excluding a lot of other believers from the political process.
Today is the Orthodox celebration of Nativity on the Old Calendar (some Orthodox have already celebrated the Feast on Dec. 25), and today seems a good day to make a few more remarks on the implications of the Linker and Weisberg anti-Mormon articles. Weisberg is more explicit than Linker and takes a slightly different tack when he indicates his preference for older religions that have had centuries to more effectively dilute the stranger and more troubling (to secularists) aspects of their teachings. Thus Weisberg:
The world’s greater religions have had time to splinter, moderate, and turn their myths into metaphor. The Church of Latter-day Saints is expanding rapidly and liberalizing in various ways, but it remains fundamentally an orthodox creed with no visible reform wing.
Where Linker seems to favour the anchors of long-established traditions that keep a religion from becoming unmoored by the latest prophetic wind (regardless of how exaggerated his view of Mormon prophecy may be), Weisberg prefers really old religions on the implausible grounds that great antiquity results in a religion turning its truth-claims into mere metaphor and sentiment. The venerability of a religion somehow guarantees its moderate, “reformed” state. It is the lack of such “reformed” moderates (i.e., the lack of people like Bishop Spong to openly deny central tenets of the religion) that makes Mormonism beyond the secularist pale. At least most of the other religions have some respectably black sheep and dissidents a secularist can admire and root for: “Go Kueng! Go Armstrong! Go Hauerwas!” For a secularist looking for a ray of “enlightened” hope in different religions, Mormonism must present an unusually bleak picture. For good or ill, these folks all really believe what they are supposed to believe (and they don’t even offer yoga classes!).
While there are strands of Judaism and Christianity that make a virtue out of their progressiveness and just how “with it” they can be, these are precisely the strands (think Conservative Judaism or the Episcopal Church) that are dwindling in numbers. The most robust and fast-growing religious groups tend to be those that emphasise the reality of what their revelation claims to be true. (See The Economist’s survey of Pentecostalism for some interesting reporting on one of these groups.) After all, what else would really be the point of religious observance if there were ultimately nothing behind it but some nice imagery or if it was nothing more than, as a much less friendly observer put it, “mucking about with half-remembered lines of bad poetry”? (For the record, if there was any doubt, I don’t agree with that observer.)
Today, for instance, the Orthodox did not celebrate a nice, imaginary idea of God coming down to earth out of compassion for us, but celebrated an event that happened and had to have happened if our Faith is to mean anything. Today we marked the day when God was born in the flesh of a Virgin. Perhaps that true miracle and the stories in the Book of Mormon appear equally plausible to someone like Weisberg, but if he is serious about his argument he can no more honestly accept anyone who believes in the Incarnation (which will always appear as foolishness to the Greeks) than he can a Mormon. I say this not because I think the beliefs of the Orthodox and Mormons are comparably true on the one hand or equally implausible on the other, but because I think a rampaging secularist does not get to pretend that he tolerates religious non-Mormons as political candidates when he obviously cannot really do so (if he is telling us the truth about why he objects to Mormonism in a candidate) but gets some special exemption to regard Mormons as especially foolish.
Jim has Weisberg dead to rights:
In other words, religion is fine if you are a Unitarian or can reduce your scriptures to poetry. But if you actually believe that stuff, you might be a fanatic.
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January 7th, 2007 at 5:49 pm
razib
“While there are strands of Judaism and Christianity that make a virtue out of their progressiveness and just how “with it” they can be, these are precisely the strands (think Conservative Judaism or the Episcopal Church) that are dwindling in numbers.”
daniel, note that conservative judaism is losing both to the more progressive reform and more rabbnical orthodox. its problem isn’t that it isn’t progressive enough, its problem is that it isn’t really coherent, charting a ‘middle’ course between orthodoxy and reform. some would argue that conservative judaism emerged in part simply due to ethnic discomfort of secular eastern european jews with the more ‘christianized’ services and sensibilities of “german” reform judaism. reconstructionism, which is explicitly secular and culture, as opposed to religious, emerges from the conservative movement, not the reform one.
i think in the broad brush your generalization that religions which demand something radical, whether belief or practice, tend to do well, is correct though. see some of rodney stark’s work on religion. but that body of work also suggests that these enterprising sects tend to shift toward liberalism later on in their history and lose that initial verve (e.g., methodism after all emerged as an evangelical pietistic reform movement).
finally, think weisberg and linker are profoundly wrong in their comparison between mormonism and other religions. wesiberg’s article in particular disgusts me since many fancy him some sort of intellect. he seems one of the intelligent ignorant.
January 8th, 2007 at 12:21 pm
Roach
Can I make an unrelated suggestion: your fonts are too light and they’re very hard to read. Plus the sans serif is a bad font that is widely decried as kind of an 80s fashion that is harder (and slower) to read.
Light gray and blue-white bright white background is exceedingly hard on the eyes; since you often write so prolifically, may I suggest black on an off-white parchment-colored background. May I also suggest that you keep the same font and color for indented passages. The specifics of reading on a screen and ordinary principles of a contrast should apply.
I don’t mean this to be rude and I would have emailed this privately if I had your email handy, which I don’t.
January 8th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
razib
I second that. It looks fine on my work desktop, but it almost unreadable on my laptop.
January 8th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
daninardmore
As to readability, try ClearType Tuning. Either Google it, or simply enter it into the address box and download it. It’s a Microsoft add-on, I believe, so it’s a safe download. Whether you have eyesight like Chuck Yeager or wear trifocals like me, it’s a big help for all websites.
January 8th, 2007 at 5:04 pm
daninardmore
I should add that after you have downloaded ClearType and gone through it the first time, it appears in Control Panel, so you can return to it there.
January 8th, 2007 at 7:25 pm
jsinger008
“For good or ill, these folks all really believe what they are supposed to believe (and they don’t even offer yoga classes!).”
It is prose sentences like the above for which I am grateful that Daniel has returned from vacation.
On the subject of revelation and faith, all I’ll say on this subject is that while in one sense for religion to have meaning, the Bible (or Koran, etc.) must be true (as you point out with respect to the Virgin birth of God), it is equally true that the Bible (to stick with the Jewish and Christian traditions) has contradictions and uses metaphor (i.e. we know the world wasn’t created in seven 24 hour days) that make it more complicated to accept as truth in the way you suggest. Perhaps this is what Weisberg was getting at, albeit in a manner that was “intellectually ignorant”, to use Razib’s phrase.