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Mormons outraged after Hegseth military policy no longer counts LDS as Christian
(www.independent.co.uk)
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And that’s basically it!
On the one hand, as an Ex-Mormon, LOL.
On the other, maybe it helps depress gop voter turnout and makes sure the Democrat wins their new district in central Salt Lake City. And maybe MAGA finds Utah is a lot less inclined to run through walls for them in 2028. Nobody does “stoically endure oppression, real or perceived” quite like Mormons.
The way DoD did this is also classic Bible thumper Protestant shit, right out of a Chick tract. Mormons are absolutely not Nicene Christians, but they profess to follow Jesus of Nazareth, so if they want the gummint to lump them in with the Christians, it takes a special kind of stupid and short-sighted religious pedant not to humor them.
Is a bit like
as a way to shoehorn Brenda with the essential oils into the category of "doctor". At the point where you've denied one of the few definitional traits of the category, you have to admit you don't fit into it anymore, you can't just pretend the definition doesn't actually exist. It's like being a lawyer who doesn't deal with legal matters, but they have a bunch of ideas their college roommate came up with about how to run a country while he was high before dropping out of the first semester of law school.
I guess, but that's some pretty unnecessary gatekeeping when one is dealing with the definitions assigned by a secular government who, in your analogy, is not in the business of evaluating wellness and healing practitioners' truth claims at all. All the various outgroups that became heretics when a very political conference wrapped up in Asia Minor didn't suddenly stop identifying as a Christians, and the fact that some provincial American conman steeped in Great Awakening Protestantism inadvertently reinvigorated some of their ideas 1500 years later doesn't make it nonsensical for his marks and their descendants to self-identify as Christians. The state has a very good reason (and no bar) to evaluate whether a given "healthcare provider" is going to harm the public by claiming certain titles, but the situation with religion is very different, particularly for a bit of minor military bureaucracy (historical contextisn't even really relevant here). Unforced error by the MAGAs.
Now, IMHO Mormonism is a pretty toxic, high pressure religion, and it believes some shit that strikes the modern mind as particularly goofy, but it's a religion with a creed that's very clearly arising out of the Christian tradition. If you want to take different magic sky-daddy theology at face value, then sure, within that framework you can reasonably draw a line and declare anyone on the Arianism line of it as "not Christian," but that's not the US government's job. Absolutely not the hill for the Department of Defense to pick at all, much less to die on, but if it makes some Mormons disillusioned with one oppressive cult of personality, then that could be a good thing.
Yeah, I dunno why this is the DoD's job to hash out, I'm with you there. That part is the Christian Nationalism nasty bullying around.
I get you need chaplains, but IMO just use the official endonyms of each group without trying to categorize or subcategorize, and call it a day and let the chaplains match themselves up.
If I were a Catholic in the military and I got an LDS chaplain (or vice versa) for my religious rites, I'd be upset. So just treat all the little groups as their own little things if you must change something.
Yeah, that's the main gist. DoD is straying from their lane because Hegseth is a raving Christian Nationalist, and not even one of their better advocates, and that is a LOOOOOOW bar. This all stems from a published list, screenshot in the article, that still includes Mormons but doesn't preface them with "Christianity" like it did for the others.
I wouldn't be surprised if he personally redlined a Word doc to delete "Christianity" from the Mormons' line before approving it for release, and maybe without any particular emotional animus, just parroting what he remembered from Sunday School that one time he wasn't hungover. The fact that the Jehovah's Witnesses and Adventists made the cut might also argue for there not being a ton of theological rigor to the decision.
I think Mormons get too defensive about wanting to be included in other Christians' theological definitions of Christianity (literally can't happen... The Mormon Trinity is polytheistic by almost any standard, to say nothing of extra books and other heterodox beliefs), but those invested in one group or another's theology can overlook that there are other contexts (shared history, cultural practice, self-iidentification, etc. etc.) that can generate just as much passion and be internally reasonable. It's almost like the separation of church and state is a pretty good fuckin' idea, especially in a pluralistic republic....
Have a little faith in Whiskey Pete. He’s exactly the kind of stupid and short-sighted religious pedant you’re looking for.