This semester I am back teaching some classes at UNM, which I greatly enjoy. This also means that I am reading the campus paper, the Daily Lobo, regularly again. This article on the front page yesterday caught my eye. Here's the skinny. A UNM student saw a booth for a campus-based Christian fraternity and asked about joining. Easy enough. But no good, as the student in question is LDS. To quote Summer, "really?!?"
Now, as a BYU alum, I don't know much about fraternities, and I work under the assumption that they can invite/accept who they want, but this seems like pretty overt discrimination. But that's not the interesting part. To me, what's fascinating is the theological issue: what does "Christianity" mean?
My take is this. To be a Christian is to profess faith in and seek to live by the teachings of Christ. Doctrinal differences have marked the (often ugly and violent) history of Christianity, but that's the basic definition as I understand it. Even in the midst of 19th-century anti-Mormon persecution, the claim was not, "They are not Christian," but "They practice a weird form of Christianity."
But in the past few generations we have seen a gradual narrowing of that definition based on a very limited interpretation of both Biblical texts and the history of Christianity. I find that immensely troubling, especially in light of the marriage of fundamentalist and evangelical Christians and the politically extreme right. It seems that theology exists for many only as a means of excluding others, not to seek a deep, meaningful relationship with deity.
It's this sense of exclusion that bothers me the most, on both a theoretical level and a practical one. Let's start with the latter. Imagine if visitors at an LDS service or social event were told that they were not welcome. That would make missionary work grind to a halt, wouldn't it? And in terms of what that sort of approach would mean philosophically, how pretentious do you have to be to claim the right to determine what another can call him/herself?
I'm interested to hear what others have to say about both the specific event and the larger implications, especially in terms of an exclusionary ethos. What does it mean to define someone else for him/herself?
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The answer to the problem is yes we are Christian and no we're not! It's very easy. The problem is that we speak from a completely different paradigmatical structure. It would be like a sociologist and an economist who both specialized in poverty. They may both say they study poverty but their ability to speak about their observations is limited by the fact that they don't mean the same things when they say the same things.
I wrote an article about this on my mostly abandoned religion blog.
In addition to the narrower definition of "Christian" there's also the overuse (and misuse) of the word "cult."
I believe the root of this issue is fear. People fear what they don't understand. Evangelical pastors fear losing money...err, I mean, parishioners. In order to prevent any such loss they redefine Christian and call all other "non-Christian" religions "cults." This then adds to the fear because now there's a fear of learning more about them.
The question I ask myself is, "Who would Jesus Christ consider Christian?" I know that sounds trite; it sounds like, "WWJD?" But I'm trying to make the point, "Who owns the word 'Christian'"? Who runs the clearinghouse that approves or denies the title of Christian to people? Is it the Roman Catholic Church (it may have been in Europe during the Middle Ages), the Greek Orthodox Church (it may be in Greece) or the American Evangelical/Fundamentalist Right (it may be in the U.S. today if one is accepting of that loosely-organized hierarchy)? The way I understand my Savior, He would be welcoming of all attempts to learn of Him and follow Him. So, I feel inclined offer assistance, rather than admiration for the Christianity of anyone who would be less than accepting of LDS Christianity.
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