The news moves fast. Most of it passes by before we can get a full view. Pandemics, wars, and the economy demand our attention. Other considerations, like celebrity gossip and political operatives yelling from our screens, just don’t. That’s the media and social media landscape in pressing and trivial form. But what about the stuff in-between? We encounter arguments. We start to comment but get distracted by normal life and responsibilities, then the discourse moves on. That’s where Under Examination comes in. Here, we slow down and indulge our desire to chime in on the debates of the day, no matter how partial our examination. This is our first entry.
Are Mormons Christian?
The Pentagon recently released a list of Christian denominations, presumably to aid chaplains in effectively performing their ministries. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons) was not on the list. This triggered loud complaints from some, including U.S. Senator Mike Lee of Utah. “I find this offensive…” Lee said in a video posted on social media. It didn’t stop there, as LDS public figures and the Mormon rank and file took to the internet to protest. The backlash prompted the Pentagon to quickly reverse course and include the LDS Church among Christian denominations, adding that it wasn’t attempting to adjudicate which groups are or are not legitimately included as Christians.
Senator Lee and his contingent were more or less satisfied, but the internet kept on fighting. So, the question remains, are Mormons Christian? Opinions abound. The opening argument goes to the Mormons, who stress that Jesus Christ is a divine figure, and belief in him is necessary for salvation. In Mormonism, Jesus was born of a virgin, died and was resurrected after three days, and so on with the typical Christian beliefs.
At first glance, this would seem to check the necessary boxes. But not so fast, says a sizable portion of Christian evangelicals and fundamentalists. The objection comes down to the fact that, in the eyes of other Christians, Mormons also believe a bunch of really weird stuff, in addition to the virgin birth, the resurrection, etc. The Book of Mormon is a Mormon-specific book of scripture, teaching that Jesus appeared in the Americas rather than just in Galilee and Judea where the New Testament places him. In Mormonism, God is said to have commanded Joseph Smith to practice polygamy, and that he did until his death, while the church was eventually forced to stop the practice for purposes of gaining statehood for Utah. Mormons have their own hymns. They send their young people all over the world to convert millions, even going so far as to knock on your door on a Saturday.
But the thing is, there doesn’t seem to a weirdness clause in common uses of “Christian.” The fact that Mormons accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and believe all the standard Biblical stories would seemingly put them in the club, at least according to any rough and ready definition of “Christian.” We could easily just say that Mormons are Christian, but not an “orthodox” case, due to all the Mormon specific quirks, and leave it at that. But as is always the case lately, the argument continues.
Two especially stark options come from the religious scholar Dan McClellan on one end, and historically armed interlocutors, on the other. McClellan claims that if someone says they’re a Christian, that’s all there is to it. McClellan states that there is “no person or group of people on the planet…” who can decide who is or isn’t a Christian, even going so far as to say that “all meaning a person ever perceives is constructed entirely within their own mind,” which presumably staves off challenges based on objective meaning. The opposite side of the debate asserts that whoever hopes to make it past the doctrinal threshold of Christianity has to meet the standards adopted in the fourth century in what is now Turkey. Not only is Mormonism not historically continuous with Christian orthodoxy, but Mormonism also specifically rejects the Nicene Creed, declaring that the godhead is three separate beings, not one being with three distinct “persons” as the doctrine of the trinity has it.
Those rejecting Mormons as Christian via the route of historic doctrine say that it’s like worshipping a different being altogether, and in any case not consistent with the foundational requirement of the faith. Contrast that with Dan McClellan who would allow virtually anyone to profess being a Christian and have it count for conceptual membership. What’s striking is how both of these views are pretty far from what a random person would say.
The unsuspecting layperson walking through life wouldn’t say that anyone, anywhere can simply declare themselves a Christian, despite the nature of their faith or lack thereof. Presumably there are some requirements on membership other than simple self-declaration. On the other hand, those who are skeptical of Mormons being Christian would by and large invoke the “too weird” standard, though probably not in so many words. What they likely wouldn’t say is that Mormonism fails because it doesn’t adhere to the standards of Nicene Trinitarianism that officially set Christian monotheism, namely, a somewhat amorphously three-in-one God. Still, an impressive number of people online do say exactly that.
Did Elon Musk Kill People?
We’ve all seen the footage of Elon Musk wielding a chainsaw on stage, aping Javier Milei’s signature move. The gesture celebrates the cutting, the hacking, even the destruction of government spending, embracing a new era that frees political figures to be as loud as they want rather than hemming and hawing about taking decisive action. Musk deputized “Big Balls” and his cadre of young shape rotators and told them to take no prisoners in their scrutiny of government spending. Whether the sending-cuts were above board legally could be put off until later.
To carry out its mission, DOGE was effectively given carte blanche by President Trump. The initiative was weighed down by sustained political controversy, several high-profile reversals after major cuts proved unworkable, and internal conflict, so it gradually lost momentum. Now that the dust has largely settled, we can begin to assess its legacy. One of the most consequential questions concerns the cuts to USAID, which some researchers estimate have contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, particularly in Africa.
This is hardly a trivial matter, but the argument has produced some trivialities. Setting aside any disputes about whether the cuts to USAID have caused harm, many respond to the accusation that Elon Musk is ultimately responsible for this harm with a strange argument. They contend that if Elon Musk is responsible for causing harm through cuts to USAID, then this is tantamount to saying that we can never rightfully stop aid, because we would inevitably cause harm by cutting assistance. They say we’d have to keep giving for forever if the claim against Musk goes through. This is supposed to be some kind of reductio against holding DOGE accountable.
What’s strange about this defense is that it collapses a very obvious distinction between stopping abruptly and stopping gradually. The policy of foreign aid is a fine topic on which to disagree. If the U.S. were ever to pull back significantly from the world in regard to aid, presumably one way to go about it would be to campaign openly on the idea, hold public hearings, make traditional appointments, give warnings to recipients, set medium term dates for expiration, work with the U.N. on the transition, and perhaps even pass laws in the process. This is how large collective decisions should be made, and in this scenario, there would be at least some chance of preserving established expectations and supply chains on the other end from the U.S.
It’s at least conceivable that the U.S. could come to such an open decision and implement it responsibly. What the defenders of Musk are saying, however, is that there is no meaningful moral difference between the two approaches – one methodical and one abrupt. To the pro Musk crowd, if we have the right to implement the methodical plan, then we have no obligation to avoid the sudden one.
In other words, they believe that because we haven’t inherited an eternal responsibility, we can’t even accrue substantive medium-term responsibilities from our polities so long as it’s technically our money and we disagree with the way it was used by previous administrations. It’s not only an opposition to giving aid. It’s a view that admits to no continuity of responsibility of our institutions and the high-stakes expectations they’ve established in the very recent past. It’s truly radical.
Roadkill Theism
Speaking of Elon Musk, his purchase of Twitter has made the social media platform a different kind of place. Among many changes, one is that theists and atheists have taken to openly bickering like it’s the Chris Hitchens days all over again. In that vein, someone posted a challenge to atheists, accusing them of a “logical fallacy” for lacking an answer to it. I apologize beforehand for this, but it really is the case that the stated challenge is for atheists to explain why it’s wrong to have sex with roadkill. Seriously.
Predictably, many of the responses from atheists were of the variety of “You need God to tell you not to have sex with roadkill?!” But that only made those lodging the challenge stronger, at least in their own minds. Any answer that deflects or even cites health or lack of desire is more grist for the theist’s mill.
Believe it or not, the example is carefully chosen. It’s meant to avoid any possibility of citing harm, coercion, or violence. Presumably, one could even practice necrobeastiality in private, so as to shield anyone from the trauma of seeing it. The atheist can’t appeal to human or even animal rights, or even to reducing harm, because the animal is dead.
Not to wade into this fraught debate, but one interesting factor is why the theists in these disputes think they have an answer the other side lacks. What becomes clear over time is that when theists say “objective” they often mean something like “axiomatic.” That is, the buck has to stop somewhere, so let it stop with God. God tells us what’s good and bad, period.
But in that state of affairs, good comes to mean only that which God has happened to command. If God had commanded something else, that something else would be good, even if it’s currently bad. Morality starts to take on a quite empty, mechanical feel in that scenario.
Efforts are made the save this, describing goodness as somehow a product of God’s intrinsic nature, protected even from divine whim that might otherwise reign. But anything we cherish that’s sufficiently protected from God’s own subjective whim is a threat to God’s omnipotence. In other words, it sets up a condition God has no control over, even if it’s God’s own objective nature. You can just ask Mormons about that, who worship a god that is strictly speaking, not omnipotent by orthodox standards, and they often hear criticisms about it from evangelicals and fundamentalists.
What results is a tightrope act where the theist has to maintain God’s omnipotence while also protecting God’s intrinsic goodness from any subjective whim God could conceivably have. It harkens back to the medieval period, and the perhaps apocryphal version of a question the period’s thinkers are accused of entertaining: How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
In any case, the theistically inspired social media challenge muddied up the waters by grouping theistic beliefs in with the religious beliefs of the East, which might not even include a personal God. In other words, it framed itself as raising an issue of religious thinking (even Eastern religion) against atheism. Technically, some (Eastern) views that count as religious could also be atheistic. It’s not clear enough, then, to group theistic and atheistic religion against secular atheism.
Believing in a modest version of karma (a religious idea) isn’t much more metaphysically ambitious than believing that all morality and consciousness are strongly emergent from a physicalist base (a secular idea), which is completely consistent with atheism. The real target, then, seems to be strongly reductionist or eliminativist versions of physicalism, rather than atheism per se. But so much for philosophy. Working our way back around to the original tweet, it’s perhaps slightly less hectoring than the first atheist response to say that if anyone needs God to ground their belief that they shouldn’t have sex with roadkill, then by all means let them continue in the faith.
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