Evangelicals v. Mormons

[Archaea]

Originally Posted by jay santos

When you go on these philosophical tangents I really wonder what the heck you're saying. If you made more grammar mistakes it would be a grapevine knock off. If you threw in words no one understands you'd be ripping of SIEQ. But really what are you trying to say??

The issue is a subtle shift to emphasize Christ.

So I don't reread. I always like Faulkner.

We should in our marketing retain our distinctive character and brand of Christianity.

We now emphasize the Bible, which is fine, but we don't emphasize our interpretative differences.

Why should somebody buy Mormonism, over Baptists or Church of Christ or generic Evangelicals? It's all the same now.

I just don't like the cowardly approach. Ecumenical in intellectual discussion perhaps, but not in marketing.

[Sleeping in EQ]

Mauss is all over this subject in his "The Angel and the Beehive." Maybe we should make it a CG book of the month.

I'm agreeing with Arch here, and I'll add that President Hinckley's emphasis on education at the October conference was a subtle move away from evangelical thinking. While some Mormons have strong fundamentalist and evangelical leanings, it remains that there is a vital intellectual presence too. BYU is a legitimate academic institution, but it won't be if the evangelicals drive the intellectuals out of the Church with some kind of orthodoxy litmus test. As of now, there is no such test and worthiness has much more to do with what one does than how one approaches faith.

Sociologists have taken to thinking of Mormonism as one of the "families" of Chrisianity (there are usually 15 such families: Adventist, Baptist, Christian Science, Communal, Eastern Orthodox, European Free-Church, Holiness, Independent Fundamentalist, Latter-day Saints-including the Community of Christ and other small groups, Lutheran, Messianic Judaism, Pentecostal, Pietist-Methodist, Calvinist-Reformed-Presbyterian, Western Liturgical-Roman Catholicism). I've flirted with the idea that the LDS Church is a bit like Judaism was before the administrative-theological split into orthodox, conservative, and reformed synagogues. We have fundamentalist, mainstream, and intellectual members all crammed into the same congregation.