Tribune guest columnist Matthew Bowman, a Latter-day Saint scholar, looks at Russell Nelson's effort to erase use of the word 'Mormon' and how that relates to the interplay of religion and society.
The topic reflects the difficulties we encounter whenever we discuss religion.It’s been 34 years since Russell Nelson, then an apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, first publicly expressed discomfort with the phrase “Mormon church” and six since he, as church president, issued a series of directives, if a shorter version of the faith’s full name was necessary, the “Church of Jesus Christ.” He also deemed acceptable the “restored Church of Jesus Christ.
In other ways, though, the impact of Nelson’s call seems to me salutary. Many scholars have for decades used “Mormon” to describe the entire religious tradition descended from founder Joseph Smith. They found Nelson’s reversal jarring — even though branches of that tradition, like, have long tried to distance themselves from the label “Mormon.” I have noticed in the past few years greater precision in choosing the best-suited nomenclature. That is all to the good.
Americans experience their country’s religious landscape as a bumptious marketplace, a series of communities competing for attention. The metaphor of “marketplace,” of course, is imperfect. It imagines religions in ways that defy the internal logic of such groups. It makes no sense to think of the Amish as the rough equivalent of Pizza Hut, because the Amish have no interest in attracting more customers.
Religious traditions that offer proposals about what our government should be like — including the Nation of Islam, Roman Catholicism or most other non-Protestant traditions — usually encounter strong resistance in the media and often repression from the state, even if such threats are imagined more than real.panicked Protestants warning that the election of John F. Kennedy would result in the pope seizing power in Washington or the FBI’s efficientof advocating for racial equality.
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