With friends, we attended the open house of the newly renovated St. George Utah Temple this morning. I loved it. I loved the fact that the renovation restored the temple to an interior look that its nineteenth-century pioneer builders would have recognized. Renovations and extensions to early temples that were done a generation or two ago often incongruously mixed styles from the period of the modification (say, the 70s) with the original styles. Lately, though, and happily, the idea even during upgrades has been to try to return to the aesthetic of the period during which the temple was originally built. This was true in the cases of both the Idaho Falls Idaho Temple and the Oakland California Temple, and it was the case, albeit in a necessarily different sense, with the the transformation of the Provo Tabernacle into the Provo City Center Temple. It is certainly true in St. George.
Afterwards, we went to Judd’s General Store, a place that loomed large in my mother’s St. George childhood. Since discovering relatively recently and to my surprise that the store still exists — it’s the oldest business in town — I’ve felt an obligation both to it and to my mothers to support it, if only in a small way. So, for myself, I bought a Cheerwine Zero Sugar Cherry Soda. Then, afterwards, at our friends’ suggestion, we all went to Riggati’s, in Washington, for really good wood-fired pizza. (I mention this only partly because mentioning such things drives my obsessive critics absolutely mad. I also want to recommend a good pizza place.) And then we drove home.
The drive was much nicer than yesterday’s, which often involved heavy rain. Along the way, though, we listened to recordings of C. S. Lewis’s brilliant “Chronicles of Narnia.” (My admiration for the writings of C. S. Lewis knows no bounds.) We finished a reading of Prince Caspian, done by Lynn Redgrave, and commenced Sir Derek Jacobi’s reading of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. This is an outstanding series of recordings, by the way, with an astonishing cast of narrators, and I recommend it enthusiastically. In addition to the two just mentioned, we’ve already listened to Sir Kenneth Branagh’s The Magician’s Nephew, Michael York’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and Alex Jenning’s The Horse and His Boy. Yet to come are Jeremy Northam’s The Silver Chair and Sir Patrick Stewart’s The Last Battle.
An interesting question: Latter-day Saints are seldom very enthused about the fact that we are routinely targeted by anti-Mormon preachers and anti-Mormon “ministries.” Proposed temples are opposed, general conferences and temple open houses are picketed (however, although I’ve often seen such picketing I noticed no protesters at the St. George open house this morning), pamphlets are written against our beliefs, radio programs and lectures in churches denounce our faith, Evangelical bookstores carry numerous anti-Mormon books, and so on and so forth.
But aren’t we hypocrites in our unhappiness about such matters? Don’t we ourselves do exactly the same thing? Don’t we send out scores of thousands of missionaries to tell other people that their religious beliefs are false? The Mormons deserve the opposition that they’ve encountered to the proposed Cody Wyoming Temple, for example, because of the way they’ve treated other faiths in the past when they’ve had the power.
I see that kind of accusation from time to time. In fact, I’ve seen it again recently, and I’m inclined to offer a few lines on it here.
I don’t see the anti-Mormon activities of the Evangelical “counterculture” — there are a very small number of Catholic organizations that engage in similar behavior but, overwhelmingly, anti-Mormon crusading is a conservative Protestant thing — as even remotely comparable to the Latter-day Saint missionary program.
A very basic part of the reason why is that, while Evangelical anti-Mormons reject the Restored Gospel as, to quote just one memorable specimen phrase, “a lie from the very pit of hell,” Latter-day Saints by and large have a reasonably positive view of the faiths of others. Although we regard some of their beliefs and practices as mistaken, we regard many others as fundamentally sound.
But I want to point to something more specific: Latter-day Saints do not, in fact, try to block the construction of the churches of other denominations, or their mosques or synagogues or temples. (Quite the contrary: The Church as an institution and members of the Church as individuals have a lengthy and well-documented history of not only welcoming but supporting and helping with the building of places of worship for people of other faiths. We don’t protest at the meetings or services of other faiths. We don’t issue pamphlets denouncing Baptists or Buddhists or Muslims. We don’t publish books attacking the Southern Baptist Convention or Reform Judaism, and our bookstores carry no such volumes. We don’t sponsor radio programs criticizing Methodists, Presbyterians, Catholics, or Rosicrucians. We don’t host lectures in our churches devoted to demonizing Muslims or the Greek Orthodox or the Sikhs or any other religious group.
When we send our missionaries out into a neighborhood, they don’t seek out any specific group in order to “target” their beliefs. They go door to door. They contact everybody who answers the doorbell or their knock. When our missionaries do street-contacting, they don’t wait, carefully scrutinizing passersby for, say, a yarmulke or some other distinguishing bit of religious clothing or jewelry that will help them to select for a specific religious movement. They talk with anybody they can. When our missionaries serve in visitor centers, there is no sign at the door saying anything like “For Calvinists only” or “No non-Catholics allowed.”
Moreover, our missionaries don’t come with the message “Your faith is false!” Instead, it’s “Truth and authority have been restored, and we want to share that with you.” As President George Albert Smith put it,
“We have come not to take away from you the truth and virtue you possess. We have come not to find fault with you nor to criticize you. We have not come here to berate you. . . . Keep all the good that you have, and let us bring to you more good.”
That is not even remotely like the message that anti-Mormon “ministries” and activists have preached in all of the decades that I’ve been watching them. It’s simply, flatly, false to claim that the Latter-day Saint missionary effort is substantially the same as the targeted anti-Mormon activities that, for so many years, have marred the face of Evangelical Protestantism.
I may have some further thoughts on this topic in a day or two. Or not.
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