Moloch, Mormons, and Mike Lee

None of these people have, you know, rubbed a piece of paper on a Mormon and said, “Ha! It turned pink.”

“Not a Christian.” What if they weigh the same as a duck?

Then they’re a witch.

Oh, okay. Oh, that’s not a Mormon. Okay, that’s not a Christian thing. That’s a witch thing, right?

There’s overlap. Now, don’t get me wrong. There’s overlap. Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

This is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Things are good for me. Not as good as, you know, people who get to gallivant off to Rome or whatever, but I’m doing great.

Look, I put in the work, okay?

Yeah, I know. I need to—well, I need to put in more work, I guess. Although when I go to Rome, I get to like just do whatever I want.

Yeah, you’re there for fun. That’s what I mean by I put in the work. I get home and people are like, “How was your vacation?” And it’s like, “It’s not a vac—”

“I was working.” Yes, I got to have dinner at lovely restaurants and got to have some of the best carbonara I’ve ever had, but it was work. Damn it.

So, well, let’s do it. We have more work to do, unfortunately, uh, and that is going to be—we got, we got a couple fun things to talk about. It is an all Mike Lee, uh, day today, and yes, I hope that doesn’t make everyone turn off their, uh, their pod blasters because, uh, we—but yes, both of our segments are inspired by that storied senator from the great state of Utah, Mike Lee, who you and I, I think it’s fair to say, not big fans.

Not big fans. And to my amusement, Mike Lee is also not a big fan of mine. He has blocked me on Twitter.

So you can’t tag him in this, but you know who can? Everybody else.

Everybody else.

So Mike Lee is based. Oh my gosh, it’s so gross, Mike. You’re so gross. He’s so—he’s a gross human. We don’t like to, you know, we’re not afraid to get—dip our toes in the political sphere, but that’s not what we’re talking about. No, he has—he has wandered into our sphere. So, so we’re going to—we’re going to take that as a jumping off point. The first thing we’re going to do is a Twisted Scripture because Mike Lee will not stop comparing people, saying that people are sacrificing things to Moloch. So we’re going to, we’re going to get into that. We’re going to figure out who slash what Moloch is, or if Moloch it was, is whatever.

Mm-hmm.

And what, what we’ll try to sort of discern, whatever the heck Brother Lee is trying to say with all of that nonsense. And then we’re going to talk about the fact that the US government decided to not—decided that Mormonism, which is Mike Lee’s religion, is a—it’s not a Christian, a Christian religion.

So we’re going to talk about that in the second half of the show. That’ll be our Taking Issue, and we’ll talk about what makes a Christian. What is Christian?

What is this Christian you speak of? So we’ll get to that in the latter half of the show, but for now, let’s dive in with Twisted Scripture. Okay, so Twisted Scripture. We got Moloch. I’m pretty sure that’s one of the bad guys in the Masters of the Universe movie. Is that right? He’s the red one, right?

I couldn’t pick him out. I couldn’t pick him out. Goatman. Goatman was—yeah.

Although if you’re Mike Lee, it’s Cowman, because—well, I’ll just dive in with sort of what got me steaming about Mike Lee and about this concept, which is that the Democrats, like, at the Democrats, recently tweeted a thing talking about James Talarico. I think we’ve mentioned him on the show before, but yeah, James Talarico is a, is a Senate candidate in Texas. He’s got a slim, like it’s unlikely that he’s going to win, but if our Texas people get out there, he might actually, he might have a chance.

So he’s running against a guy who was impeached by his own party’s House of Representatives for a laundry list of corrupt things.

Of corruption.

Yes, corruption. He’s openly corrupt.

Openly and kind of excitedly corrupt. He is proudly and is corrupt.

Definitely just a corrupt human being. And yet we have a pastor and an all-around decent human being, and people are like, he can’t pull it off. Like, this is where we’re at.

Yeah, yeah. Way to go, Texas. Way to make us believe that the, the bad guy can win in that. However, so the Democrats tweet a picture of Talarico and they say, Texas: James Talarico is the only candidate who will put you first. Okay, fine.

Yes, not, not the most earth-shattering rhetoric. No, no, you know.

But I mean, you know, but probably true. The Democrats for you, they, uh, constantly snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory. But then Mike Lee decides to step in, and his play on it is, James Talarico will put you first on the altar to Moloch. Yes. And he included in that a, uh, a very famous image.

It is used an awful lot on social media.

Okay, yeah.

This kind of sepia-tone looking, probably wood carving from the late 19th century showing a bunch of worshipers, and one of them is holding out an infant, and there’s a bronze hybrid anthropomorphic bovine statue seated there that has a fire.

That means a cow-headed dude.

Cow-headed dude holding out arms, and the idea is that the baby gets put on there and is burnt up in the process.

And this time Mike Lee went cool and had Grok make it animated. So—

Oh, did Grok?

So like, it’s got like—

Causing it to—

The fire, the flames are burning.

Oh gosh. Yeah, so the flames are rising as, uh, and the wind is billowing the robes. So good grief.

So there you go. Uh, why is he— why is Mike Lee talking? First of all, I don’t know what— what we should do is we should just mention that because I, lefty that I am, big guy who like, likes, you know, I follow politics from the left and I am a left-wing guy, and there are dog whistles on the right that I know about, and then there are dog whistles on the right that I don’t know about.

‘Cause they’re stupid.

Well, yeah. So this is a dog whistle that I wasn’t aware of. And so I had to do some research.

And, and the research that I did pointed to the idea that at least the political operatives on the right, people like Based Mike Lee, are using the image of this, this character that they believe is named Moloch as an abortion stand-in. People, they’re talking about the idea that abortion is, uh, they’re framing it as a child sacrifice, right? And so they’re saying that, that people who have abortions are sacrificing their children to an evil god. Yes. And therefore they are evil, and therefore Democrats are evil, and therefore anyone who wants women to have reproductive rights are evil, and they’re all worshipers of Moloch.

Uh, so Dan?

Yes, sir?

How does that line up with the Bible? I feel like, I feel like he’s got it right. Uh, I, at the very least, I went and looked up some scriptures and found, for instance, in 2 Kings, uh, a whole thing about you shall not give up any of your offspring to sacrifice them to— and in the NRSVUE it says “Molech.” Molech or Moloch, yeah. So there you go, right? It’s right there. Don’t sacrifice your offspring to Molech. So Mike Lee is right, and we should just end this episode.

The problems with this rhetoric are legion, and we can start with the fact that the attempt to rhetorically equate abortion to child sacrifice is problematized by the fact that abortion takes place before birth, child sacrifice takes place after birth. There’s a big difference between those two things.

And there’s also the problem of the fact that if we go look in the Hebrew Bible, as we’ve discussed before on the program, the Hebrew Bible does not treat a fetus as a full legal and moral person. It treats it as a piece of property.

Whose, whose accidental destruction is recompensed by the payment of a fine. And in the exact same passage where it’s saying the accidental destruction of a fetus is recompensed with the payment of a fine, it says the accidental destruction of the mother who is injured in the act.

Who presumably is a fully born human.

Yes, yes. Uh, that’s the death penalty.

So they’re drawing a pretty clear distinction between born humans and fetuses. One is, is a full legal and moral person, the other is not, is property, and property of the husband because the fine is paid to the husband.

Right.

And this agrees with a lot of other ancient rhetoric where abortion is primarily punished legally as a property crime against the father. In other words, when they didn’t like abortion, it was because it was taking away the father’s property. And, but a father could cause that. In fact, in most ancient societies and and we’re not sure exactly what the situation would’ve been in Israel and Judah, a father could expose, end the life of a newborn if he was not interested in it. So societies that said a woman can’t have an abortion would’ve said a father could cause it. A father could do these things. So there’s a lot more complexity. The water is a lot muddier when it comes to what’s going on with abortion in the Hebrew Bible. But what is very clear is that child sacrifice and abortion are two very different things. So this is, this is an attempt to rhetorically collapse a very clear distinction between two different types of beings, one a fetus and one a born human.

It is a means for people to cheerlead to, uh, among their own group. It’s a way to preach to the choir, uh, by basically just ginning up this, oh yeah, we think that abortion is child sacrifice, so we’re gonna go out there and and just baffle thoughtful people capable of critical thought by spreading this rhetoric around.

Well, and let’s— let— I, you know, we have talked about this in the past, but it’s important to note that the history of this is that evangelical Christians and even, you know, Mike Lee, the LDS and stuff, had a far more nuanced and far less adamant view of abortion before around 1980, before the late ’70s and early ’80s. Yeah. When they decided— when, you know, people in leadership positions on the right decided to use it as a political wedge issue, which they— which it never had been before. And so, like, most evangelicals, most pro— most Baptists, most, most of, like, most of Americans other than Catholics were pretty meh about the whole thing. They didn’t care.

You had like Criswell, I don’t remember Criswell’s first name, but I think this was an evangelical leader who actually came out in support of Roe v. Wade.

Right.

And then over the next decade decided, no, this is of the devil. And in no small part because of the machinations of Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich and others, who got together and concocted a plan to create this wedge issue to galvanize the rise of a religious right that would facilitate, uh, more right-wing authoritarian Christians in government. And I— initially their goal was to stop the government from taking away their funding because of the white supremacy that governed their universities. The government was saying, “Hey, if you want funding, if you want students to be able to get loans and grants and things like that, you have to allow Black students in your universities. " And they were like, “I beg your pardon, sir? " And, you know, were not going to have it. And so that was kind of the catalyst for all of this. And yeah, there’s a lot of scholarship on how the evangelical approach to feelings about abortion have evolved.

And the LDS Church formally, officially endorses abortion in cases of incest, rape, and threats to the life of and the long-term health of the mother. And so there are— it’s a grayer area. But obviously Mike Lee is using this as an identity marker, as a flag that he can wave to rally the troops to agree that James Talarico is the devil incarnate. Right. And this is like the quintessential wedge issue for right-wing authoritarians. And many listeners of the show will know that I ran for my state legislature twice in 2018 and 2020. And I don’t know how many doors I knocked on and talked to people where we arrived at a point where they were like, “Yeah, I pretty much agree with you on most of these things over and against the other person. " And they would even be like, “I know the other person is not going to listen to us and is more or less corrupt. " But they would say, “But I could never vote for someone who approves of abortion. " Like, that’s— in terms of a wedge issue, that’s the magic bullet.

Yeah, they really did a good job wedging that one.

Yes, this one is incredibly effective because you can do whatever you want.

And they will not vote for the other side because of abortion, because they have been conditioned to think that this is the ultimate disqualifier. Up to and including a serial adulterer, a rapist, a pedophile. A serial sexual predator who is now talking about how much they love inflation and makes a bunch of promises, lies about literally everything, looked at a solar eclipse. Yeah, like, they don’t—.

To be clear, we’ve switched off of Mike Lee to Trump.

I’m just— I just want to make sure that we’re not making accusations against the wrong person or whatever.

Right. Mike Lee is, you know, far more intelligent than, than Donald Trump is. But this is an illustration.

It’s a low bar, Dan.

Yes, this is an illustration of the degree to which they will tolerate corruption, immorality, pure evil, rather than vote for someone who approves of abortion, wants abortion to be safe, legal, and rare.

Right. Not even promoting abortion, not saying— no, not pro-abortion. Yeah, just just pro the right. We’ve made that point, but I do want to get into who is this character of Moloch or Molech, and what are we talking about here?

This is not a character at all.

What? How dare you, sir?

I dare.

I saw a picture.

It was—.

Yes, there was a Wikipedia page and everything.

There was never any deity named Moloch that was worshiped in the ancient world, at least as near as we can tell. And the references in the Hebrew Bible to Moloch as a deity are actually just references to a word that refers to a specific type of sacrifice, a mulk sacrifice. And one of the reasons we know this is because we have inscriptions, these are from Carthage, they’re written in a Semitic language closely related to Hebrew, that talk about, oh, this is a mulk sacrifice offered to Baal, for instance.

And then we have the remains of an infant. And so the word “mulk” is just a noun. It just refers to a specific type of sacrifice. However—.

Now, are we— sorry, I know that several of the ancient Semitic languages, including Hebrew, just didn’t have any vowels.

Right.

So it was just sort of the M sound, the L sound, and the K sound. Yes. So when you say “Molech,” do we know that that’s how it would’ve been pronounced, or are we just sort of guessing in the same way that “Molech” or “Moloch” is just kind of best guess as to—.

So we know that it’s probably a single-syllable noun. Okay. So we know it was consonant, vowel, consonant, consonant. That’s how a lot of what in Biblical Hebrew we call segolate nouns, that’s how they were vocalized anciently. Anciently. Anciently. Where did that word come from? Anciently. And we know this because of a number of different factors, including how the words function in different declensions and in different relationships with other words, but also in transliteration and into other languages. So for instance, you might find a text that is a Semitic language, but it’s written in a Greek script where they do have to include the vowels. So that would tell us what vowels they, they were using in that time period. But we, we also know that how nouns, um, what kind of, kinds of vowels were usually used for what kinds of nouns.

So it’s, it’s a very, very educated guess. Now when it comes to Molech or Moloch, we have to use like the Septuagint’s transliteration of that as a name is one of the indicators that those were the vowels that were used. But this is, we have no good data that indicate this was the name of a deity. All of the indications are that this was a noun that referred to a specific type of sacrifice. So instead of saying this is an offering to Moloch, these passages should all be read as this is a molech offering. It is an offering as a molech or mulk or whatever.

Okay, so that word should be— and I guess this is just a standard, like a translation issue where it looks ambiguous enough that it could go different ways? Is that like— for instance, so, so the Leviticus 18 passage that I just read, 18:21, uh, I, I’m just trying to understand, like, you know, I’m not reading out of, uh, NIV here. I mean, I’m in NRSVUE, and they’re still saying, uh, you know, offspring— you shall not give your offspring, right, to sacrifice them to Molech.

Yes. This is a very, very traditional reading. Like, there are a bunch of things where scholars are like, “Yeah, that’s wrong. It just hasn’t filtered its way down to Bible translations.

Uh-huh.

That’s not in the Bible anywhere. The word that is commonly translated leprosy has nothing to do with Hansen’s disease. And we know this, but we just kind of leave it because it’s traditional.

Interesting.

Yeah, and that annoys an awful lot of folks.

I’m noticing, by the way, that when I click on the footnote for this thing, it says, instead of “sacrifice them to Molech,” it says, the Hebrew says, “to pass them over to Molech,” which could mean something very different. Like what you’re saying, Pat, could very much be, you don’t give them, like pass them over to the act of Molech.

Well, the idea is pass them over as a mulk offering. Right. So yeah, the verb there is actually cause to cross over, and the idea is you are literally physically handing over or passing over like onto an altar or something like that.

Right.

But there’s only one passage that a lot of people will point to as kind of like, aha, this is what actually proves it’s a deity. And that’s in 1 Kings 11:7, where it talks about Solomon built a high place for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab. And so abomination is a substitution for the god of. Right. And for Molech, the abomination of the Ammonites, “on the mountain east of Jerusalem.” So that would—

Oh, okay.

Yeah, that would seem to identify Molech as the god of the Ammonites and the name of a deity.

The only problem is we know who the god of the Ammonites was, and it was not Molech, it was a god called Milcom. And if you look two verses earlier in 1 Kings 11:5, it says, “For Solomon followed Astarte, the goddess of the Sidonians, and Milcom, the abomination of the Ammonites.” So this is just a textual corruption where the final mem on the name Milcom fell off and we’re left with MLK, which could mean king, or as we see in the Masoretic Text, it is understood as a reference to the name Molech. If we go to the Septuagint, they fix the problem by saying “their kings,” which would actually indicate that it was, yeah, they interpreted it as kings. And we have, there are like two or three other passages where it very clearly says Milcom is the god of the Ammonites. So there’s not a good case to make that any deity was ever worshiped in the ancient world with child sacrifice.

However, or named Milcom, named Molech.

Right.

However, as we’ve talked about before on the show, there is a good case to make. In fact, I think it is correct that the God of Israel demands child sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible.

I was thinking we might need to bring that up because, yeah, there’s so many, you know, when you hear all of, you know, people like Mike Lee talking about they’re sacrificing their children and only the most evil ever people in the history of the world would do child sacrifice. I got bad news for you, bro. So talk about that a little bit.

Yeah, well, there are a few different things to talk about, including the fact that within Judaism, as well as within Christianity, central events of the entire faith are child sacrifice.

Right.

Like Jesus is a child sacrifice.

He’s an adult sacrifice.

You can dress it up, offspring sacrifice. You can dress it up in a lot of different ways rhetorically, but it is God offering their child, their son, as a sacrifice. Right. And you know, that’s pretty clear. And then the Akedah, this is Abraham’s offer of Isaac. I think we’ve talked about this on the show before as well. Right at the last second, God goes, “Psych, just kidding.” Right. And—

I just wanted to see if you’d do it. Yeah.

I didn’t know you were gonna do it, man. That was pretty good. But when we look at the text, as we’ve discussed before, it’s a little fuzzy on what exactly happened because you have, it talks explicitly about Abraham and Isaac. They walked on, they went up the mountain, they did this, they did that. Whatever happens, happens. And then it says, “So Abraham returned to his young men.” Two go up the mountain, only one comes down. And there are medieval and later Jewish traditions that actually understand the sacrifice to have taken place.

Because Isaac vanishes from the narrative for a bit. And so there’s this idea that, oh, he was sacrificed and he lived in heaven for a couple of years before he was reconstituted on earth. Or there’s one where the ashes—he was burnt as a burnt offering and the ashes were scattered around the mountains of Moriah and the dew mixed with the ashes and Isaac—

Oh, wow.

You know, kind of, was again reconstituted.

So like a phoenix rising.

Yes, rising from the ashes. And so anyway, even within Judaism, child sacrifice is kind of central to the story.

I mean, the Exodus starts with God just sacrificing all the firstborn sons of Egypt to himself.

And here’s where it gets really weird. Then God gives the Covenant Code to Israel, which we see in Exodus 20 as the Ten Commandments. Exodus 21 and 22 and a little bit of 23 have the Covenant Code, and the end of Exodus 22 sounds an awful lot like a command to offer child sacrifice.

Because it says in English, in verse 29 in English—it’s verse 28 in Hebrew—“You shall not delay to make offerings from the fullness of your harvest and from the outflow of your presses. The firstborn of your sons you shall give to me. You shall do the same with your oxen and with your sheep. Seven days it shall remain with its mother; on the eighth day you shall give it to me.” Obviously, with the oxen and the sheep, “give it to me” means sacrifice it to me.

Right.

So it sounds like that’s what is being referred to in terms of the firstborn. Now, everybody immediately—or at least people who are informed about their Bible will immediately go, “Wait a minute, Exodus 13 and Exodus 34 say you’re supposed to start walking in that direction, and then at the last moment you go, ‘Just kidding, I’m gonna pay you money, and then I don’t have to sacrifice my child.’” Or they’ll point to Numbers where it says this is really about dedicating the child to priesthood service or something like that. So we have renegotiations of the commandments. Now, I think the majority of scholars agree that the Covenant Code is the earliest legislative stuff in all the Hebrew Bible. And so these other passages are coming from later, and they’re having to renegotiate what’s going on here because they’ve found this peculiar commandment that says, “I want your firstborn kids.” And they’re like, “Ooh, we don’t like that.” And presumably nobody was doing it, so—we have no data that indicates that there was actually the sacrifice of children going on in Israel.

This kind of thing did happen in the ancient world.

It was more likely than not any child you successfully gave birth to was not going to live past a year. And so the calculus of this frequently resulted in, well, maybe if we sacrifice the firstborn, then God will bless us so that other children will survive. Yeah, that was, that was the calculus. Whether or not it worked, um, but we have in the, in the later renegotiations, they’re, they’re substituting things—money or priesthood service or something like that. But notice that the foundation is still child sacrifice. Yeah, we’ve just tacked, you know, a hard left right at the last second over it. We’ve just said, “Just kidding, don’t actually sacrifice the kid,” which betrays that underlying all of this is something buried deep in hoary antiquity that actually said sacrifice your kids.

Right.

You don’t need to say, “Let’s pretend to have them sacrifice their kids,” if that was not actually what you wanted initially. You can just not have a commandment about sacrificing your child.

Nobody’s even talking about sacrificing children. You don’t need to have any commandments about it.

Yeah, it’s not like somebody is like, you know what, here’s what we got to do. We’re going to command them to sacrifice their children and then say, just kidding, right at the last second. And then because everybody around the boardroom table would have been like, why don’t we just not command them to—yeah, I mean, if you just want the money, just say, yeah, you got to pay this money if you have a kid. If you just want the priesthood service, you can just say, “Yeah, you’ve got to give your child over to priesthood service.” You don’t have to say, “Well, sacrifice them. Just kidding, we’re going to leap in at the last second and say do it.” So the rhetoric that Mike Lee is appealing to here is just transparently ignorant and emotive. This is just an attempt to try to get people to hate Democrats because they would like abortion to be safe, legal, and rare.

Yeah, it’s things like comprehensive sex education, it’s things like greater access to women’s healthcare, it’s things like greater access to contraception. And guess what three things the people who rail against abortion are also railing against?

Right.

Those things.

Yes. So they don’t want abortion to happen at lower rates.

If they were serious about abortion, they wouldn’t be calling—they would call the pill abortion prevention pills. They wouldn’t call—they wouldn’t be calling those, you know, “you shouldn’t be using that.” They—yeah, but they’re not serious about any of these things. They’re serious about having a wedge issue and getting elected. This works great to fire up their electorate.

Yeah, and unfortunately, the voting public is—a larger portion of the voting public than I am comfortable with is happy to be like, “Sure, I’ll just imagine that you’re the devil incarnate because you think abortions ought to be safe, legal, and rare,” even if the guy I’m ultimately going to elect literally rapes children. Yeah, uh, it’s, it’s baffling to me, and, and it is so disgusting, and I am embarrassed and, and ashamed that, that we put into office, uh, such a, a profoundly immoral, uh, and, and profoundly corrupt person.

Well, speaking of a profoundly immoral and profoundly corrupt person, we’ve got more Mike Lee to talk about. So I think you and I should move on to our Taken Issue. So yeah, Dan, uh, Mike Lee is mad. He got mad, uh, but one of the things that he got—the thing that he got mad about is that the United States government, uh, specifically the Department of War, or Department of Defense if you want to be Rawr. Yes, the Department of Rawr.

The Pentagon. Pete Hegseth, or Kegsbreath, as the kids are calling him.

As he’s fondly known. Scotchy Pete, as I like to call him, has decided that Mormons, specifically the people of your faith, Dan, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aren’t Christian. Yes. Now, this came in the form of a—first of all, Hegseth decided that there were too many religions. It’s unruly. It’s unwieldy. And so he took a list of different religious designations that was somewhere in the neighborhood of 210 to 220. Reports vary on that list.

And this is a list of religious denominations, groups, and then there was a code, like a, a two-letter code that was associated with them in an effort to help chaplains be able to identify the religious faith of a given member of the military.

Right. So, so like, just so that, like, you know, if you’re a Catholic and the chaplain there is needing to see to your, to your needs, your ecclesiastical needs, he needs to know if he should give Catholic last rites or if he should call someone else over, if, you know, because to give a Jewish soldier Catholic last rites would be a bit of a faux pas.

We’ll call it that.

Yes. A party foul on the—.

Yeah, exactly. And there’s literally no good reason not to have every person’s religion available. We have enough two-letter combinations to make that happen.

But Hegseth decided, no, we’re shaving it down and released a list of, of, uh, the new very shaved down 31 now categories of religion.

And the original list had a bunch of things. It was like Christian-Methodist, Christian-Catholic, Christian-Jehovah’s Witness, Christian-blah blah blah. And then its own category was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Yes. Without that Christian thing at the front. So people like Mike Lee and our other senator, Chris Stewart, raised holy hell and blah, blah, blah. And so the Pentagon then released the list again, but without listing all of these different things as Catholic or as Christian.

Christian. Yeah, they didn’t say, okay, Mormons are Christians, we’ll add the label. They just said, fine, we’ll take the Christian label off.

And so you have now a list of denominations and no, this is Christian supercategory.

Right. And also, yeah, like you say, no one at the Pentagon, no one at the White House, no one in the US government said, oops, sorry, of course you’re Christians, LDS. No one has said that. So yes, I think, I think that this is a really interesting moment for the LDS people. But it’s also an interesting reason to reason for us to talk about what the heck is a Christian. Yeah.

And part of— some people have pointed out Pete Hegseth’s pastor is Doug Wilson. We’ve talked about Doug Wilson in the past. He is a piece of work.

That’s one way of saying it.

A bygone era. Yes. But he is very much Mormons aren’t Christian. And so there are those who think that Doug Wilson’s influence may have trickled down into the categorization of Mormons as not Christian on this Pentagon list. But yeah, it did start a debate on social media that is still raging on Twitter among the least qualified commentators, which is where, you know, that’s kind of Twitter is like, if you want to find the highest concentration of people who have no business speaking on certain issues, that’s where you go.

Well, people who have no business speaking on certain issues who are willing to portray themselves as experts on that issue. Yes. Yeah. I think, yeah, it’s shocking the amount of certainty that you see in social media circles, especially on X. Yes. That from people who have just nothing but vibes guiding them. Yes.

And so there are an awful lot of people who are like, “Well, of course Mormons aren’t Christian.” And you have a bunch of different cases that they’re trying to make. Most of them center on the Trinity. But others center on, you know, they’ll rattle off a list of things that make Mormonism not Christian, including a doctrine of deification. Study your history, Christians. Deification was a central part of ancient Christianity.

And by that, I just want to clarify that there is a central Mormon theology that humans, us, we, through a belief in the teachings of the gospel, can become gods ourselves.

Well, through the principles and ordinances.

And ordinances.

That’s right. Because not just beliefs, that would be a very Protestant way to approach it that a lot of Mormons would disagree with. However, again, this is something that is actually in a lot of Orthodox traditions and we find in earlier Christianity. Now, that does not mean that that early Christian version is a proto-Mormon doctrine.

Right.

The first thing I ever published was a paper called Latter-day Saints and Patristics, where I basically wagged my finger at Latter-day Saint apologists and said, stop identifying patristic ideas about deification and things like that as proto-Mormonism. It’s not. So, but mostly people are focusing on concepts of deity and particularly the Latter-day Saint rejection of the triune God or the Trinity. The Nicene Creed basically is supposed to be the essence, the very beating heart of what it means to be a Christian, which is bad news for everybody before Nicaea who is now no longer a Christian.

Right, right.

All the way down to Peter and the group.

They’ve been dechristified, along with anyone who happens to, you know, follow the teachings of Jesus now, but happens to take a Unitarian view of the Godhead or whatever.

Yeah. Oh, and guess who got left right out of the list when it was whittled down to 31? Unitarian Universalists. Yeah. So they were just omitted. There were other groups that were combined into other groups. The UUs, Unitarian Universalists, just deleted.

Just psst, out completely. I was eliminated.

Atheists. Yeah.

Atheists are no longer on the group. They left agnostics, which just feels like they’re just winking and then kicking. You know what I mean? Yeah.

No pagan category either. The pagans were—

Pagans, Wiccans, all of those sorts of people are out.

Yeah. But the biggest problem with this that I have with this idea of, of course they’re not Christian, even though Jehovah’s Witnesses are listed as Christians.

And I don’t— I think people would have more of a— informed Christians should have more of a problem with including Jehovah’s Witnesses than with Mormons saying, “Yeah, we’re Christian.” But here’s the thing. There is nobody, and there is no combination of people who is in charge of the boundaries of Christianity. No person has that authority.

I thought you said it was Doug Wilson. I thought you said he was in charge of it.

Doug Wilson is in charge of Doug Wilson. And to the degree that he has actual ecclesiastical institutional authority over who belongs to his particular church, he has a say over whether or not someone is a member of his particular group. And that’s true more broadly as well. You know, the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has the authority to decide whether or not I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

That’s true. And if you decided that your belief system as a member of that church differed far enough from what they’ve decided is their central belief system, he could make the decision to kick you out.

Yes. And there are a lot of people who have wondered why on earth that has not happened yet. But that is neither here nor there.

It’s a little here and there.

The issue is none of these people have the authority to declare who is or is not Christian. There’s only one person who has ever existed who would hypothetically have that authority, and we ain’t heard from him in 2,000 years. We keep leaving messages saying, “We’ve been trying to get in touch with you about your car’s extended warranty,” and he’s— we’ve been ghosted, basically. Ghosted by the Holy Ghost. Jesus has not clarified regarding that, and we can’t look to the New Testament for any help because it doesn’t really tell us where the boundaries sit.

And so, well, because the New Testament didn’t imagine a sect called Christianity, we don’t see that until late in the book of Acts, right?

Um, and, and the word Christian only occurs a couple of times. So yeah, it’s just not considered. And so when it comes to who is or isn’t a Christian, the folks who look into religious identity and look into membership and boundaries and all that kind of stuff, the folks who study this, myself included, would say that self-identification ought to be the most important factor. Not the only factor, but the most important factor. And then, you know, it radiates out to to other factors as well. But none of these people have, you know, rubbed a piece of paper on a Mormon and said, “Ha! It turned pink, not a Christian.” Right. Like, it doesn’t work that way. None of them can dip a Mormon in acid and say, “See the reaction? That means not a Christian.” It doesn’t work that way. So really all they’re doing is preaching to the choir.

They’re just saying— Or just say, “Weigh the same as a duck.” Then they’re a witch.

Oh, okay.

Oh, that’s not a Mormon— okay, that’s not a Christian thing. That’s a witch.

There’s overlap. Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s overlap. But, and yeah, we won’t go there. But it’s just, it’s not how it works. You don’t get to decide beyond yourself and whatever group you might happen to have any kind of institutional authority within. And so it’s really just a person who’s a part of a collection of social identities speaking to the other people who are part of the same identities saying, “We don’t like them.” That’s correct. We don’t like them. They do not speak for all Christianity. They’re just trying to use this as an identity marker to curate and advance their own standing and their own access to power and resources within those social identities, which is really what Twitter is doing is giving people an opportunity to costly signal and engage in credibility-enhancing displays.

And it’s always been so interesting to me that all of these people are sitting in their church, or sitting, you know, they’re in the pews, and they’re all just furiously saying, “Haha, we’re the best. We’re the only real Christians. All these other ones are fake,” or, “All these other ones are doing it wrong or whatever.” And yeah, I get that you have— that they want to draw their own boundaries. They want to say the, you know, they want to delineate a series of necessary and sufficient conditions that may— that, you know, if this is met and this is met and this is met, but this is excluded and this, then no, you’re not quite there. But as you say, when they do that drawing of a boundary, whether it’s pointing at Nicaea or pointing at this, that, or the other political hot-button issue and saying you have to believe this or that on that issue to qualify, what they’re saying in essence is the opposite of what they think they’re saying, which is that it’s a thing that’s decided after the fact.

Like, like Nicaea, if you, if you’re pointing at Nicaea, you are admitting that a group of people who kind of all disagreed with each other got together, you know, struck out this word and that word and kind of shook hands on it, and just, you know, nobody was fully comfortable with it, and that’s sufficient to define your religion?

And imperial authority had to come in and be the one to enforce it as well, even though they—that imperial authority switched allegiances a bunch of times in the process. So yeah, it’s very clearly historically contingent, but they don’t want to acknowledge that. And I wish they would, I wish they could see that what they’re arguing over is meaningless as well. Who cares if Mormons are labeled Christians by the Pentagon? Like, it doesn’t change anything about their life. It is only relevant to your identity politics, to trying to curate your own standing. And because—does it hurt anybody to say, “Yeah, they’re Christian, we still don’t like them”? Right. “They’re not our kind of Christian.” “We disagree with them.” Yeah. “We think they’re dumb.” Right. “You know, we don’t like that they’ve got those extra books of the canon, we don’t like the polygamy, we don’t like, uh, all this other stuff about them.”

You, you’re still allowed to say those things if you acknowledge that, that Mormons are Christian. Uh, it, it just, it demonstrates that this is just about playing in a social club for you.

Yeah, and, and, and, and making sure that your, your social club is exclusive.

Yeah, it’s the No Homers Club all over again.

Because, because I don’t know if you remember that episode, but he’s like, but you got that other Homer. And he’s like, well, it’s no homers. We can have one.

We can have one.

It’s like, but, but you got the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

It’s no Reformation-era-ers or whatever. Yeah.

Yeah, we can have one Restorationist branch of Christianity. Restoration.

But to me, it shows how petty and really how petty this all is. This is all just about, “Ooh, we want maintenance. We’re the real Christians and everybody else is a pretend Christian.” Like, this is playground behavior writ large. And playing out on Twitter of all places. I do think— And among senators, excuse me.

Yeah, I do think that one, you said who cares whether this group or that group labels themselves as Christian. I think though that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints should care. Yeah, because this was— I don’t, I don’t think there was anything accidental about this at all. This was a decision that was made purposefully to exclude them. And honestly, it shocks me that more LDS people aren’t standing up and saying, hey, you don’t respect us at all. Like, they’re— they’re one of the most reliable right-wing voting blocks in the country.

Oh yeah. I mean, I think, I think white evangelicals are the only group that, that voted for Trump, uh, in higher percentages.

Yeah. And yet they’re, uh, they’re willing to just stomp all— they don’t respect the LDS. They— you know what I mean? Like, the, the right wing of this country has— doesn’t just sees it as a joke.

Yeah, and it’s just about structuring power.

They’ll accept the votes of Latter-day Saints. They’ll let them help them gain power. But yeah, they don’t want them. They don’t like them. And which is why I have said, MAGA Mormons, you made this bed, you sleep in it. You’ve been told for years, they don’t want you. You’re trying to hitch your wagon to evangelicalism to gain greater access to power and resources socially and politically, and they couldn’t care less about you. They don’t want you.

More to the point, they hate you.

They don’t respect you. They do care because they want— they enjoy not liking you. So, all right, yeah, there you go.

Uh, I, I think it’s problem— I’ll, I’ll just find one last thing to say, I think it’s problematic when the majority of the things that you’re doing in exercising your religion is trying to clarify who you don’t like and who doesn’t belong.

Right.

Yeah. That’s a terrible way to be religious. Yes. You don’t find that in the Sermon on the Mount. It’s a terrible way to be religious, and it shows that really these folks are religious only because they see it as a social club that has value for them.

And yeah, and especially, especially if you’re calling yourself Christian, because it seems to me that if you’re calling yourself a Christian, then at very least one of the necessary conditions of that, if we were to say that there were any, would be being a follower of Jesus Christ.

Well, I’ll do you one better. In Mark 9, Jesus’s disciples come up to him and say, “Hey, these other people were trying to say they follow you, but they don’t. We don’t like them. They don’t follow us, so we told them to get out of here.” And Jesus says, “No, no. Anyone who gives you a cup of water to drink in my name, because you belong to Christ, will not lose their reward.” Like, the New Testament says that you shouldn’t run people off just because they don’t follow Jesus the exact same way that you do. And yeah, the whole “different Christ” thing that is also used to talk about this is so bafflingly stupid.

All right, so I believe that what you’ve just said is that it is the official policy of the Data Over Dogma podcast that a Christian is someone who will give you water. Yes. Boom.

That is the essence, yes, of Christ.

Are you willing to give water to these people? All right.

Look, good job. I have a no soliciting sign on my door and I still get solicitors almost every day.

Oh my gosh.

And without fail, when I say, and sometimes I know that a lot of people, they’re trained to not leave until they’ve had three nos.

Right.

And so sometimes I’ll be like, “I appreciate what you’re doing. No, no, no. Okay, you can satisfy the requirements of your job.” I will always say, “Can I offer you a bottle of water or something?” Yeah. So you can say, “Cool.” Because I think that that is what Christianity is supposed to be about. Winning arguments on the internet is a pretty silly brand of Christianity. Uh, do better.

Yeah, all right, there you go. Well, if you would like to become a part of keeping this whole thing going, you can offer us a glass of water in the form of becoming a patron of this show. Uh, the way you do that is you go over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma where you can choose what level you want to be. And you can get fun rewards like an early and ad-free version of every episode. Or, at a certain level, you can get the After Party, which is our bonus patrons-only content that we do every week just for you guys. So, head on over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma for that. Thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing. Thanks to Sam for helping us out on the YouTube. And we’ll talk to you all again next time.

Bye, everybody.

Moloch, Mormons, and Mike Lee

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