ClobberBlog | Mormonism, Evangelical Christianity

A couples of weeks ago, at the General Relief Society Meeting, Thomas S. Monson delivered a sermon entitled “Charity Never Faileth.” This sermon dealt with the subject of charity, but not in the sense that Latter-day Saints usually mean when they use the term, i. e. giving to others or meeting their needs in a way that relieves their suffering. Instead, Monson’s talk was about the charity of not judging others. As I said in my recap, I thought it was a pretty good talk.

This post is also about a different kind of charity, a charity which I see as being badly needed if Mormons and Evangelicals are going to be in dialogue with one another. It’s the charity of not correcting others unless correction is really necessary.

In August, I was discussing baptism and infant baptism with some LDS friends. I was discussing the LDS minimum age for baptism and I said something along the lines of, “I know you baptize them at age eight because that’s when their sins start counting, but–”

My friend suddenly jumped in and cut me off. “No! We don’t baptize them because they’re sinful, we baptize them to fulfill the commandment.”

This confused me. I replied, “Right, I know they’re not sinful before the age of eight, but eight is the age of accountability and–”

My friend went on to insist that cleansing eight-year-olds of their sins has nothing to do with it. I later talked with my husband about it, then talked with some other LDS friends online. They all confirmed to me that they thought my friend was in the wrong. The Fourth Article of Faith clearly states that baptism by immersion is practiced “for the remission of sins.” Not only had my friend’s correction been superfluous, it had contradicted LDS doctrine and ultimately could have clouded my understanding of LDS teachings on baptism.

It happens often in interfaith dialogue that I feel like I’m witnessing this phenomenon of corrections that aren’t even correct and clarifications that actually work to confuse the subject. Even when the corrections are spot-on, they can still be rather unnecessary given the background of the original poster and the intended audience. If an evangelical who is giving general information to other evangelicals about what Mormons believe says, “Mormons teach a heavenly mother,” interjecting to explain every sophisticated alternative devised by the philosophy junkies at NewCoolThang probably isn’t necessary. Likewise, when a Mormon who is explaining evangelical beliefs to other Mormons says, “Protestants believe in a priesthood of all believers,” a discourse on the variants within Protestantism that do hold to some lesser form of linear authority is probably only going to confuse the subject.

As someone who is arguably “religiously bilingual,” meaning that I understand both Mormonism and Evangelical Christianity pretty well, I feel like a lot of people do not understand just how difficult it can be to get a really good grasp on the teachings of a religion that isn’t your own. It’s a lot like learning a second language, and as anyone who has ever learned a second language can tell you, the good teachers are not the ones who stop you at every other word to correct some minor quibble with your intonation. These are the teachers who make you lose confidence and want to give up. The good teachers are the ones who focus on the big mistakes at first, then work on smaller things once you’re ready for them. If you really want to help someone understand your religion, correcting their every attempt to describe it is probably a bad idea.

So, I’m not saying you should never offer correction in interfaith dialogue. Thoughtful, constructive correction is one of the ways that we come to a better understanding of one another, and besides, if somebody gets something about your religion grossly wrong, you have every right to try and insure that others don’t make the same mistake. The rule that I usually try to hold to is that if I would accept that comment if spoken in Sunday school by a fellow evangelical, I should probably not try to correct it when I hear it from a Mormon