Take Bernie Madoff, by all accounts a devoutly religious, really really nice guy. Only problem was he was stealing tens of billions, much of it from religious charities.

Far from being a bar to mean behavior, religion frequently provides justification.

It is certainly used as a justification of chopped, nonsense logic. Take papal infallibility, a ludicrous doctrine, a blasphemous claim that man speaks for God. But you know it really does not mean what you think it does you understand, people who argue against it only do so out of their foolish ignorance of what the doctrine means – I have heard Jesuits give precisely that form of ‘explanation’. Which really amounts to merely a repetition of the blasphemous claim that the church speaks for God.

Which when you get down to it is suspiciously like the explanation given for how Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was making all that money. At the end of the day they both use the same charlatan’s trick of telling people that asking questions and demanding explanations is wrong.

Just lump BYU and Notre Dame in along with Faux News: institutions that purport to be something that they are not.

Hmm. Massive top-down bureaucracy… impressive feats of mobilising the masses in response to disasters… evangelical… busy spreading the word in the Third World… intolerant of dissent… history of bloodshed… this is all sounding a bit familiar. What’s the Mormon position on tractors?

I’m disappointed nobody picked up on my powder keg point. Fox? Alas, this post has slipped beneath the fold… it’s history already.

In some brands of Christianity, e.g. orthodox Calvinism, it’s even more mysterious. You know that God disapproves of everyone, but that he will, completely gratuitously, grant salvation to a preselected, but by definition undeserving, group of the elect.

I’ll unpack that.

If you’re a Christian (and hence care one way or the other), you can’t be certain that you’re saved and somebody else (who you don’t like) isn’t. You can hope God approves of your conduct (and not the other persons’s); you can even be fairly confident; but you can’t know. So the worst you can get to, on the level of moral condemnation, is (or should be) a rueful shake of the head – “well, I don’t know of course, but I think if you carry on like that you might just be heading down the primrose path… but it’s not for me to say, we’re all in His hands after all”.

We’re familiar with people who use that approach as a passive-aggressive tactic to conceal the hatred they’re actually feeling. But perhaps it can be genuine. “My values say your conduct is wrong, but I don’t know for certain that my values are binding on you” – that sounds like a pretty good attitude to have. Odd that, when we think about religion, the self-deceiving passive-aggressive version should be so predominant.

Religious types are often “nice” if by “nice” you mean “conventionally polite and solicitous as long as they get their own way”

Also someone asked if I really have known many evangelicals. I’m from the Bible Belt; the answer is “yes”. Not to (re)mention, my sister is one.

I think that I should be more clear that the basis for my “niceness” estimation isn’t very limited contact such as talking to a missionary whom I don’t know. It’s based upon people I know moderately to quite well.

As far as whether or not the conservative Christians I’ve known, particularly evangelicals and fundamentalists, can be accurately described as being “not nice”…well, I think I’ve been less than clear on this. It’s not so much that they have been unsually unkind, it’s more that they’ve been pretty much like most people; whereas the Mormons have been unusually kind. Also, while the conservative Christians haven’t been particularly unkind to me (and, I should also say that almost everyone is kind and friendly to me because I generally am that way—except occasionally online—and, of course, people respond to kindness), but they tend to express anger and hostility against the vast number of people whom they think are the bad guys. Like, you know, casual hateful racism. I don’t doubt that many Mormons I’ve known are racist, but I don’t hear about it from them. I do from the culturally conservative Christians I’ve known in, primarily, (Eastern) New Mexico and Texas. (Eastern New Mexico is culturally Texan; often referred to in the rest of NM as “little Texas”.)

To put it another way, the culturally conservative Christians have of course been caring about their own, just as most people are, but I’ve noticed that the Mormons seem to be caring about everyone, not just people like themselves. That doesn’t mean they will compromise their values.

The reason this matters to me is that it gets right to the heart of something I feel and believe very strongly. I think that the conventional understanding of “tolerance” is flawed. It implies a “live and let live” attitude which doesn’t allow for proselytizing or strong and limited moral limits on behavior that implicitly condemn those who violate them. In my opinion, the much more productive idea of tolerance is simple that one, by default (but disprovable by evidence in individual, not general, cases) respects others to have as well-intentioned and earnest beliefs as oneself. It’s a view that doesn’t automatically assume that everyone who works contrary to one’s values is intentionally, actively “evil”. People—all people—tend to make this assumption. But those who hold culturally conservative, rigid, religiously defined values are more susceptible to this.

But I notice in my sister, most of her peers (young, not as political, conservative evangelicals), and most Mormons I’ve known that they don’t do this. They assume that most other people who believe differently than they do are well-intentioned but wrong.

I’m interested in this relative to Mormons because I’m extremely interested in it in general. I want to understand how communities and institutions can encourage strong values and activism while discourage vilification of those who have different and even opposing values. I see examples of communities that are able to inculcate this kind of tolerance, even religious communities with (relatively) very intolerant core beliefs.

To me, that people like Limbaugh exemplify the exact opposite of this is an example of why I care very deeply that we on the left avoid doing the same. I’ve been in conflict with the values of most of the people I’ve known my entire life (which perhaps might explain my point-of-view on this, along with my temperament being essentially optimistic and that I like other people), but I don’t think they’re bad people on the basis of having opposing values. With the exception of when they are intolerant in the Limbaugh-esque fashion.

Don’t deny the Holocaust, though, or you might get reinstated . . .

Lets face it: [to be a Mormon] one just has to believe in magic.

Depending on how you define your terms, then yes, that’s right, that pretty much sums it up. Your point is?

(Incidentally, it’s “Mormon,” not “Morman.” The name is taken from one of our books of scripture, the Book of Mormon.)

Roy said:

The 19th c. Mormons were not only not “nice” to the Native American populations of the lands they coveted, and took, they were as violently, murderously intolerant as it’s possible to be. There’s blood all over Utah from that.

There’s plenty of truth to what you say here, but plenty of exaggeration too. “Blood all over Utah”? I think the historical record, which is replete with statements of official church leaders from the very top all the way down to the local level calling for the Saints to treat (for theological reasons that we don’t need to get into right now) the local Native American population with decency and respect, is decidedly more mixed than you suggest.

Do you actually know a bunch of culturally conservative evangelicals? Were they really all like this? In my experience, they are not all like this, particularly when dealing with actual humans rather than abstractions….I think that the anger, etc. is often caused by particular subcultures, rather than an artifact of a particular religion one belongs to. There is a subculture of angry right wing paranoid that overlaps with some of the evangelical subculture. But then there are many other subcultural groups with those traits. In my experience, certain academics can be bitter, rage-filled, intolerant people who can’t stand anyone unlike themselves, e.g., Muslims and Christians. Or various others they don’t like—chaos theorists or libertarians or whatever. My hypothesis is that the thing that makes people angry and intolerant is some kind of perceived wound to themselves, rather than their beliefs per se….I think it really oversimplifies to say that the antagonism is the main attraction to the faith. For some people it is. For other people it isn’t. Maybe go to L.A. and visit a Guatemalan evangelical church sometime and see why they joined ? Or even a suburban megachurch? The reasons are very diffuse and complex.

Very well said, and thank you for saying it. People familiar with modern American religion might be easily led to believe that Mormons and evangelical Protestants treat each other with mutual loathing and suspicion, for example, and certainly there is some evidence of that (the big kerfluffle between the supporters of Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee back during the Republican primary, for example). But it simply isn’t the whole story. As a longtime resident of the American South (Virginia, Mississippi, and Arkansas), and had many associations, formal and informal, with evangelical Protestants, particularly Southern Baptists. They knew I was an active, believing member of the local Mormon congregation. Yet, to my knowledge, none of them ever expressed any kind of contempt or exclusions towards me; to a person, they were kind, open-minded, and generous. Selection bias in the sort of people I met, given that I’m an academic? Possibly. Nonetheless, it’s evidence to me that the often common assumptions about hate or antagonism which frame how we think about groups we don’t agree with, even groups espousing political or moral or theological doctrines we think are wicked and false and hateful, are often simply wrong, or at the very least fail to recognize a complex reality.

There are a lot of different Mormons, who joined or who stay with the LDS faith for a lot of different reasons. The same for other conservative evangelicals. These differences lead to many different subgroups within the whole. Some of those subgroups, no doubt, truly are hostile and aggressive and mean. But not all of them are, and none of them, I think, are uncomplicatedly so. It’s an important point to keep in mind.

I lived in SLC in 1983, when I was a practicing member of the Church of the Deep Powder Couloir. That spring, the temperature stayed cold through late May, and there was almost no melting of the mountain snowpack. Then it suddenly warmed to 90F+, and Salt Lake was, amazingly, facing a flood. Pretty much overnight, the LDS Church coordinated its membership to build a couple of miles of sandbag levees that diverted water out of the downtown. An impressive collective action, and I doubt that there is another US city that can take care of itself in this way.

Disclosure: I am not LDS, and I regret it when the Church uses the same collective resources against human rights.