Posted on 06/21/2013 4:31:51 AM PDT by Colofornian
The Mormon Church has an ambivalent history with Christianity’s most iconic symbol, the cross. For about 70 years, the cross was generally tolerated within the church’s cultural fabric. However, the first decades of the 20th century initiated a slow but steady expression of disapproval of the cross; a criticism influenced by LDS leaders’ willingness to publicly declare the Roman Catholic Church as the “church of the devil” described in LDS scripture.
“Banishing the Cross: The Emergence of a Mormon Taboo,” (John Whitmer Books) by Michael G. Reed, is a slim but valuable volume on the history of the Mormons’ relationship with the cross. As Reed notes, the Mormon Church was founded during an era of widespread Protestant hostility to the cross, a hostility that was due to that era’s wariness of Catholicism.
As Reed notes, Mormons were generally no fans of Catholicism, but they were more responsive to the cross as a religious symbol. There are two reasons for this. The first was that Mormonism was founded during a time of spiritual awakening in the early United States. While “organized religion” was criticized, individualistic spirituality flourished. Within these “rebel theologies,” spiritual manifestations were not uncommon. The symbol of the cross often played a role. Another reason the cross was tolerated by early Mormons, according to Reed, was due to founder Joseph Smith’s interest in Freemasonry. In fact, Nauvoo in the early 1840s was a hotbed of Freemasonry interest.
That interest is a key reason that the symbol of the cross traveled with the saints to Utah. Reed presents many photographs, both central to Mormonism and 19th century Utah, in which the cross is prominent.
However, as Reed notes, criticism of the cross started to creep more into the Mormon culture as a the 20th century began. Reed cites statements from leading Mormons, including then-apostle Moses Thatcher, that connected the cross to anti-Catholicism. Around 1915, a proposal in the Salt Lake area to put a cross on Ensign Peak received significant opposition, one that initially surprised LDS supporters. The eventual failure to place a memorial cross at Ensign Peak is cast — correctly by Reed — as a dispute between church leaders. The author writes that younger church leaders, such as David O. McKay and Joseph Fielding Smith, had not grown up in the early era of the LDS Church and therefore had not been influenced by the more liberal, anti institutional, even anti-government thought of the 1840s to 1860s LDS leadership. Also, they had not been influenced by Freemasonry.
In my opinion, it’s important to note that in the first 30 years of the 20th century the LDS Church leadership had what might best be referred to as a “second Mormon reformation.” Leaders such as McKay, Fielding Smith, and later J. Reuben Clark, Mark E. Peterson and Bruce R. McConkie, successfully moved the church to extremely conservative ideology, including a renewal of harsh rhetoric against Catholicism.
As Reed notes, Joseph Fielding Smith wrote, “To bow down before a cross or to look upon it as an emblem to be revered because of the fact that our Savior died upon a cross is repugnant…”
The more blunt McConkie described the Roman Catholic Church as “being ‘most abominable above all other churches,’” writes Reed.
What I describe as a conservative era eventually endured about as long as the early Mormon Church’s initial tolerance of the cross. In the 21st it has waned. As Reed notes, it would be shocking to hear an LDS leader denounce Catholicism as McConkie once did. However, Reed still sees an institutional taboo against the cross in the LDS Church. To still use the term “taboo” though is too harsh.
While it’s true that an anti-Catholic diatribe by an LDS leader would be greeted with shock today, it’s also true that a talk about the symbolic spiritual value of the cross would mostly be greeted with non-surprised acceptance by most Latter-day Saints.
This article, from the LDS publication The Ensign, is evidence of a stance on the cross that would have been at odds with the rhetoric of church leaders of the past. A specific condemnation of the cross may be an occasionally tactless utterance from some church members, but most others would find such beliefs offensive. Today, Latter-day Saints define the cross as a responsibility to live a righteous life. That seems a pretty ecumenical position.
But it is not confined to the illiterate. All of us respond to beautiful things in a way that is quite different from the way we respond to a text or a verbal proposition. That's why so many FReepers use pictures in addition to words. And in a grander way, that's why Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" has fascinated millions, maybe hundreds of millions of people who otherwise would not be much interested in a bare text that says "God created man."
I am a RCIA teacher, and I have long said that one weakness of our (parish) RCIA program is "Too much Prose, not enough Poetry."
I love the True. I love the Good. And we shouldn't ever neglect or short-change those who are most moved by the Beautiful.
The Sacred Scriptures speak much of the Glory of God. And Glory is not just a five-letter word. It is an encounter will brilliance and splendor that blows your mind.
“Encounter with”. Typo.
Stop making sense! Teehee
It's a Mormon ring ... the letters are CTR -- and stand for "Choose the Right" -- a Mormon hymn title.
It's become a sort of "abstinence" ring for Mormons...but goes beyond that.
The writer of that Lds hymn has written a lot of Lds' most popular Sunday School hymns...so it became an obvious choice in the Mormon parental generation to pass on a message to the next generation.
Looks like the Mormons won’t be advertising that Benji Schwimmer is a Mormon anymore.
Yes, but you have to consider how the worshippers looked upon it. Naive worshippers would treat the thing as a god or a manifestation of a god. ; educated persons took a more abstract view.
After Vatican II, the iconoclasts came out in full force. So we got flat prose, childish music and bad modern art. Revolutionaries tend to be puritans. The New England Fathers frowned on poetry, except the psalms, and banished chant for cacaphony. Virginians who traveled north remarked on the singing in congregational churches where everyone sang the words as they pleased as that was not pleasing to the musical ear.
Thanks - I sometimes wear a cross or even a T-shirt with religious symbolism. It sounds like you have your head on straight and understand the intent of my earlier post- I don’t think there’s anything wrong with symbols, but they are not holy in themselves. Burn a Bible and you wasted a good book - the book is not holy in and of itself, it is the Word that it carries that is holy and that does not get destroyed or even lessened if an individual book is destroyed.
When a person promises damnation, I take it for what it’s worth. I don’t support the Mormon religion any more than I support any religion. ALL religions have been formed by men and many have rites/rituals/requirements that are either not in the Bible, or may be mentioned in the Bible but have been twisted to suit men. Christianity is a movement/state of being, not a religion.
You misinterpreted my meaning and the reason for my questions. I find nothing wrong with symbolism and use it myself. I find it wrong or amiss when the symbol becomes as holy as what it symbolizes.
And there you have it.
All these years I really thought Christianity was about Jesus Christ and here is “just a movement and/or state of mind”.
Wink, wink...
It appears like they've reached their goal!
I spotted the above in a Wal-Mart® parking lot in Tooele, Utah a couple of years ago...
Look at it a while and you'll see the 'R' changes to a 'P'.
Choose the Prophet
In conclusion let us summarize this grand key, these “Fourteen Fundamentals in Following the Prophet”, for our salvation depends on them.
1. The prophet is the only man who speaks for the Lord in everything.
2. The living prophet is more vital to us than the standard works.
3. The living prophet is more important to us than a dead prophet.
4. The prophet will never lead the church astray.
5. The prophet is not required to have any particular earthly training or credentials to speak on any subject or act on any matter at any time.
6. The prophet does not have to say “Thus Saith the Lord,” to give us scripture.
7. The prophet tells us what we need to know, not always what we want to know.
8. The prophet is not limited by men’s reasoning.
9. The prophet can receive revelation on any matter, temporal or spiritual.
10. The prophet may advise on civic matters.
11. The two groups who have the greatest difficulty in following the prophet are the proud who are learned and the proud who are rich.
12. The prophet will not necessarily be popular with the world or the worldly.
13. The prophet and his counselors make up the First Presidency—the highest quorum in the Church.
14. The prophet and the presidency—the living prophet and the First Presidency—follow them and be blessed—reject them and suffer.
I testify that these fourteen fundamentals in following the living prophet are true. If we want to know how well we stand with the Lord then let us ask ourselves how well we stand with His mortal captain—how close do our lives harmonize with the Lord’s anointed—the living Prophet—President of the Church, and with the Quorum of the First Presidency.
Ezra Taft Benson
(Address given Tuesday, February 26, 1980 at Brigham Young University) http://www.lds.org/liahona/1981/06/fourteen-fundamentals-in-following-the-prophet?lang=eng
Can I do it cheerfully?
And my wife asks the silly question:
“Where do you want to go on vacation THIS time?”
SURE they will!
Mormonism is OPEN to HOMO’s, just as long as they pay their tithe.
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