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Mormons Don't Want to be Mormons Anymore

by clare goldsberry

Yep, you hear correctly. After 150 years of selling their religion as distinct, separate and exclusive, they now want to be mainstream Christians. Heaven forbid!!

A P.R. blitz of recent news articles revealed that Mormons are fed up with being... well, Mormons! They want the “M” word to fade into history like polygamy. An article in the Arizona Republic on Sunday, Feb. 18, quoted Dale Bills, a church spokesman in Salt Lake City, saying that Mormons “want to be known as followers of and believers in the savior Jesus Christ.” He claims that mainstream Christianity hasn’t understood this.

Now, instead of being referred to Mormons or “LDS,” they want to be called The Church of Jesus Christ—with an emphasis on “Jesus Chris,” to prove to the world that they are Christian. So, I guess now instead of calling them Mormons, we’ll have to call them “persons of the Church of Jesus Christ.” (They still don’t want to be referred to as Christians!)

It seems that the Mormon Church is facing a huge identity crisis. It’s a fitting situation for a group of people whose adherents generally suffer from various degrees of schizophrenia. For over a century, Mormons didn’t want to fit into mainstream Protestantism. They insisted on a position that placed them outside the norm, separate in doctrine and dogma, and distinct in religious history as the ONLY TRUE church of Jesus Christ on the planet. It appears that this formula has worked quite as well as Mormons, on paper at least, have outpaced mainstream Protestantism in terms of increasing their membership. Now they want to be like the mainstream Protestants.

To this end, they no longer advertise the Book of Mormon on TV. Instead, viewers are urged to call and get a free copy of the Bible. This switch in advertising tactics happened about the same time that a DNA study out of BYU showed that Native Americans actually did come from peoples of the Northern Asia, probably across the Bering Sea land bridge, as anthropologists have suggested for decades. So much for the “Submarine from Jerusalem” theory! (Quietly, church leaders have been told not to push that story openly anymore).

Another change has been in the Temple ceremonies. The blood oaths have been removed, along with an insulting reference to Protestant ministers as servants of Satan. Church leaders cited the fact that these things were offensive to new converts from mainstream Christianity. Duh! The first time I saw that movie, I knew it wasn’t produced by Cecil B. DeMille! If I could have walked out of that theater . . .!

What’s next in their attempt to be seen as “Christians?” Well, I predict that soon they will get rid of their magic underware. After all, if people see the outline of those “garments,” they will for sure know that these people are “Mormons,” not Christians.

I also predict that the Mormon Tabernacle Choir (they claim that name will stick!) will begin singing music from the “Old Time Gospel Hour.” Hymns such as “Give Me That Old Time Religion” and “Old Rugged Cross” ought to be enough to convince all the mainstream Christians that Mormons aren’t really.

But, I think the thing that will clinch the deal will be the day Church leaders replace the angel Moroni with a gold cross on the SLC Temple spire. That’s sure to convince the Christian world that Mormons have finally come into the mainstream, and the “M” word will fade into history, just like polygamy. I for one, don’t think the Mormons should mess with success. Besides, they’ll soon become so mainstream that they won’t be fun anymore. Utah might become as normal as ... God forbid!... California!