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Why I care about being recognized as Christian

Why I care about being recognized as Christian

Last updated on: October 2, 2025 at 5:48 pm by Dan Peterson

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Why I care about being recognized as Christian 2025-10-02T17:48:26-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Modern-day Abydos with its enormously important ancient temple, in a Wikimedia Commons image by — who else? — “Abydos Fahd”

Today, Thursday, is the Interpreter Foundation’s traditional day for sharing materials online that have previously been published in print as book chapters. Here is the latest: Seek Ye Words of Wisdom: “The Reach, the Handclasp, and the Embrace: Gestures of the Gods in the Ancient Egyptian Abydos Formula,” written by David Calabro

Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article originally appeared in Seek Ye Words of Wisdom: Studies of the Book of Mormon, Bible, and Temple in Honor of Stephen D. Ricks, edited by Donald W. Parry, Gaye Strathearn, and Shon D. Hopkin. For more information, go to https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/seek-ye-words-of-wisdom/.

“Egyptian stelae from the First Intermediate period to the Middle Kingdom sometimes feature a set of wishes for the afterlife that include, among other things, instances of hand gestures. . . . The specific wishes vary considerably from one stela to the next, reaching a standardized form only in the Twelfth Dynasty (around the reign of Senusret I, ca. 1950 BC), although they are fairly consistent in theme throughout the duration of their use. Despite the variation, modern scholarship typically refers to these wishes for the afterlife as the ‘Abydos Formula.’”

President Russell M. Nelson, M.D., Ph.D. (LDS Media Library)

For two very obvious reasons, it has been difficult this week to keep up with even a representative sample of the important stories and news items related to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Here, for example, are a few links occasioned by the passing of the leader of the Church:

“Coworker at LDS Hospital remembers day President Russell M. Nelson was called as an apostle”
“Utah students dress in Sunday best to honor President Nelson and Michigan shooting victims”
“Perspective: When I had lost all faith, President Nelson reached me with his words: I was in a ‘crisis of faith’ when Russell M. Nelson became prophet, and I didn’t have a favorable opinion of him. He surprised me in every way imaginable.”
“Read Global Tributes to President Nelson”
“What Really Happened Before Pres. Nelson Announced Temples | Elder Larry Y. Wilson” If you have the time, I think that you’ll find this 44-minute interview with an emeritus General Authority Seventy quite interesting. It offers an insider’s view of President Nelson and Church leadership.

A cloud, with sunlight. A soothing image for a still-difficult subject. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)

And, of course, there was that horrific assault on a stake center in Grand Blanc, Michigan. Here are some recent stories resulting from it:

Church Newsroom: “Elder Bednar Brings the Love of Jesus Christ to Grand Blanc, Michigan: The Apostle ministers to survivors and thanks local and federal law enforcement”
NPR: “After Sunday’s attack, Latter-day Saints in Michigan turn to Scripture and community” The stories from actual local members of the Church that come in the latter part of the recording program are well worth hearing.
The Conversation: “The Michigan church shooting sits within a long history of hatred against Mormons in America.” “The bipartisan nature of anti-Mormonism arguably makes it one of the more socially acceptable biases in the US.”
Deseret News: “An ER doctor ran into a burning Grand Blanc church again and again: What we know about those killed and injured during the attack on the Latter-day Saint congregation in Michigan”

I’ve already called attention here to fundraisers for the widow and the now-fatherless son of the Michigan mass murderer and for the seriously injured Greg Mikat. The former has quite understandably attracted considerable attention from the news media, including the following:

New York Times: “Why One Man Raised $200,000 for Man Who Attacked His Church”
Deseret News: “Online fundraising after Sunday’s shooting includes donations for the family of Thomas Sanford: After noticing no money was being raised for the grieving family of the Michigan shooter, David Butler decided to get the ball rolling.”

Responding to the story, an online personality named Richard Hanania posted that “You don’t deserve Mormons, America.” Quite flattering, that. May we live up to it!

“Soleil couchant sur le Vercors”. (Wikimedia Commons © Guillaume Piolle / CC BY 3.0)

But what about the other victims of the assault in Grand Blanc? I’m grateful to the good folks at Meridian Magazine for putting this list together: “GoFundMe Accounts for Michigan Shooting Victims.” I hope that we can step up to help, as befits Latter-day Saints.

I know the people who were there in that chapel. That is to say, I already knew much about them even without knowing their names or seeing their faces or having met them. They could be my own Latter-day Saint neighbors and fellow ward-members. Had I been in Grand Blanc last Sunday, I probably would have been there in that chapel with them, partaking of the sacrament. We are Grand Blanc. Grand Blanc is us.

Thou shalt live together in love, insomuch that thou shalt weep for the loss of them that die, and more especially for those that have not hope of a glorious resurrection. And it shall come to pass that those that die in me shall not taste of death, for it shall be sweet unto them. (Doctrine and Covenants 42:45-46)

Kinda makes ya feel tingly all over, don’t it? It feels great to be loved.

There have been many expressions of sympathy for Latter-day Saints after the savagery in Michigan, but there has also been a notable profusion of criticisms of the Saints and their faith. So I very much appreciate this important article from the Evangelical pastor Kyle Beshears: “‘Weep With Those Who Weep’: A Plea for Evangelical Compassion in the Wake of Violence Against Latter-day Saints”

It’s good to see an Evangelical leader who is willing to stand against extremist anti-Mormon rhetoric from his theological “side.” More people need to take such stands, and not only in connection with my particular faith: “Megyn Kelly is wrong: Neutrality on right-wing antisemitism is immoral: The podcaster and the late Charlie Kirk were wrong to refuse to cut ties with Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. This failure is poisoning American conservatism.”

I’ve always liked this cover.

Finally, I call attention to this piece from the Deseret News and then offer some of my own thoughts on the topic: “Perspective: It’s OK to be peculiar as a people: Should we really care if some mainstream Christians don’t claim us as Latter-day Saints?”

Some Latter-day Saints have, I think, been disturbed by the criticisms and rejections that they’ve seen online since Sunday’s attack. They’ve been shocked. I haven’t been, though, because I’ve been monitoring such things for decades now. I’m not at all surprised.

Some, however, writing about it, have wondered why we even care about being accepted as Christians. Why should we crave approval from Evangelicals?

I think that I can truthfully say that I don’t seek any kind of certification from conservative Protestants, and I’m certainly not interested in watering down our doctrines or erasing our distinctive culture or backing away from our historical claims in order to gain their approval.

And yet I do care very much about being recognized as Christian. (I care enough that I wrote a book that is largely dedicated to that matter.) Permit me to explain why. (First, though, I want to point out that Professor Barry Bickmore, of Brigham Young University, posted a Facebook entry on 29 September that parallels my thoughts on this topic very closely.)

Many years ago, a fellow Latter-day Saint graduate student and I decided to drop by an Ex-Mormons for Jesus “visitors center” — yes, in the heyday of the God Makers film such a thing actually existed — in Whittier, California. While there, we had a conversation with the Evangelical Protestant lady who ran it.

Among other things, she informed us that we were not Christians. So I asked her whether Catholics were Christians. “I don’t have a mission to Catholics,” she replied. Okay, I said. But are Catholics Christians? “My mission is to Mormons,” she answered. After a surprisingly prolonged and repeated back and forth, though, she grudgingly admitted that Catholics were not Christians.

I thought that highly instructive. In ordinary usage, for most people and certainly historically, the question of whether someone is or isn’t a Christian has been a simple factual one. “No,” one might respond. “He’s Jewish.” (Or “She’s a Buddhist” or “He’s a Hindu.”) It’s not a controversial matter, and the person (or movement) in question wouldn’t challenge the description. (I do remember a weird exchange with another Evangelical lady down in Southern California who faulted me for hypocrisy: I wanted to be called a Christian, but then I turned right around and denied the right of Muslims to claim the title!) When a patient’s religious affiliation is printed on her hospital wristband, a panel of historians and theologians needn’t be convened to approve the designation.

Soon after my visit with the Ex-Mormons for Jesus lady, EMFJ ran an ad in the local Whittier newspaper. “Mormons are not Christians!” it announced.

I expect that many of those seeing that ad might have been surprised by it. “Hmmm,” they might say. “I didn’t know that. I always thought they were.” They would imagine that they were being handed a previously unknown fact. “Mormons,” to their surprise, were to be grouped not with Catholics and Protestants but, rather, with Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Muslims, and Jews. But their reaction would be very different if they were to understand that those expelling Latter-day Saints from Christendom would also, if they were candid, thrust the Catholics from the Christian fold. Very few people, I think, would knowingly accept a definition of the word Christian that excludes the largest single Christian denomination — currently and historically — from the fold.

But the specious definition being used by EMFJ and similar organizations is seldom if ever really explained or defended. So the banishing of Latter-day Saints from Christianity is announced as resting upon “just the facts.” And, accordingly, people who love and believe in Jesus Christ and who would never abandon him to become Jews or Buddhists are pre-programmed, on the basis of a deeply misleading claim, to reject the message of the Restoration.

Many years ago, I presented the first incarnation of the argument that became the book at the annual Sunstone Symposium. The respondent to my paper was Rev. Dr. Jeff Silliman, who was, at the time, the pastor of Mount Olympus Presbyterian Church in Salt Lake City. He admitted that I had made a sound case for the inclusion of Latter-day Saints within the historical semantic range of the term Christian, but insisted that we were, nonetheless, heretics. “Somehow, though,” he said, “I get the impression that Professor Peterson would be quite comfortable with that.”

And he was right. The term heretic plainly implies a judgment that has been reached from a particular point of view, rather than an objective and universally acknowledged “fact.” Martin Luther was a heretic from the perspective of the contemporary papacy, but he isn’t a heretic from the standpoint of Lutheranism.

Yes, I’m more or less fine with being labeled a Christian heretic. The distance between my faith and mainstream Christianity is precisely as great as that between mainstream Christianity and my faith. Other Christians think that I’m wrong on many issues; I think they’re wrong. But I do insist that my co-believers and I are Christians. Not to insist on that would make me complicit in a lie.

A poster for “Something Rotten” (fair use, I hope)

I am a self-confessed serial eater, a notorious repeat offender. (Unlike my critics, I can’t go for weeks, let alone permanently, without food.) And I relapsed yet again last night: My wife and I went out to dinner with a neighbor couple at Los 2 Compadres in Pleasant Grove — excellent chips and salsa, really good refried beans — and then on to the nearby Ruth and Nathan Hale Theater for a performance of the often-hilarious music comedy Something Rotten. The play’s run at “The Ruth” is coming to a close this week, and there are probably few if any tickets available for it. But it’s well worth an evening. It’s set in the 90s. The 1590s. Will Shakespeare is a major character in it, modeled on Elvis. So are Shylock and Nostradamus.

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