Introduction
The great German literary demigod Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once remarked: “There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.” My reading of Bethany Blankley’s recent Huffington Post article has confirmed Goethe’s fear as being my own. In the doleful cacophony that sounds forth from the ranks of fundamentalist Evangelical critics of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Ms. Blankley is more than suitable at playing first-chair violin. She is an adept Konzertmeisterin who plays with a zealous gusto that is by no means forced into a decrescendo by facts or evidence.
The accusation that Latter-day Saints are not Christians is not new, and it is not it likely to go away anytime soon. So long as fundamentalist Evangelicals dominate the religious landscape of modern America, the benighted Mormons can anticipate this Hydra to rear its ugly heads incessantly. All of the efforts of the Latter-day Saints to quell this tired assertion will almost certainly be in vain, as misinformation, misrepresentation and outright calumny continue to capture the imagination of an ignorant public with scandalous tales of the moral and theological debauchery and baseness of the Mormons. [Read more…] about Bethany Blankley and the “Mormon Question”
