religion or cult

Robert Jeffress, a Baptist evangelical, caused a bit of a stir at the recent Values Summit (to which only Christian protestants were invited—presumably because only they have values worth summit-ing about) when he declared the Mormon religion a “cult.” 

When I read about that I was mildly amused and a good deal more than mildly irritated. 

What amused me is that Jeffress’ statement was a practically paradigmatic example of the pot calling the kettle black. Almost no matter which definition of the word “cult” you choose, all religions are one.

I went to the Oxford English Dictionary and found that the first definition (preferred and most generally applicable) is “a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.” Can anyone say Baptist?  Catholic?  Jew?  Muslim?  Duh.

The second definition, probably preferred by Jeffress, is “a relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as sinister.” Sort of the way Baptists view Catholics?  The way Catholics view Jews?  The way Jews view Muslims?  By this definition, a cult is whatever religion you aren’t. 

But what about the third definition?  Maybe it’s where Jeffress was coming from.  The OED’s third definition is “a misplaced or excessive admiration for a particular person or thing.” So, Mormonism is a cult because its members have excessive admiration for Joseph Smith.  Got it.  But what about Baptists with Christ?  Ah, not the same Jeffress would no doubt say.  Smith is just a man who called himself a prophet, someone delivering the word of God; Christ is God. Really? Then why did he say was delivering the word of God?  Why didn’t he say he was delivering the word of himself? 

The point is, every religion (at least every Western religion) has been brought to us by a man.  Which goes back to my original point:  all religions are cults.  That isn’t meant to demean religion, it is simply to point out the obvious—all religions demand of their followers that they “venerate a particular figure or object” and therefore all religions are cults.

That, of course, wasn’t really Jeffress’ point or his concern.  He knew he was preaching to a room full of preachers and that referring to any cult that wasn’t their cult as a cult would be immediately understood as a way of damning that cult.  In fact, he went on to make his real point, which was that  “those of us who are born again followers of Christ should always prefer a competent Christian to a competent non-Christian like Mitt Romney.”  Here's where my irritation arises.

That Jeffress made that pronouncement in his introduction of Rick Perry to the congregations—oops, convention—is reason enough to question his intelligence (Perry is certainly Christian, but I can’t imagine a definition of “competent” that would apply to him), but that somewhat begs the larger question his statement raises.

At least the way I read the situation, Chirst didn’t tell his followers to worship him.  He told them to worship God.  Joseph Smith doesn’t entreat Mormons to worship him, but to worship God, more or less (see below) the same God Christ was talking about.  The difference between a Baptist and a Mormon isn’t the God they worship, it’s whose direction they follow in doing so.  If the savior is God, what difference does it make whose prayer book one uses to worship him?

What buggers people like Jeffress about Mormons is that Smith presumed to suggest that God’s angel had told him that Christianity had gone astray and that further “scriptures” were needed to correct what had gone wrong.  Those turned out to be largely the Book of Mormon.  To evangelicals like Jeffress, the Christian bible contains the whole of God’s revealed Word, and God stopped talking whenever the Roman church decided which gospels were actually true.  (That it took the church 3 centuries after Christ to do that doesn’t seem to bother anyone.)

Christians also don’t like the idea that, in the Book of Mormon, God the Father and God the Son are treated as actual flesh-and-blood beings, even though that beggars logic far less than the notion of an incorporeal being that can’t be experienced except through the life of a very corporal being who was also God.

I write this not to diminish the value of  religion or the authenticity of faith.  Marx referred to religion as the “opiate of the people,” and most all religions tend to hold that statement in great contempt. But if you stop and think about it, Marx had a point, and it's not even--necessarily--an irreligious point.  Religion and opium are alike in that they both dull our cognitive faculty and allow us to move through life becoming inordinately blissed by its pleasures, and largely ignoring its unpleasant realities.  In the sense that both make life easier for us to live, they aren’t all that bad.

Where religion, like drugs, becomes problematic is when it becomes extreme—when my cult looks wrathfully on all other cults, even to the extent of attempting to exterminate them.  If Jeffress finds his fundamentalist Christiantiy comforting, fine—he should luxuriate in it.  What he should not do is condemn Mitt Romney (or anyone else) for finding comfort in a different cult, and what he especially should not do is suggest that Romney’s belief in his cult disqualifies him for an occupation that, by definition, both transcends all cults and encompasses them.