Arkansas court rules Mormonism is not Protestantism
The Arkansas Court of Appeals recently handed down an unusual ruling in which a man was held in contempt for involving his children in the LDS Church. Actually, it’s not as dramatic as it sounds. When Joel and Lisa Rownak divorced in 2005 they agreed that their two children would be raised “in the Protestant faith.” Since this agreement was entered as part of the divorce decree, it was enforceable by the court. Subsequent to their divorce, Joel Rownak converted to Mormonism and involved his two sons in his new faith, including baptizing one of the boys. Rownak made several free speech arguments, but the Arkansas court still found in contempt of the decree. The court relied heavily on the fact that Rownak himself had asked for the language to be placed in the divorce decree.
The interesting part of this case, as it relates to the Mormon Church, is the court’s discussion of whether the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was a Protestant church. The court noted:
Based upon testimony by appellant’s wife, a statement by the president of LDS that was publicized on the church’s website, and testimony by appellant, the court found the LDS church not to be a Protestant faith and found that appellant had promoted the LDS faith to his sons.
Ark. App. CA08-193 p. 4. The question of whether Mormons are Protestants is mildly interesting, but it’s fairly clear cut. The Arkansas court didn’t seem to have much trouble coming to its conclusion. It would be more interesting if the divorce decree had required the children to be brought up “in the Christian faith.” Then you would have a U.S. court attempting to determine an issue about which there is significant disagreement among various denominations. What sources would a court consult in determining whether Mormonism is part of Christianity? Would a court consult the LDS.org website, like the Arkansas court did on the Protestant issue? Or would the court instead rely on other religious authority outside of the LDS Church? And is even proper for a court to determine such controversial issues?
As much as I’d like to see the outcome of such a case, it probably isn’t the sort of dispute that a court should resolve. In the Arkansas case there really wasn’t much of a dispute over whether Mormonism was Protestantism. But it still raises some significant constitutional questions. On this topic UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh opined:
I think there are substantial limits on the enforceability of such contracts. The church property cases held that courts generally can’t make theological decisions, such as which claimant’s views are closer to orthodox (with a small “o”) Presbyterianism; and I think the logic extends also to the interpretation of contracts, wills, and trusts that call for such decisions. Nor can courts avoid this constitutional barrier by trying to figure out what the majority of members of a religion thinks (hard to do reliably, plus it assumes the conclusion of who constitutes “members of a religion,” and it privileges majority denominations within a religious group over minority denominations). And courts usually can’t avoid the constitutional barrier, I think, by asking what the parties intended the term to mean — the best test of a word’s intent is usually the word itself, and that is the very thing that calls for theological decisionmaking.
The Arkansas Court of Appeals’ decision is available here.
Here is the English version of an article on science and Mormonism that I published awhile ago in my blog “Interlingua multilingue”:
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Science and the Mormons
The Mormons are a religious sect that emerged from Christianity in the United States in the Nineteenth Century. They added to the Bible their own scripture, the Book of Mormon, translated by Joseph Smith from an original text in a language he called Reformed Egyptian. According to the mythology of the Mormons, in 1827 the angel Moroni gave Smith these texts, which were engraved on golden tables. Smith could understand them without learning their language through the divine magic of two special lenses that he used to read them while he translated them.
Smith and his followers were persecuted by traditional Christians, who forced them to travel slowly and with great sacrifices until they reached what is now Utah, where their descendants dominate the religious and social life of this American state.
According to the Mormons, the Indians of the Americas came from Egypt more than 2,000 (two thousand) years ago. They used this myth to convert many Indians to their religion. “We were taught that all the blessings of our Hebrew ancestors made us a special people,” said Jose a Loyaza, a lawyer in Salt Lake City, the capital of Utah. “And this identity gave us a sense of transcendental affiliation, a special identity with God.” But Loyaza gradually learned that there was another outrageous irony to his faith.
He rejected his religion after learning that evidence provided by comparative DNA studies between American Indians and Asians conclusively proved that the first humans that migrated to the Americas came not from the Middle East but from Asia.
For the Mormons this genetic confirmation of the origin of the Indians in the Americas is a fundamental collision of science against religion. It is in direct conflict with the Book of Mormon, which, according to their religion, is a completely error-free historical work that must be interpreted literally.
The Book of Mormon is also fundamentally racist. It narrates that a tribe of Hebrews from Jeruselem went to the Americas in 600 B.C. and split up into two groups, the Nephites and the Lamanites. The Nephites carried the “true” religion to the new world and were in constant conflict with the Lamanites, who practiced idolatry. The Nephites were white (in 1980 the Mormons changed the word to “pure”), and the Lamanites received from God “The curse of blackness.”
The Book of Mormon also narrates that in 385 A.D. the Lamanites exterminated all the other Hebrews and became the principal ancestors of the American Indians. But the Mormons insist that if the Lamanites returned to the “true” religion (Mormonism, quite naturally), their skin would eventually become white like the skin of the Nephites that their ancestors had exterminated.
But despite these outrageous racist insults, many Indians and Polynesians (who also, according to the Mormons, are the descendants of the Lamanites) converted to Mormonism instead of telling the Mormons to go fuck themselves. (Through some perverse mechanism in human psychology, these converts are like homosexual priests who support the Roman catholic church or other gay people who support any type of Christianity.)
“The fiction that I was a Lamanite,” said Damon Kali, a lawyer in Sunnyvale, California, whose ancestors came from Polynesian islands, “was the principal reason that I converted to Mormonism.” He had been a missionary for the Mormans before he discovered that genetic evidence proved that the Lamanites were only a religious myth, and he could not continue his efforts to convert others to Mormonism.
Officially the Mormon church insists that nothing in the Book of Mormon is incompatible with the genetic evidence. Some Mormons are now saying that the Levites were a small group of Hebrews that went to Central America and after many generations of marrying with the natives they met, their Hebrew DNA disappeared into the DNA of their neighbors.
In 2002, officers of the church started a trial to excommunicate Thomas W. Murphy, a professor of anthropology at Edmonds Community College in Washington, an American state at the extreme northwest of the continental United States.
His trial attracted a lot of attention in the American public communications media, which ridiculed the church and insisted that Murphy was the Galileo of Mormonism. The general contempt provoked by this publicity seriously embarrassed the officers of the church, and they stopped the trial.