Part of it is the “no PR is bad PR” factor, but I think we can’t ignore the content of the play. In reading interviews of Trey Parker and Matt Stone and in the clips I’ve seen of their Southpark episodes that featured Mormons or references to Mormonism, I don’t believe their intentions are malicious. I think they find Mormons curious, humorous, and perhaps odd, but in making fun of Mormons they always seem to work in a common message, which is “Yeah, they’re kind of crazy, but they’re also nice and mostly harmless.” In a way, this message might open doors that would otherwise be closed–it’s hard to be afraid of what you laugh at. And while some might make the case that it’s also hard to take seriously what you laugh at, I don’t worry much about this. Superficial humor and levity can more easily be overcome by missionaries than fear.

My favorite commentary so far on the Book of Mormon play comes from Richard Bushman, who also hasn’t seen it, but responds to questions about the doctrines and practices of the Mormon faith referenced in the play. If his opinion isn’t quite what other Mormons might hold, it’s the opinion I hold and that which I would hope most other Mormons would hold as well.

In my family, we put up the Christmas tree, gave each other presents, had hot cocoa, went out caroling, generally attended a Christmas party at our church, etc. Of course in Southern California there was no snow, so no sledding or anything like that. If you’ve ever watched A Christmas Story, then yeah, that’s pretty much what Christmas was like for me growing up, except my mom never cooked a turkey at Christmas, only on Thanksgiving.

Now that I have children of my own, we’re starting our own Christmas traditions, which are likewise pretty simple, although my wife and I are making efforts to make Christmas very much Christ-centered. When I was a kid I always knew that Christmas was to celebrate the birth of Christ, and yeah, I was that kid who knew Santa wasn’t real and ruined every other kids’ dreams.

The other night our family went to see a live nativity scene at a local Mormon church. It was outside and they had all sorts of animals and people dressed up. They even had two live camels, although my daughter seemed to like the baby goats the most. After waiting outside in the cold for an hour and a half, we finally made it into a building they had made look like a marketplace or street in ancient Bethlehem on the inside (they really did a good job of it, too), and we walked in between buildings and actors until we rounded a corner and they had soft music playing and a mother and father with a live baby in a manger. I wasn’t expecting anything but I got really emotional. It was such a peaceful scene, and as I imagined what it would have been like to have been able to see our Savior right after he was born the Spirit or something worked on me and I couldn’t keep the tears back. Even our 2 1/2 year old daughter got really reverent, and after we left she kept wanting to go back and see “baby Jesus”.

I’m thankful to be able to celebrate Jesus Christ’s birth, life, and atoning sacrifice at this time of year. I’m grateful for the love our Father in Heaven and his son Jesus Christ have for all of us. I know that Jesus Christ was born of Mary and was the literal Son of God. I know that Christ is my Savior, and that only through him can we be forgiven of our sins and return to live with our Heavenly Father. This is my testimony, my witness, that I leave with you in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

You and I were both born into the church to LDS families. If Mormonism is the one true church, wow…..we really hit the jackpot. Extremely lucky, right? Out of the billions and billions of humans that have come and gone over the last 50,000 years, and the tens of thousands of organized religions, not to mention the other tribal/pagan/animist beliefs, we were so unimaginably fortunate to have been born into the Creator of the Universe’s own special organization on earth.

We could have been born into any other circumstance where we were taught to believe in the existence of various deities. We could have grown up in Northern Europe a thousand years ago believing in Odin or many thousands of years ago in Egypt believing in Min. After being taught those beliefs by our parents and surrounding culture, wouldn’t we have been believers? I think so.

So, what is more likely? That you and I were unimaginably lucky, or that everyone else feels the same way about the faith of their family/culture?

I’ve thought about this quite a bit, and I don’t think I have any definitive answers I can point to, but I do have a few personal opinions. But to answer the question that I made the title of the post, I don’t know. That is, if I had been born a Muslim, would I be as faithful to the Muslim faith as I am to the Mormon faith? What if I had been born a Catholic? I really don’t know how to answer that question for myself, but if we were to look at broader statistical data, I’d be willing to bet that many, if not most, people remain faithful to the religion into which they were born. However, there are obviously a lot of people who change from the religion into which they were born, and most people who are Mormon today weren’t born into Mormon families, so who knows.

Now, to say the chances of someone being born into a Mormon family are small is true, if you believe you’re born wherever you are strictly by chance. But even if we follow that line of thinking, the fact remains that somebody has to be born into Mormon families. The chance of it being you or me, specifically, may be small, but the chance of it being someone is pretty close to 100%.

But I don’t believe we’re born into our families by chance. I think it’s all well-planned out and we’re born exactly when and where God wants us to be born.

Onto that last question, of course I can’t say whether everyone feels the same way about their faith as I do, because I’ve spoken to precious few people of other faiths on such a level as to be able to make any such judgment, but based on that small sampling I’m inclined to extrapolate, perhaps in error, and say that no, they don’t think the same way I do about their religion. However, I’d extend that to many other Mormons, not just members of other faiths. Hopefully that doesn’t come across and terribly arrogant and superior, because I don’t mean it that way, I just think it’s a fact that some people think, question, and reason more than other people do, and if I think more deeply about things than somebody else then there’s someone else that thinks more deeply about things than I do. I believe that most people, of all religions, don’t think very deeply about life, the universe, and everything. I think most people are occupied with day to day tasks like working, eating, and sleeping, and “being a good person” and relatively few of us wax philosophical.

But that doesn’t really answer the question, I suppose. I suppose the question is whether or not I think there could be someone who feels about their religion just as I do about mine. My answer to that is “no”, but with some caveats. Perhaps I can best express my thoughts by responding to one of your follow up questions:

By what criteria do you discount the truth claims of the other 10,000 organized religions in the world?

I don’t discount other religions, per se. I think every religion has some measure of truth, some more, and some less, and I don’t believe that membership in any particular religion during this life guarantees or disqualifies one for all the blessings of exaltation. I’m inclined to believe that Islam is a true religion that was founded by God. According to Islam, their religion was given to Mohammad by the angel Gabriel, and I don’t see any reason why that couldn’t be true. Whether what is practiced today in Islam is exactly what Gabriel taught Mohammad is another question, but I have no reason to question the roots of the religion as coming from God. Likewise I believe most other religions sprang up as the result of communication with God or his messengers or through what you could call “inspiration”. These religions have blessed the lives of billions of people. I think it’s quite interesting to think about how things would be different for the people of the Middle East and surrounding areas if Islam had never been founded. There are many, due to Islamic terrorism, who think we’d all be better off if Islam had never existed, but I think that’s rather short-sighted because we don’t know what would have existed in its place. I think there’s a good chance the world would be much, much worse off today if Islam had never existed, and I think it would certainly be worse for the people of the Middle East. I think Islam was established by God to serve his own purposes, which in the short-term are quite different than the purposes for which he established the Mormon faith, although in the long-term they are the same, which is to bring his children closer to him in terms of their thoughts and deeds.

But if another religion says “We’re the only true religion and all others are false and impostors” well, yes, I disagree with that. I think there are many “true” religions in that they teach primarily true principles and serve the function of bringing people closer to God, but what sets the LDS Church apart is that it’s the only church with the Priesthood, or God’s authority to act in his name. No other baptism is valid, no other sacrament is valid, and there is no other church I know of that even claims to be able to perform marriages that last beyond this life.

I think the natural follow-up question to this is “If the LDS Church is the only true church, why didn’t God make it to be the church with a billion members instead of Islam?” At least part of the answer is that it doesn’t matter, in the long-term scheme of things. God’s purpose is to help his children become like him. His children don’t all have to be members of his church in this life for that to happen. But it is important that his church exist during the history of this world in order for that to happen. It does exist and will continue to exist, and so everything will work out for everyone, regardless of what religion they belong to, as long as they are developing those characteristics that make them more like God.

One more opinion of mine–I am of the opinion that somebody else can receive revelation from God that they are supposed to join another religion. That is, I think someone could pray and feel that they are supposed to join the Baptist church, or the Lutherans, or Islam, or Buddhism, etc. I don’t believe this would happen if they were comparing those religions to Mormonism and trying to decide between the two, but I think someone, in isolation from Mormonism, could receive revelation telling them to join another religion. I think this could happen because I think God will “take whatever he can get”, and if someone is going to come closer to him by joining a religion as opposed to not joining it, then he would want them to join it. “Damned” is just another word for “stopped”, and we’re only stopped in our progress, or damned, when we reject truth. As long as joining another religion is an improvement upon the prior condition of the individual, why would it be a bad thing?

The specific page I came across is entitled A Response to Glenn Beck’s Mormon Conversion Story. It’s apparently written by one “bob mccue” who seems to think of himself as being a logical, rational, and intelligent human being. His post is in response to a video on YouTube of Glenn Beck’s conversion to Mormonism. McCue starts out by saying ” If you don’t want to read an analytical response to Beck’s sincere, uninformed, deceptive pap, stop reading here.” and yet what follows is hardly analytical. But since he’s gone so far as to analyze Beck and Mormonism, I thought I’d do the same to his analysis. Here is my analysis of his analysis, with his statements in italics:

Every religious organization is populated by sincere people who have important social needs met by the organization, and who confuse the strong feelings that come from that experience with a divine encounter that justifies belief that their organization has “the truth”. So, you find one of those people who perceives the institution to be particularly important for him (“Without Mormonism, I would be a drunk with no family and no job”, says Beck), get him to tell his story using the usual, formulaic salvation narrative – “Things were going really bad in my life; then I fell into a crisis of some kind; then I found [insert name of religion]; then I had a powerful emotion experience [insert tears]; then some really great things started to happen in my life that are a sign from God; and now things are wonderful for me and my family”, and you have poster boy that is highly useful for marketing purposes. The more high profile the individual, the better this works.

McCue’s analysis begins off with the above paragraph, in which he effectively claims that because some religious people falsely confuse strong feelings with a divine experience, that means there is no such thing as a divine experience. By the same logic if sometimes I’m sitting in my car at a stop light and it feels as though the car is moving when it really isn’t, this means my car never moves, and any sense I have of my car moving, even when everything outside the car appears to be passing by me, is merely an illusion I’ve created to make myself feel better.

A large part of LDS inspiration these days comes from a marketing firm named Edelman on Madison Avenue in NYC. Seriously. The Mormons are trying to catch up with the Evangelicals who for years have been using relatively sophisticated marketing tools, and largely as a result far outperform the Mormons in terms of conversions. Richard Bushman explained, in part, how this works to a crowd of well heeled Mormons at a dinner in Calgary recently. He did not name Edelman, but laid out the LDS marketing strategy in some detail. I know from other sources that this information is provided to LDS leaders, at high cost using tithing money of course, by Edelman. A Mormon who was at the Busman meeting summarized it for me. With typically naïve Mormon hubris, he was thrilled that his church was getting more sophisticated in terms of marketing and communications. That is prophetic inspiration for you. Call the gurus on Madison Avenue when you need to find out what to do. God must be leading each and every major business in North America, because they all use this strategy too. My acquaintance somehow missed this irony.

Next, McCue takes issue with the LDS Church using a marketing firm. It seems that McCue’s opinion is that if the LDS Church is run by prophets as claimed, then all the Church’s marketing efforts should be the direct result of revelation from God. I suppose this is an understandable misunderstanding, so allow me to set things straight for Mr. McCue and anyone else who may be similarly confused on this point. Mormons don’t believe that nothing can be done without revelation from God. We believe God gives us timely and needful revelation, but much of the time leaves things up to us to figure out. We believe that God steps in once we have done all we can do. One might imagine a conversation between God and the President of the LDS Church in which the President asks God “God, how can we spread the gospel message more effectively?” and God responds “C’mon, I gave you a brain, why don’t you use it? Go hire a marketing firm or something and don’t ask me about this again until you’ve done everything you can on your own.” Thus the hiring of a marketing firm by the LDS Church is perfectly in line with Mormon doctrine, if not with McCue’s own line of thinking.

At the end of the paragraph McCue once again misteps in his logic by stating that if the LDS Church uses a marketing firm and the LDS Church is led by God, then that means that anyone who uses a marketing firm is also led by God. That would be akin to stating that if Bobby has a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich, and he says his mom made it for him, and Joey also has a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich, then Bobby’s mom must have also made Joey’s sandwich. Huh? Yeah, doesn’t make much sense.

While wishing Glenn Beck and his family well, I found his video repugnant. It presents a false picture of Mormonism, and will be used to dupe innocent people. The “true love” Beck talks about is at the root of countless religious and secular movements. That fact that this is a revelation to him says something about him, but not about how Mormonism is special or different from other religious groups. Members of Jim Jones’ and other cults say the same kind of thing about their groups as Beck does about Mormonism.

Again, this is hardly analytical. McCue states that Glenn’s video presents “a false picture of Mormonism” but that’s only McCue’s opinion. I found the video to present a very accurate and honest picture of Mormonism. The fact that what Beck says about his conversion story is similar to what crazy people like Jim Jones’ followers may have said doesn’t mean Beck’s experiences are also crazy. If you see a kid with a 20-dollar bill and ask him who it belongs to and he says “It’s mine” but you find out he stole it, does that mean the next kid you see with a 20-dollar bill also stole it? There’s no connection. Two people can say the exact same thing and one can be 100% lying and the other can be telling 100% the pure truth.

Beck’s favorites day of week is Sunday because that is a family day. That is the case at my house too, and only since leaving Mormonism. While Mormon, I was seldom at home with my kids on Sunday, and when I was I tended to be exhausted and hence far less of a father than I could have been. You, I know, were in the same position. You and I gave our energy to the Mormon institution instead of our families. Glenn Beck has not yet experienced that side of his new faith.

McCue, how do you know that Beck has not experienced “that side of his new faith”? I’m not saying that he has, but the point is that I don’t know. How do you know? Maybe he has, and yet he has still found a way to make it a family day. How can you claim that you know Beck’s life and his feelings about it better than he does himself?

Beck’s fear based claim that he would be on the human trash heap without Mormonism is a pathetic, but unfortunately well-used religious claim. It is designed to scare people into the fold, and into staying in the fold. I reject life lived on the basis of fear, and want nothing to do with organizations that promote that point of view. This is a virus that weakens human beings, and makes them dependant on manmade authority.

Once again, McCue seems to be making many assumptions without basis. McCue, how do you know that Beck’s claim is “designed to scare people into the fold”? Maybe he sincerely feels what he is saying. By the way, I’ve been an active member of the LDS Church for 34 years and when you say you claim that the LDS Church teaches people to live life “on the basis of fear” I must admit I have no idea what you’re talking about. Maybe that’s what you got from Church teachings, but it’s not what I get from them.

And, Beck does not address the most important question about religious groups. That is, “How reliable is the authority of the institution that asks for our allegiance, and how much do they ask of us?” The more the institution asks, the more reliable its authority should be proven to be before we go along for the ride.

I completely agree with McCue on this one. Joseph Smith said that a religion that doesn’t ask you to sacrificed everything doesn’t have the power to save. That’s a pretty large request, and so I myself wouldn’t be a member of the LDS Church unless I had received an answer from God himself that it was his true church.

We know how much Mormonism asks. Ultimately, it wants full commitment. It is designed to push us as far in that direction as we will go. But perhaps Glenn Beck does not know that yet. This is because Mormonism uses sales pitches like his to get people in the door and on the train on the basis of attractive “milk”. Then the train starts to move, social commitments are made, roots go down, the forces of cognitive dissonance kick in, and the more momentum the train has the harder it is to get off. The Moonies, Hare Krishna and many other cults explicitly recruit on this basis. So do the Mormons, though most Mormons don’t realize it until the facts are pointed out to them. That is, the “hard doctrines”, the “meat”, the “mysteries” (“Why did God tell the Mormon leaders to lie about so many things!?”), the commitments required of those who attend the temple and become Mormon leaders, and a host of other aspects of Mormonism, are kept purposefully hidden until the convert gradually becomes “ready”. Why is that? Well, by that time the train will be moving so fast that it will be very hard for the convert to de-couple his life from it. The forces of denial and cognitive dissonance will then hide Mormonism’s flaws from him.

Based on how much research does on other topics related to his show I find it difficult to believe he wouldn’t have researched the LDS Church quite thoroughly prior to being baptized. The guy is a voracious reader.

As for Mormonism teaching “attractive milk,” most of those who are introduced to the LDS Church very quickly are exposed to a number of controversial ideas such as modern-day prophets like Moses, new scripture in addition to the Bible, requirements to not drink alcohol, coffee, or tea, to not smoke or use drugs, etc. In many cases joining the LDS Church means being disowned by ones family and friends or at least introducing some awkwardness into relationships. Converts have to jump through a lot of hoops and do lots of things that are rather uncomfortable if not downright near impossible. There is little that is “easy” about becoming a Mormon, and I’ve found that in the cases that are exceptions those who do become Mormons too “easily” have a tendency to leave the LDS Church just about as easily as they came in.

And as for anything being kept “purposefully hidden” perhaps you know something about Mormonism that I don’t, but I’ve read enough anti-Mormon material to know that what people think the Mormon leadership is “hiding” generally means those things the Church isn’t actively promoting, but there’s a big difference between a lack of promotion and actively hiding something. I don’t go about telling everyone I meet about every mistake I’ve ever made, but that doesn’t mean I’m hiding my mistakes.

Towards the end, McCue tries to promote the idea that the majority of people who become Mormons are intellectually lacking. However, his evidence appears to be anecdotal other than his reference to a study that claims, in his words to “predict that Mormon missionary work will only be successful where magical thinking is as bad or worse than the Mormon level”. Unfortunately he doesn’t link to the study, only the website where he claims it was found, but in searching that particular website I couldn’t find any reference to “mormon” or “lds” on it. But I will quote a few statistics relating to the education levels of Mormons in general:

• LDS women are more likely to graduate from college than Catholic or Protestant women
• Utah “spends a larger percentage of state dollars on education” than any other state
• Utah has been ranked at high as 7th academically in the nation
• A recent national Advanced Placement study found Utah ranked first in the nation in both [AP] exams taken and exams passed on a per capita basis
• Utah has one of the highest high school graduation rates in the nation
• Utah is ranked 2nd in proportion of the population who are high school graduates
• Utah ranks first in personal computer ownership
• As Latter-day Saints become more educated, they are more likely to be active Church participants, a trend opposite what is found in most denominations

Granted, these statistics pertain to those who are members of the LDS Church as opposed to those who join, so in a way I’m not responding to the exact argument McCue is making, but it’s the best I can do given the data available to me. It would be fair to say based on the data above that Mormons are hardly uneducated or uninformed and that they only reason they are Mormons is because of a lack of intellectual ability. I find that last bit of data in the bulleted list especially interesting.

Obviously McCue has an ax to grind. I think it’s sad that something that has brought me so much happiness could be blamed for causing the bittnerness and regret he seems to feel. Most members of the LDS Church who leave seem to do so because they were offended by one more more fellow members, and if that’s the case I’m sorry it happened. Members of the LDS Church, leaders included, are by no means perfect and in many cases are surprisingly imperfect. But as Dan Jones, one of the early members of the Church said, “I’d rather have a prophet who’s a drunk than no prophet at all.” Not that we’ve had any prophets who were drunks that I know of, but the point is that even if the head of the LDS Church isn’t perfect, that doesn’t mean it isn’t God’s church.

Of course this may all sound ridiculous to someone who isn’t familiar with the practice, but many other religions also have dress codes wherein the members of that faith wear certain things as symbols of their beliefs.

The truth is that some Mormons probably do think poorly of anyone who drinks, but if they do, then they’ve got their own problems. Mormons don’t believe anyone else is condemned or hated by God for having a beer, or even for getting roaring drunk and passing out. Mormons simply believe that God has commanded them, as members of the LDS Church, to not drink. The commandment doesn’t apply to people who aren’t members of the LDS Church. That said, hopefully you can understand if some Mormons aren’t clear about this and go about judging people who drink, or if they simply are uncomfortable around alcohol. There are a lot of Mormons who don’t know how to act when somebody around them is drinking, and so they get a bit awkward.

As for myself, I’m fine around people who drink. I would have no problem hanging out in a bar (other than that I wouldn’t want someone to mistakenly think that I’m an imbiber myself). I’ve actually sat at a bar myself with a friend while he had a drink and I had a Sprite. Perhaps that’s not such a great thing in and of itself since somebody could see me there and assume I’m a hypocritical Mormon taking a few swigs, but it didn’t occur to me at the time.

At first it wasn’t a commandment for the church members, it was “more of a guideline”. But later on it became a commandment and today church members can’t enter LDS temples or fully participate in certain church activities if they’re openly rebelling against it. That’s not to say some church members might not imbibe once in a while and keep it secret, but if they do then they’re going to hell. Just kidding, but if it were found out then they’d get called in by their church leaders who would try to help them stop drinking.