Is Mike Lee Under The Impression Pete Hegseth DOESN'T Think Mormons Are In A Cult?
Bless his heart.
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Something very stupid happened within the MAGA Christian nationalist movement this week, one of those leopards-eating-faces moments that is kind of delicious to watch from the sidelines, if I’m being honest.
It started when MAGA white Christian nationalist Secretary Shitfaced Pete Hegseth tried to make a move in his white Christian nationalist enshittifying of the Pentagon, part of their efforts to exert greater control over the military’s chaplain corps and get all the woke gayness out of it. Defense Department spokesfluffer Sean Parnell announced that they would be greatly simplifying the categories of religious affiliation the Pentagon recognizes “from over 200 unmanageable categories to 31,” in order to blah blah blah whatever. It’s information they collect on servicemembers and WARFIGHTERS! Read Parnell’s full announcement and watch Shitfaced’s video about it from March if you give a damn.
This is the important part, the part that sent a handful of Republican lawmakers to their fainting couch, this picture that accompanied Parnell’s announcement:
Do you see it? Utah Senator Mike Lee, a devout Mormon, saw it. So did Utah Senator John Curtis. The Mormons are listed, certainly. But not as Christians.
Uh oh.
Curtis tweeted:
“Look at who is in the name of the Church,” he cried.
Mike Lee birthed an entire cow out of the bottom flaps of his magic underpants about it on Twitter:
“I think it’s very unfortunate that the Pentagon has chosen to identify basically every faith group in America that professes faith in Jesus Christ as Christian, with one exception: that is those belonging to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.”
Y’all, he was stung. He said it was “repugnant” and violates “any sense of decency,” and complained that the government needs to stay out of “doctrinal disputes.” Getting mad like he was about to cry, Lee demanded, “Secretary Hegseth, tear down that wall! This is not cool! Get rid of it! Get rid of it now! Thank you!”
We guess Mike Lee doesn’t think it’s OK when they do it to his magic underpants religion where if you covenant-marry your wife in the temple you win a free trip to rule over your own planet when you die. He’s only cool with them deleting all those other woke belief systems and non-belief systems, like atheists and Wiccans.
As the Bulwark notes, after this happened, Mike Lee started fighting with half of MAGA Twitter, which was calmly explaining to him that Mormonism is a cult and a false religion and that he was going to hell. He tried to fight back with the same smug attitude he uses about everything else, but even the “bless your heart” responses made him look wounded and defeated. We would pity him if he wasn’t such a carbuncle and a piece of shit.
But a couple days later, he declared victory! Or he tried to convince himself he was declaring victory. Or maybe he really thought he had won?
So what the Pentagon did was it re-released the list, but without all the “Christian” prefixes. “The Pentagon’s job is not to adjudicate theological debates, but instead to ensure sincerely-held faith is respected and encouraged in our ranks,” the statement said.
If Mormons can’t be called Christian, then nobody can!
Now, as Andrew Egger correctly notes at The Bulwark, if it was the aforementioned atheists or Wiccans complaining, the Pentagon wouldn’t have changed shit, as triggering those kinds of people was their whole point.
But Mike Lee and the Mormons are a currently useful part of the MAGA Christian nationalist coalition, so Mike Lee had to do something to save face, and so did the Trump regime and super self-righteous evangelical Christian nationalist Pete Hegseth.
But note that what Hegseth did was not to call Mormons Christians, which is what makes Mike Lee’s declaration of victory so sad. And rest assured that no matter what this list looks like right now, Pete Hegseth and the other white Christian nationalists in charge at the Trump Pedo Protector White Nationalist Christian Regime absolutely still think Mormonism is a cult.
How do I know this?
Story time!
When I was in high school, my family went to a severely frozen chosen-branded, extremely wealthy conservative evangelical Presbyterian church. To understand the flavor of this place, envision a church in the leafy, established part of a large southern city, within a 10-minute drive from the country club that bears the very name of the city. You know the one. The oldest club, where the most society people are members. This is not a fun country club. It’s an expensive, invite-only, family lineage country club that may even now not allow Black people or Jews as members, at least not in practice. (If you ever read that Vanity Fair article about the rich white people who took a private jet from Memphis to January 6, you know who exactly the fuck I am putting on blast here.)
The Country Club is an extension of this church and a couple other very similar churches. Or is it the other way around? Regardless, none of these are places Jesus of Nazareth spends a whole fuckton of time.
So, high school! Sunday school, to be exact. Now, you have to understand that when I was a closeted teenager, denying myself even to myself, part of my defensive armor was that I was all in on the conservative faith. When we began going to this church with its Calvinist beliefs, I devoured books on the theology, underlined verses in my Bible that totally proved it was true, and became quite pompous in my confidence that you can’t argue with THIS, you dirty liberals. I was into it. I loved books about prophecy, as so many who have the zeal of converts do.
And I certainly enjoyed a good book about cults. (Here is one that I specifically remember reading.)
Which is why I was totally interested when the dad of one of my fellow youth group members taught a weeks-long series in our senior high Sunday school class about cults. This would be far from the only seminar I ever attended on cults. Beach trip paid for by the rich white people of the church? Cult seminar. Youth group event at friends’ Southern Baptist or nondenominational evangelical church? Cult seminar.
This was the 1990s, the Satanic panic still had gas in the tank, and a favorite conservative Christian pastime was putting on the full armor of God to steel oneself against the imaginary yet somehow ever-present threat of falling into a cult and becoming one of those victim stories you would see on Sally Jessy or whatever.
Yes, there was much education about obscure cults our Boomer parents were still convinced were around every corner, all the things that terrified them about the 1960s and the latter half of the Beatles catalogue.
But one constant, defining feature of these seminars and classes in conservative evangelical churches was that they also spent a lot of time explaining why certain sects with “Christian” in their name are actually anything but Christian, are in fact anti-Christian. Chief among these, as I remember — I hate that I didn’t keep my notes — were Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists and Mormons. (Funny that the Christian Scientists and Jehovah’s Witnesses were listed as Christians in the Pentagon’s list, by the way.)
This is one of those things that’s absolutely common knowledge among people who grew up in the conservative evangelical church, but maybe people on the outside do not realize. Mormons = not in the club. Mormons = can be convenient political allies, just like they pretend for political purposes to love Jews, haha, as long as they’re the right kind of Jew, AKA the Orthodox kind that eagerly serves as their useful idiots for fulfilling the Biblical prophecy they believe will bring Jesus back. (Jews are also helpful for them to point to when they use terms like “Judeo-Christian” to pretend they aren’t gunning for an absolute Handmaids’ Tale-grade Christian fascist theocracy.)
Not in the club.
For some evidence, go to any Christian bookstore, especially the kind that’s contained within a megachurch. Browse around! Leave with 45 books about cults, all of which will feature Mormons. Google “are Mormons Christian” and click on all links written by conservative Christians who are not Mormons. Write a summary of what you learn, just kidding I already did it for you, and all it says is “LOL.”
I spent approximately 1.4 seconds googling this to show you what I mean. Here’s a whole bunch of reasons written by a fundamentalist Christian that Mormons are Satan’s own devil cult, no matter how much they protest that they have “Christian” right there in their name:
Beliefs: By and large, Mormons deny the doctrine of the Trinity, instead holding to a form of polytheism (belief in multiple gods/goddesses). They teach that the chief God, Elohim, evolved from a man and went on to spawn other divine children — including Jesus and his brother Lucifer (I can’t help but chuckle as I type that!), along with the pre-existent souls of all humans. In the words of one of their “prophets,” Lorenzo Snow, “As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become.”
It should be pointed out that because Mormon doctrine holds that everyone’s soul existed in heaven before earth was created, they teach that a person’s soul can be born with spiritual merit or demerit based on its past actions before birth.
Strikingly, this led to a long history of white supremacy in the Mormon church, as they believed dark skin was an indicator that one’s soul had disobeyed God in its pre-existent state. (They’ve since tried to distance themselves from this doctrine, for obvious reasons.) It also led to the practice of polygamy among fundamentalist Mormons, since having more wives meant having more children — aka more bodies for these pre-existent souls to inhabit.
Not only is their doctrine of God radically unbiblical; Mormons have a different understanding of “salvation,” as well. In the Mormon belief system, people gain greater levels of eternal reward (even up to becoming a god yourself and inheriting your own planet) by performing enough good works and participating in specific Mormon rituals.
One such ritual is “baptism on behalf of the dead,” in which a Mormon member may act as a stand-in for the spirits of their deceased friends and relatives, receive those spirits into themselves (!), and earn saving merit on their behalf. Non-Mormons are strictly forbidden to enter the Mormon temples where these rituals take place (not that I’d want to be around for that).
Although Mormons claim to be a “restored” version of Christ’s true church, hopefully this brief glance makes it clear that they are far from anything that could be considered true, biblical Christianity.
He can’t help but chuckle as he types that Jesus and Lucifer were brothers! OMG who slept on the top bunk???
I should mention that the Mormons are literally the first entry on that page of “unorthodox ‘Christian’ sects.” Others featured are (surprise!) Jehovah’s Witnesses and Unitarians. In the book I referenced, Mormons are chapter six.
Are dipshits like Mike Lee laboring under the delusion that any of their evangelical colleagues don’t make magic underpants jokes behind their backs, and/or also think they’re hopelessly deceived cult members? (They also believe this about Roman Catholics, but it’s harder to use the “cult” term for a religion with 1.4 billion adherents.)
Pete Hegseth, as a dedicated follower of an extra-creepy wang of the same Reformed tradition that produced the conservative Presbyterians, almost certainly believes this, and the pathetic thing Mike Lee is taking as a “win” did not change anything about that. I am pretty confident in my assumption that Pete Hegseth firmly believes Mormons will be dropkicked into hell just like any any other cult member or heathen.
This is really so humiliating for Mike Lee, as he is such a true believing, piss-dribbling, lipstick-exposing footsoldier for MAGA. There is no idiot Trump conspiracy theory he won’t latch onto, just look at his Twitter feed, he’s a total dumbass. He’s a poster boy conservative Christian beta male who unquestioningly serves whatever white conservative Christian master he’s told to.
And now he’s spent a week being confronted with what they really think of him.
As Egger basically says, this episode exposes how the MAGA coalition — and the Christian nationalists who make up such a large part of its driving force — can only ever be united “as a force against the established liberal order,” and adds that “If it were ever to come close to achieving actual hegemonic cultural or political power, it would immediately collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions.”
Under that government, the Mormons and Mike Lee wouldn’t control or win shit, and neither would the Orthodox Jews, for that matter. They’d all end up in the gulag sooner or later. (And if this happened in the US of A, it’s likely so would the Catholics, if the Christian nationalists attained that kind of power. They’d get to be part of the charade for a while, though.)
Look, I guess I could be wrong, and Pete Hegseth could be woke about the Mormons’ salvation in a way literally none of his co-religionists are. But if so, he’d be the first one!
But yeah, Mike Lee just declared a flawless victory after huffing and puffing and demanding to be called Christian by Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon, which responded by calling nobody Christian.
Trust me: the Christian nationalist Trump regime’s opinion of who is and is not a Christian hasn’t moved one millimeter. And it does not include people who believe ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America and that God has a plan for all of us and that plan involves them getting their own planet and that God changed His mind about Black people in 1978.
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Not that I’m denying Mormons are Christian, but the panic is all the more insulting when you realize it boils down to him being mad they aren’t included in the “good religion” club, which should, in a decent human, be a red flag that maybe this whole ranking system is bullshit. But here we are.
Raised Regular Baptist here...we were explicitly taught that Mormons had demons as special helpers. One story we were told was how there were chairs that Mormons could not physically sit in because that's where their "helper" sat, but true Christians could sit in those chairs because Jesus lived in their hearts and automatically kicked the demon "helper" out of the chair. Another story was of a Mormon family that was in a car accident and the youngest son survived because his "helper" threw him out of the vehicle before impact. I was literally taught by my Bible believing church that Mormons were a dangerous cult mixed up with demons. Imagine my shock when Mitt Romney ran for president. I knew there was no way he would be elected because no true Christian could vote for a Mormon. How times have changed...