(ABP) — Quite by coincidence, I had just finished reading Carolyn Jessup's Escape when the news stories broke about the raids on the Texas ranch of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints. The “escape” of the book's title is from an abusive, polygamous marriage. Yet there was for me an unexpected coda to Jessup's story. Her eldest daughter, on turning 18, returned to her father and the Fundamentalist Mormon Church.
The FLDS makes an easy target. If the reports of child abuse are true, then of course the state has an overriding interest in intervention. But it seems to be a routine part of every discussion of the Texas situation to observe that among the sins, real or imagined, of that ranch was its prohibition of contact between the Mormons who lived there and something called the “outside world.”
That division is a particularly tricky one, and believers in any faith would do well to pause over it for a moment.
In a column published a couple of years ago, Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, president of the Chicago Theological Seminary, wondered whether children might not possess the right to be exposed to varying points of view, a right presumably denied to them by fundamentalist parents. That is, the public good requires that each of us be prepared to participate fully within the rules of a secular, pluralist society. According to Thistlethwaite's logic, aren't such children victims of child abuse?
To cite a less academic but more contemporary source, comedian Bill Maher recently wondered why the Texas pedophiles were being prosecuted while Pope Benedict was being lionized. After all, he observed, child abuse was much more widespread with the Catholic church than among a few hundred misguided Texans.
This is the issue for me. Progressives, such as Maher and Thistlethwaite, and fundamentalists are offended by the same thing: that there are people who think differently than they do.
Here let me return to the example of Carolyn Jessup's daughter. It may well be that this young woman is continuing to live out the results of a life of abuse. She may be so broken by her experiences that she cannot understand her own self-interests. Or it may be that she has decided the life lived out by the Fundamentalist Mormon Church is in fact the life that most faithfully reflects the call of God. From the outside, how can any of us know?
It is not difficult, however, for even the most mainline of current denominations to look back and discover when it was maligned by slander. It is even easier to discover when our churches were guilty of real crimes; remember where the “Southern” part of the Southern Baptist name came from.
All in all, the difficulties of the Christian churches have not been that we were not open to the outside world, but that we accommodated ourselves far too well.
With this in mind, I think we, as Christians, need to see the Fundamentalist Mormons -– alien as they might seem to be to us -– as our brothers and sisters in Christ. While the teachings of Joseph Smith are heretical (or not fully scriptural), heresy nonetheless belongs in some sense in the Christian tradition. Polygamous Mormons in particular raise the question of what constitutes Christian marriage.
Lest we see them as too “other” in their practice, some ethicists today have observed that we are living in a culture that increasingly practices “serial polygamy.”
The Christian reason for monogamy is that we are to be faithful to our spouse as God is faithful to the church, the one body of Christ. Thus, monogamous marriage is directly linked to the oneness of the church.
Of course, one might readily observe that God seems more like a polygamist today: having many, many churches. And some theologians have gone so far as to compare the crucifixion to child abuse. Such “polygamy,” however, has more to do with our adultery and idolatry than with God's desire to have many partners. In the book of Hosea, the faithless wife (Israel) is restored when God says: “And in that day, says the Lord, you will call me, ‘My husband,' and no longer will you call me, ‘My Baal.' For I will remove the names of the Baals from her mouth, and they shall be mentioned by name no more” (Hosea 2:1-17).
Our faithlessness cannot defeat the faithfulness of God. This fact is most fully displayed in the crucifixion, which is not an angry Father punishing his Son, but God's own willingness to enter, heal and defeat our brokenness and sin “from the inside.” This astounding gift frees us to live more faithfully as Christ's body for the world.
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— Beth Newman is professor of theology and ethics at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond. [email protected]