Salon.com > Valerie Tarico

Was Mother Teresa a masochist?

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:04:00 +0000

With a new Pope at the helm, the Catholic hierarchy has set about to polish its tarnished image. Can an increased focus on the poor make up for the Church’s opposition to contraception and marriage equality or its sordid financial and sexual affairs? The Bishops can only hope. And pray. And perhaps accelerate the sainthood of Agnes Gonxha, better known as Mother Teresa.

In the last century, no one icon has improved the Catholic brand as much as the small woman who founded the Missionaries of Charity, whose image aligns beautifully with that of the new pope. In March a team of Canadian researchers noted the opportunity: “What could be better than beatification followed by canonization of [Mother Teresa] to revitalize the Church and inspire the faithful, especially at a time when churches are empty and the Roman authority is in decline?”

Do religious conservatives make lousy tippers?

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 20:01:00 +0000

The story has gone viral: A group got together at Applebees. When the tab came the minister wrote on the ticket, “I give God 10 percent, why should I give you 18?” She scratched through the automatic large-group tip and substituted a fat zero and signed it with the word “Pastor” in front of her name. The waitress posted an image on Reddit. The pastor called to complain. The waitress got fired. The internet went wild. Last I saw, one story had 80,000 comments and counting.

In reality, the pastor simply exposed something that is all too common to Christian thinking: the sense that giving to the church and to religious charities is the be-all and end all of generosity. As indignant reactions to the Applebee’s incident show, service workers sometimes pay the price:

“I worked at the Outback Steakhouse for 3 years and we ALL dreaded Sundays.”

“The Sunday after church crowd were allways the worst tippers. I found another line of work.”

Religion may not survive the Internet

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 16:30:00 +0000

As we head into a new year, the guardians of traditional religion are ramping up efforts to keep their flocks—or, in crass economic terms, to retain market share. Some Christians have turned to soul searching while others have turned to marketing. Last fall, the LDS church spent millions on billboards, bus banners, and Facebook ads touting “I’m a Mormon.” In Canada, the Catholic Church has launched a “Come Home” marketing campaign. The Southern Baptists Convention voted to rebrand themselves. A hipster mega-church in Seattle combines smart advertising with sales force training for members and a strategy the Catholics have emphasized for centuries: competitive breeding.

Does the Bible make Americans more violent?

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 15:38:00 +0000

My friend Li is an Evangelical Christian and, in keeping with her family values she keeps an eye on what her children view and read. In the summer, she took her 12-year-old daughter to the Hunger Games. “It’s the perfect movie for her,” Li commented. “No swearing and no sex.” No swearing; no sex. Just people stalking and killing each other.

The Motion Picture Association of America agrees with Li’s priorities. So did the writers of the Bible. Our love-hate-love affair with violence goes way back.

At West Point, “you need to believe in God”

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 16:22:00 +0000

Blake Page, a 24-year-old cadet in his 4^th year at West Point, created a storm on November 19 when he announced he was leaving in protest over religious discrimination and church state boundary violations. In his letter of resignation he stated, “I do not wish to be in any way associated with an institution which willfully disregards the Constitution of the United States of America by enforcing policies which run counter to the same.” In an op-ed published at the Huffington Post on Monday, Page minced no words: “Countless officers here and throughout the military are guilty of blatantly violating the oaths they swore to defend the Constitution . . . through unconstitutional proselytism, discrimination against the non-religious and establishing formal policies to reward, encourage and even at times require sectarian religious participation.”

Right-wing Christians didn’t always hate women

Sat, 17 Nov 2012 14:00:00 +0000

In the autumn of 1978 the Washington Association of Churches and the Washington State Catholic Conference jointly published a six-page pamphlet they called “Abortion: An Ecumenical Study Document.” Their work offers a fascinating snapshot of Christian thinking at the time and raises some equally fascinating questions about what, exactly, has happened in the last 35 years.

The pamphlet does not contain a position statement. Quite the opposite, in fact. From the beginning, the authors explain that such an agreement is impossible: "Clearly there is no Christian position on abortion, for here real values conflict with each other, and Christian persons who seek honestly to be open to God’s call still find themselves disagreeing profoundly."

Mitt Romney: Son of Abraham?

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 13:01:00 +0000

While in Jerusalem Mitt Romney made an appearance at the Wailing Wall in a yarmulke. Was he just trying to pay tribute to Orthodox tradition or does he think he’s a Jew? Perhaps both.

Conservative Christianity teaches “supersessionism,” the idea that God’s covenant with Christians replaced his covenant with the Jews and now Christians are the Chosen People, the spiritual heirs of Abraham. Mormonism takes this a step further, teaching that Mormons are not only the spiritual heirs of Abraham, they are his physical descendants as well.

Mormonism includes a ritual called the “ patriarchal blessing ” in which a member in good standing receives a set of pronouncements spoken by an older male who is thought, during the ritual itself, to act as a latter-day prophet. Like many of Mormonism’s better known distinctive features, such as plural marriage and wearing sacred undergarments , the practice was instituted by Joseph Smith himself.* One of the most central functions of the patriarchal blessing is to reveal which great-grandson of Abraham a person can claim as his ancestor. Per Mormonwiki:

"Through these blessings, Latter-day Saints are told their lineage from the tribes of Israel. All tribes have been represented, but Latter-day Saints descend mostly from the sons of Joseph—Ephraim and Manasseh."

One former Mormon describes the experience: “While reading my patriarchal blessing I took note that it says I was: ‘born through the loins of Ephraim.’ I found it fascinating how patriarchs could tell which tribes people were descended from."

This peculiar-seeming teaching offers a fascinating window into the way sacred stories emerge and evolve. It also offers a window into one way religious sects compete and seek status.

In the Bible story, the Hebrew people are divided into 12 tribes based on the 12 sons of Jacob, one of whom is Joseph of the “Technicolor Dreamcoat.” The story of Jacob’s 12 sons and the 12 tribes of Israel bring together two passions of the Bible writers, both of which play a central role in Mormonism: genealogy and numerology. The concept of Chosen People creates a fixation on bloodlines, and the Bible writers often go to great lengths to establish the lineage of powerful men. In fact, two of the New Testament writers, each with a different audience in mind, offered contradictory genealogies of Jesus that theologians have struggled for centuries to reconcile. The Mormon religion continued and expanded the obsession with bloodlines to the point that vaults in Granite Mountain , Utah, now house almost two million rolls of microfilm with genealogical records. Mormonism teaches that family is forever, which is why a man controls his wife’s standing in heaven and members can be baptized on behalf of deceased antecedents, and it is terribly important to know who your ancestors were.

The number 12 traces its own lineage of significance clear back to the signs of the zodiac and manifests repeatedly in the Bible. Joseph Smith himself was deeply influenced by Freemasonry, which provided the sacred symbols that appear on Mormon undergarments. It also reinforced a fascination with numerology and biblical numerology in particular.

Thus there were 12 signs of the Zodiac, 12 months in the year, 12 tribes of Israel, 12 stones in the pectoral, and 12 oxen supporting the molten sea in the Temple. There were 12 apostles in the new law, and the New Jerusalem has 12 gates, 12 foundations, is 12,000 furlongs square, and the number of the sealed is 12 times 12,000.

The numbers three and seven also had early magical significance that shaped the beliefs of Bible writers and early Christians. Think seven days of creation, three days before the resurrection, the holy trinity, or the command to forgive your neighbor “70 times seven.” Like the number 12, three and seven are built into the structure of the Mormon bureaucracy.

The triangle is one of the most potent forms in magic, and the 1835 revelation provided numbering of priesthood offices which added to 180 (the number of degrees in a triangle). The revelation specified that in ascending order the deacon’s president presided over 12 deacons, the teacher’s president over 24 teachers, and the elder’s president over 98 elders....There were three men in the first presidency, 12 men in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, 70 men in the 70....

Like Christianity, though, the number 12 remains chief among the numbers assigned special powers and significance. We humans are storytellers at heart, and at the heart of every story is a protagonist, whether an individual or collective, who matters more than the rest. Because of this, two ideas – bloodlines with special rights and numbers with special powers have maintained their appeal for millennia. They can be found all around us –in Harry Potter, or New Age spirituality, or faded tabloids about the British monarchy. Ironically, we frequently fuse our ancient superstitions with modern scholarship methods and technologies. Hence the lack of a 13th floor in many modern hospitals. Hence, too, the microfilm archive in Granite Mountain.

Our quest to bend nature’s or society’s rules to stack the odds in our favor, means that we are constantly vying for a little more status. For that reason, it would come as no surprise to a scholar of sacred stories that a preponderance of Mormons are said to descend from the lineage of Joseph . The 12 sons of Jacob and their offspring may comprise the Chosen People according to the biblical chronicle, but not all of the 12 are equally favored by either God or their earthly father. In fact, tales of the Hebrew patriarchs are often stories about paternal favoritism and its consequences, both positive and negative.

Within the broader narrative of Chosen People are stories of chosen sons and mothers who compete viciously to ensure their sons receive extra standing or privilege. Father Abraham and Yehovah both favor Isaac over Ishmael, Abraham’s son born of the slave woman, Hagar. Isaac and Yehovah favor his son Jacob over his son Esau. Jacob and Yehovah favor the sons of his wife Rachel over those of her ugly older sister Leah. They favor Joseph most of all, which is why his brothers throw him into a pit and sell him to an Egyptian slave trader where he becomes a confidant of the Pharaoh, ultimately ruling over them all. Among those in the know, announcing that someone is the heir of Joseph is indeed a patriarchal blessing—a pronouncement that he has the most favored bloodline out of the favored 12.

The belief that our ancestry matters to God has drawn the LDS Church into several kinds of awkward or ugly dogmas. Officially sanctioned racism was prominent in theology and church practice for a century and a half after Smith founded the religion. According to the story , a tribe of Israelites traveled to the Americas around 600 BCE, but split into two warring factions. The evil faction, the Lamanites, eventually killed off their righteous brethren and were punished with brown skins, becoming the forebears of Native Americans. Offspring of Adam’s son Cain (who murdered his brother) were cursed with even darker skin, became the forebears of Africans. Anyone with African blood was banned from the full privileges of Mormon membership until 1978 and Utah refused to celebrate MLK Day until 2000. Recent DNA research showing Native Americans to have Asian ancestry has caused consternation and even defections among science-minded Mormons.

Mormon Church leaders like Mitt Romney appear to have moved beyond the divinely sanctified racism of church history – at least when it comes to matters of skin color. But the issue of privileged bloodlines remains. In the Mormon version of the end times, the descendants of Abraham through Isaac and Jacob will be gathered together into the land promised so long ago by Yehovah to a wandering band of Semites. The tribe of Judah will return to the land surrounding Jerusalem, but the tribe of Joseph (divided between Ephraim and Manasseh) as part of “10 lost tribes” will be gathered together in Zion, also called the New Jerusalem, centered in Jackson County, Missouri.

According to the Tenth Article of the Mormon Faith, this is not a spiritual metaphor: "We believe in the literal gathering of Israel and in the restoration of the Ten Tribes; that Zion (the New Jerusalem) will be built upon the American continent; that Christ will reign personally upon the earth; and, that the earth will be renewed and receive its paradisaical glory."

Does Mitt Romney think he is a son of Abraham and that Zion will be his inheritance? It is hard to imagine otherwise. He worships a god who cares who your father was, and his father, and his father before him and who, in part, allocates blessings accordingly. Indeed, Mormon doctrine may offer a little insight into why Romney appears so untroubled by an America where fortunes increasingly are dictated by heredity.

*The LDS Church, the dominant sect of the Mormon religion, supports polygamy or plural marriage only where it is allowed by law. It is assumed that some men will have multiple wives in heaven.

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington and the founder of Wisdom Commons. She is the author of "Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light" and "Deas and Other Imaginings." Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.

Bible-based healthcare?

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 15:00:00 +0000

Despite a defeat in District Court last week, the Catholic Bishops and their conservative Protestant allies are forging ahead with lawsuits against Obama's health care reforms. Their goal? To ensure that American health options are dictated by religion rather than medical science. With an infallible pope and an inerrant Bible as guides, they are convinced that they know what God wants.

Baptists bank on fire and brimstone

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 13:55:00 +0000

The Southern Baptist Convention is a force to be reckoned with. As the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, with over 45,000 affiliate churches, it have been shaping and channeling conservative Christian sensibilities since the Civil War, when Southern Baptists split from the North so they could advocate on behalf of slave owners. They fought to keep slavery and lost. Then they fought for Jim Crow laws and lost. Then they fought for segregation and lost. Now, faced with eroding membership, the Southern Baptist leaders are fighting against irrelevance. Unfortunately, they have committed to a strategy that will make it harder for their members – and for all of us—to move toward a future based on collaboration, compassion and practical solutions to real-world problems.

Is Mormon underwear magic?

Sat, 07 Jul 2012 17:00:00 +0000

To outsiders, there is little more fascinating about the Mormon religion than the secret underwear that Mormon temple initiates are expected to wear day and night. As one former believer put it, “I've been an exmo since 1967. All that time, the underwear questions were the first ones I got from people who found out I had been Mormon. A friend brought it up again last week at lunch.” Another former Mormon agrees: “When people first find out I'm exmo, their first question/comment almost ALWAYS is, ‘So what is the deal with the magic underwear?!’ Honest! People outside the morg are spending WAY too much time thinking about garmies!”

(“Garmies” is insider slang for the sacred undergarments prescribed by the religion’s founder, Joseph Smith.)

Some outside interest may be driven simply by curiosity: Mormons have sacred underwear! What do they look like? Or incredulity: Religious leaders can tell women to wear undershirts with special symbols all the time beneath their bras and people do it?! But that’s not the whole story.