One of the interesting religion-and-politics stories of the past week: due to Mitt Romney's prominence in the Republican campaign for the presidential nomination, a longstanding controversy about the LDS church's practice of baptizing Holocaust victims has come back into the news. In this case, what's being discussed is the revelation that, after the Mormon church has stated that it no longer baptizes Holocaust victims, it has nonetheless recently baptized Anne Frank.
Steven Colbert comments on the controversy, con brio, at his show earlier in the past week. As does Jay Michaelson at Religion Dispatches, who links to a newly created website, All Dead Mormons Are Now Gay, where folks can go and baptize deceased Mormons into homosexuality.
That website is admittedly in somewhat dubious taste, and borders on the offensive. But, then, the practice of baptizing Holocaust victims to which it responds is equally in dubious taste and offensive to the Jewish community--as the Mormon community has had reason to know for quite a while now.
And, of course, the baptizing-Mormons-into-homosexuality angle has everything to do with the high-profile role the LDS church chose to take when it provided an army of workers and lavish funding to yank away the right of civil marriage from gay citizens of California with proposition 8. As some Catholics are now doing after the U.S. Catholic bishops have shoved their church into the public square in a way that attracts negative attention from the general public, some Mormons have vented anger, following the prop 8 battle, that their church's role in the battle has been exposed and criticized.
In my view, when religious bodies choose to become involved in these significant ways in public deliberations about legal issues like marriage, they should expect public scrutiny. That's how American democracy functions.
I'm particularly intrigued by the comments in response to Jay Michaelson's article. Not a few of them from Mormon respondents strike me as eerily like the kind of dialogue I often read on centrist Catholic blog sites: heady, abstract, totally missing the point, straining mightily to catch the gnat while the camel passes glibly through.
And this makes me wonder if there's something inbuilt in heavily patriarchal, male-entitled religious groups that promotes this kind of head-in-the-clouds yammering, while the real-life applications of the issues under discussion (and the real people affected by the discussions) never receive any attention at all. As I said recently, the overweeningly male-dominant conversations at centrist Catholic blog sites lately about the contraceptive issue bring back to mind (for me) Carol Gilligan's classic analysis of the very different ways in which young males and females process moral issues. The fixation on abstract concepts like material cooperation with evil and who pays how much when, where, and how for people's contraceptive coverage through insurance: all of this, in the total absence of any reflection about who is implicitly under consideration in these discussions and who is affected by them, strikes me as highly male-centric and rather morally obtuse.
As do many of the critical comments Mormon readers of Michaelson's article are making in response to the article. Not a few of these seem unable to get the level of anger the practice of baptizing Holocaust victims elicits in the Jewish community, or the level of anger the Mormon involvement in movements to strip rights from gay citizens arouses among many of us who are gay.
And that avoidance of the personal and the relational, when it's coupled with abstruse discussions about how the dead are not being baptized against their consent, since the dead retain consciousness and free will and Mormon-baptized Jews like Anne Frank can be presumed to have consented to their baptism: this leaves me wondering about the roots of religious thinking that seems to find it so easy to prescind from real people and real lives, as it flies off into theological stratospheres that only the chosen few can detect.
As I say, with Mr. Romney in the political spotlight these days, I think Mormons can expect more of the sort of critical scrutiny they're getting right now in these discussions of the proxy baptism practice and LDS involvement in battles against gay rights. And I'm no more convinced by the if-my-tribe-does-it-it's-right argument when it comes to members of the LDS church than I am when I hear it from members of my own RC church.
It takes a bit more than smug tribal self-righteousness to mount convincing moral arguments in the public square in a pluralistic secular democracy.
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