Last week in my post I touched upon being an “ethnic” Mormon. I got some well thought out pushback in the comments saying that because the Mormon Church was expanding outside the intermountain West, and has always sought new members outside the fold, then Mormon really isn’t an ethnic group (at least not yet). Some commenters did say that we could be cultural Mormons, and that made better sense.

It seems an article by Christopher Cunningham in the Meridian Magazine preemptively shot down the idea that I could be an ethnic Mormon, or even a cultural Mormon. Three days before I did my post, he wrote at Meridian:

One of the more confused habits in contemporary Latter-day Saint-adjacent discourse is the insistence that people who reject The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints still possess some special claim on “Mormon” identity.

They talk as though “Mormonism” were an ethnicity. As though there were something in the blood. As though having the right grandparents, the right zip code, the right memories of casseroles and church basketball and trek and EFY and green Jell-O and dirty sodas and ward culture means you retain some inherited authority to define what the Church is, what it should preserve, and what it owes the world.

The Church of Jesus Christ is not an aesthetic, it’s not an ethnicity, it’s not a regional brand, it’s not even a culture. It is a church.

It has doctrine, commandments, ordinances, priesthood keys, and covenants. It has admission requirements, and it has boundaries.

For those interested, I recommend you read the whole article at my link above. It is almost like Cunningham read the Wikipedia page for the “No True Scotsman fallacy”, and used that to base his arguments on.

He makes a novel argument about why the Church still cares about the name Mormon when they asked everybody to stop using it. He said that Kentucky Fried Chicken changed its name to KFC, yet you would not be allowed to open a business called Kentucky Fried Chicken. Cunningham goes on to explain why there cannot be cultural Mormons, Why John Dehlin should be sued, and how saying you are a cultural Mormon is a subtle form of racism:

For a church community that is increasingly populated and run by people from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the idea that people get special say over what happens within the community because of who their grandparents were brings up unfortunate racial problems.

It could appear that the Church PR people asked Cunningham to write an argument for their Dehlin lawsuit. I find it interesting that up until we got a lawyer in the head chair, nobody seemed to care about the word Mormon. Even when the Church was embracing it during the “I’m a Mormon” campaign (2010-2018), John Dehlin was into his second decade of Mormon Stories.

The first comment to the Meridian article was from an LDS raised Cultural Anthropologist, who said the author was wrong, and that she is confident that she (the commenter) has forgotten more about how culture works than this author has ever known.

What do you think is behind this effort to take away my Mormon Culture?