Matthew Bowman: Why both sides are right in the debate about the word ‘Mormon’

It’s been 34 years since Russell Nelson, then an apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, first publicly expressed discomfort with the phrase “Mormon church” and six since he, as church president, issued a series of directives discouraging use of the term “Mormon” as a nickname for the faith or its members.

Instead, he recommended, if a shorter version of the faith’s full name was necessary, the “Church of Jesus Christ.” He also deemed acceptable the “restored Church of Jesus Christ.” Members should be called “Latter-day Saints,” but more fully, “members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”

Nelson’s address on the topic at the October 2018 General Conference drew consternation from a number of scholars and journalists. For some, the policy seemed niggling, trivial, a sign that Nelson was pedantic and controlling. More substantively, his preferred terms are cumbersome. They also represent a break from the past. After all, church leaders from Brigham Young to Gordon Hinckley embraced the “Mormon” moniker, so eliminating its use in history writing is anachronistic. Finally, the term “Church of Jesus Christ” is inexact because a number of Christian organizations use that phrasing.

Six years later, many of those points still stand. They are among the reasons why I and my colleagues have elected not to change the name of my academic post: the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies.

In other ways, though, the impact of Nelson’s call seems to me salutary. Many scholars (mostly Latter-day Saints) have for decades used “Mormon” to describe the entire religious tradition descended from founder Joseph Smith. They found Nelson’s reversal jarring — even though branches of that tradition, like Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints), have long tried to distance themselves from the label “Mormon.” I have noticed in the past few years greater precision in choosing the best-suited nomenclature. That is all to the good.

And yet, the further we’ve gotten from that conference speech, the more I’ve found myself less interested in whether Nelson’s plan is good or workable or the right thing to do, and more interested in what it illustrates about the knotty problems and dead ends Americans still run into whenever we talk about religion.

The problem of church and state

Here is that conundrum in a nutshell: It seems to me that it is entirely appropriate for the media to reject Nelson’s request by virtue of the logic of the public square. But it’s also entirely appropriate for him to make it by virtue of the logic of his faith.

If this makes little sense, that is because the way we talk about religion in American public life — in politics, the media and so on — makes little sense.

Americans experience their country’s religious landscape as a bumptious marketplace, a series of communities competing for attention. The metaphor of “marketplace,” of course, is imperfect. It imagines religions in ways that defy the internal logic of such groups. It makes no sense to think of the Amish as the rough equivalent of Pizza Hut, because the Amish have no interest in attracting more customers. Similarly, the state has consistently promoted some and repressed other religious groups, including Nelson’s own.

And those conflicts have resulted in a state of affairs many Americans think of as normal, although, of course, it is hardly that. We pretend that our public square — the realm of politics and economics and so on — is neutral toward religion.

It isn’t. The expectation that the public square should be “neutral” assumes that religion shouldn’t make claims about how the economy should be run or how the federal government should be organized. Such a model prefers religions premised on personal reflection and moral self-discipline that do not go so far as to provoke people to try to do anything as drastic as change the world.

Religious traditions that offer proposals about what our government should be like — including the Nation of Islam, Roman Catholicism or most other non-Protestant traditions — usually encounter strong resistance in the media and often repression from the state, even if such threats are imagined more than real. Witness panicked Protestants warning that the election of John F. Kennedy would result in the pope seizing power in Washington or the FBI’s efficient persecution of the Nation of Islam.

And yet, of course, a great many religious traditions do have opinions about how society should be organized. The Catholic social justice tradition advocates the redistribution of wealth to care for the poor. Pope John Paul II called on the state to do so. Black Protestant churches have a long tradition of advocating for racial equality. Many, many smaller groups — like the Amish or Jehovah’s Witnesses — take positions on issues ranging from the Pledge of Allegiance to public schools.

Members of those groups run for office and vote. Requiring them to set aside their views in the public square is both naive and a form of regulation of religion. It is simply impossible to have genuine public neutrality toward religion and will be until our economy and our government are run by machines instead of people, and only possibly then.

A world of religious diversity

We live in a society in which religious diversity is a simple fact. The president is a Roman Catholic. The Senate majority leader is Jewish. Many people profess no religion whatsoever.

Even though it may be impossible to form a society that is genuinely neutral toward religion, we must yet find a way to live with one another.

It is easy to overlook how difficult this is to accomplish. Every day societies across the globe fall into civil war over religious differences. A Hindu majority persecutes a Muslim minority in India through violence and economic oppression. The Egyptian Constitution establishes freedom of religion and yet designates Islam as the state religion while Christians in Egypt are routinely barred from holding certain jobs. In France, where the vast majority of citizens are cradle Catholics who profess no faith whatsoever, the state has barred Muslim women from wearing headscarves in public schools in the name of religious neutrality.

These systems may seem incomprehensible to Americans, but maintaining a diverse and functioning religious society is tricky. There is no flawless solution; only jerry-rigged efforts that limp along from case to case. American pretended neutrality is, in fact, a way of regulating religion. But that does not mean that any other nation has found a better solution.

The problem with the ‘restored church’

This brings us back to “Mormon.”

Russell Nelson’s proposal that the church be referred to in the media as “the restored church of Jesus Christ” is particularly interesting. Its usage relies on supporting the faith’s truth claims. It’s therefore jarring to hear in a society in which religious diversity is a necessary and assumed good. At the same time, Nelson is simply stating the internal reality that he, as a believer, experiences.

That is an ultimately unsatisfying conclusion, of course. But it is how the entirely flawed yet absolutely necessary negotiation of the reality of our religious diversity works.

Matthew Bowman is the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University and the author of 2023′s “The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America” and 2012′s “The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith.”