Growing up, I knew exactly one Mormon family. The father was the town veterinary and he was a good man. When my dog broke her leg, he put a cast on it. Later, he amputated another dog’s leg. He always seemed to care. Of course, we had livestock (as did almost all farmers in SE Iowa then) so he was frequently at our farm. He treated my 4H calf and didn’t charge me anything. It was a particularly stupid creature which performed terribly at the fair. However, my grandpa rigged the bidding so I got a good price for it, but that’s another story. The point is that our Mormon vet was nice to me.
I didn’t know much about what the local Mormons believed. They didn’t drink ice tea or coffee which was very strange. We knew polygamy was in their past and that they had a lot of other beliefs not shared by the wider community. People in Keosauqua viewed not drinking coffee as being just about as weird as the polygamy thing. We didn’t live far from Nauvoo, IL which was a center for the Mormon church. They had a good restaurant there which featured blue cheese. I wasn’t sure if there was any connection between Mormons and blue cheese, nor am I to this day. Blue cheese wasn’t as mainstream then as it is now.
I saw our Mormon veterinary get kicked by a cow. If you’ve never been kicked by a cow, you’ve never been kicked. The Christians I knew growing up, believed that the tongue should be tamed. However, it was understood that absolution was given (in a Protestant sort of way) to farmers who got kicked by livestock. There was a string of words largely approved for such occasions. The fact that our Mormon veterinary was so controlled in his response to getting blasted by the hoof of a cow was nearly as remarkable as him not drinking coffee at the sale barn.
All of which is to say, Mormons were an oddity in Keosauqua, aliens, sojourners: good neighbors, but weird.
Denny Burke concluded his post from today, A revolution in the American South on gay marriage, with this thought:
Christians in the South are witnessing the disolution of the old way–one in which many Christian values were reinforced by the wider culture. That day–that South–has gone with the wind. That means that Christians who have grown accustomed to ease in Baylon will once again have to learn what it means to be sojourners. And that may not be an altogether bad thing.
I wonder if, in the coming years, Christians in rural America will be seen like we saw Mormons in the 1960’s and 70’s in my hometown. In any case, we should watch what we say when we get kicked.
Read Denny Burke’s post here.
Comparably, Carl Trueman adds:
Surely it is time to become realistic. It is time to drop the cultural elitism that poses as significant Christian transformation of culture but only really panders to nothing more than middle class tastes and hobbies. It is time to look again at the New Testament’s teaching on the church as a sojourning people where here we have no lasting home. The psalms of lament teach us that it is only when we have realistic horizons of expectation will we be able to stand firm against what is coming. If we do not understand that now, we are going to be sorely disappointed in the near future.
Read the whole thing here.
