Tribal Religions

I volunteer for the Mormon Women Project, running their facebook page, as well as, editing and publishing a monthly e-newsletter.  I love working with this diverse group of women, dedicated to celebrating the fact that there are many ways to choose the right.  We publish an profile of a Mormon woman every week, and this week's interview had an excellent quote I want to share.

I remember having a crisis of faith when I was in graduate school and we were studying literature. I was taking a course called “Black Literature,” and one of the authors of an assigned book wrote about how he had given up what he called “tribal religions” to become a Bahá’í. Why? Because he viewed Christianity, Judaism and Islam as tribal religions. The nature of a tribal religion is that it excludes anyone who is not part of the “tribe.” I thought about that (and of course Mormonism is very tribal) and agreed with him that tribal religions were destructive. I remember thinking that I could give up the church because excluding others is not what a loving God would do. Then I started thinking about family and how important family is for the development of a child and obviously a baby would not survive without a family, which is actually just a small tribe. So the tribe was probably not the problem. Everyone needs a family and that tribe to give them strength, but then that strength should be focused outside of the tribe and community rather than trying to keep people huddled together. That’s really at the core of my religious faith. I am a very religious person. I am a very religious Mormon. But the purpose of the church is to make people strong in order to reach out to the larger world, and not to keep us isolated from the world.

Perfectly said.