Mormons, Baptists, and Christians

[M. Lynne Murphy]

>Does Baylor have an official policy statement that says that Mormons are not
>Christians, or is the exclusion of Mormons rather based on interpretation of
>what it means to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior and develop a
>personal relationship with Jesus?

The contracts here say something about Jesus, but there is no official list
of "approved" and "unapproved" churches--at least not in the faculty
handbook and such places.  The departments have just learned from experience
which religious affiliations do not pass the administration's muster.

There are other interpretations of "Christian", of course, that do not have
anything to do with "personal relationships" and "personal saviors"...I'm
tempted to say that's a pretty American way of dealing with a deity.

I like to say that I'm a Christian in the same sense that I might (or might
not) be a Marxist or a Chomskyan-- Jesus someone with good ideas that I want
to follow (much more so than Marx or Chomsky, actually).  (Of course, we
could get picky then and say that I must be a Jesusan rather than a
Christian...)

Lynne