Over the weekend, Nancy Ross published an interview with Kerry Pray about her new book The Book of Queer Mormon Joy on the Exponent II blog. One thing that stood out to me about the interview is the way that Pray’s feelings about the word “Mormon” echo my own:

“Ex-Mormon” never felt quite right because you don’t actually stop feeling Mormon when you have been one your entire life! It’s your culture and your heritage and where you come from. I tried post-Mormon for a while. But after Nelson made “Mormon” a forbidden word it got a whole lot easier because Mormon no longer necessarily referred to membership in the institutional church, which I no longer consider myself a part of.

preface

A quick preface: This is a post that I originally wrote nearly two years ago for By Common Consent. Lately, it’s been bugging me that I don’t have a version of it up on my own site, and since I haven’t had a lot of time this week to write anything original, I’m going to repost this here.

This post elaborates on one of my favorite close readings of the Book of Mormon. It surprises me that in his criticism of the word “Mormon,” Russell Nelson seems to think that the name originates with the character named Mormon rather than the place that he’s named after (within the narrative of the Book of Mormon)—and the implicit reasons he’s named after that place. For years, I’ve been interested in the way that the history of the word “Mormon” within the narrative of the book that bears its name serves as a symbol of baptism; more recently, I’ve grown to appreciate the way that it refers more broadly to Christian redemption.