Confession:  When I was just a teenage boy, I shoplifted from a local mini-market a silver plated cross necklace, and defiantly wore it to church on the following Sunday.  I wore the necklace for the purpose of making a statement to my congregation, testifying of my spiritual status before God.  Strange this story may sound. One may perceive these actions as paradoxical, since my sin of stealing would undermine the message of the cross generally understood by Christians today.  But I was no typical Christian, and herein lay the answer to the riddle: I was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Since Latter-day Saints (LDS) tend to believe that the cross is a symbol of apostasy, it is understandable that I (a rebellious teenager at the time) would have found no contradiction in wearing the stolen jewelry to church.  As my theft was contrary to expected LDS behavior, so too was my display of the cross: “[Crosses] are inharmonious with the quiet spirit of worship,” says Apostle Bruce R. McConkie in his highly published and widely influential book Mormon Doctrine.[1]  My display of the cross was an act of rebellion against the ecclesiastical authority and teachings of the Church.

Having grown older, less defiant, and more responsible since my teenage years, I chose to serve a two-year mission for the LDS church.  In the early months of my service, however, I was again confronted with a paradox related to the Mormon cross taboo.  My companion and I were teaching an investigator who was seriously considering the possibility of joining the Church.  We encouraged him to read the Book of Mormon and seek the Lord’s guidance through prayer; the following week, with tears in his eyes he enthusiastically told us that he had received an answer from God to join: the night before he saw in a dream a “cross of flames”, which as a convert from Catholicism, made complete sense to him, but as a Mormon missionary I was very confused.  Unsure how to respond, all I could think to do was raise my eyebrows and asked him, “Will you be baptized?”  I was happy that he accepted the invitation; however, I remained disturbed over the idea that God would answer a prayer with an apostate sign in order to lead someone toward the Church.  “What do you think about Gabriel’s dream?” I asked my companion; to which he replied, “I don’t know Elder?”  My companion seemed to be as confused as I was.

Turning to LDS literature made reconciliation all the more difficult for me, as I discovered that Apostle McConkie had not only claimed that the cross was inharmonious with Mormonism, but he also identified its sign as the Mark of the Beast (citing Revelation 13:16-17).[2]  Equally confusing, I read Apostle Joseph Fielding Smith’s disregard for the cross, claiming that it was “repugnant and contrary to the true worship of our Redeemer… [It is] very poor taste and inconsistent to our worship.” Smith continues,

We may be definitely sure that if our Lord had been killed with a dagger or with a sword, it would have been very strange if religious people this day would have graced such a weapon by wearing and adoring it because it was by such a means that our Lord was put to death.[3]

Joseph Fielding Smith’s rationale, which reduces the symbol to a mere instrument of torture and death, has become a popular[4] rebuttal for Latter-day Saints responding to the claim that they are “enemies of the cross.”[5]

The Mormon disdain for the symbol has at times been acted out in extreme ways.  On one occasion, a group of LDS young women arrive to Girl’s Camp, shocked to find within their tent crude wooden crosses displayed above each of the cots.  Having identified the crosses as “symbols of the Great Whore of Babylon,” the adult counselors instructs the young girls to cut all of them down with their pocketknives.  To their chagrin, they realize later that they had actually cut down the frames for hanging mosquito netting![6]

On other occasions, the negative stigma has born less humorous fruits. A Baptist pastor writes a letter to the administration of an Indiana elementary school predominately attended by Latter-day Saints:  “Several times this new school year,” the Pastor tells of his first-grade daughter, “as well as a time or two last year, she has experienced some difficulties because on occasion she wears a cross necklace to school….  [S]ome children in her class have told her that it is bad to wear the cross.  One child even said that he hated the cross and that she should take it off.”[7]  Similarly, but from a different report, an LDS elementary school teacher was said to have flipped a crucifix worn by a little girl, “asking her why she was wearing dead bodies on her.”[8]

To give one more example, two Mormon missionaries visit an investigator’s home, notice a decorated homemade cross hanging on the wall, and ask if they can have it.  The investigator hands it over – presumably as a gift, thinking that they liked it and perhaps wanted to hang it on their own wall.  But after the missionaries leave, they tear the cross to pieces in disgust.[9]  Why did these missionaries do such a thing?  The return missionary explains, “We both believed that… having that cross there was inviting Satan into his home, and that was causing this guy problems accepting our ‘truth’.”  In hindsight he expresses regret over these actions, “Yeah, pretty stupid, I know. But so things go,” he says, “Mormons take things so literally, and so seriously, there simply must be a reason we do the things we do.”[10]  No longer accepting the LDS rationale for rejecting the symbol, he now compares this experience to the story of a woman cooking a pot-roast:

A newly-wed husband noticed that every time his wife cooked a pot roast she would first cut an inch off either end before putting it in the oven. When he asked why, she said “Because that’s how you are supposed to cook pot roast.” Unsatisfied with her answer he pushed until she admitted that she learned it from her mother.

Waiting until a visit with his wife’s mother, the husband asked, “Your daughter tells me you taught her to cook pot roast by first cutting an inch off each end?” to which the mother replied, “Well of course, that’s how pot roast is cooked.” But the husband was not to be deterred, and after pressing his mother-in-law on the subject she finally admitted that she’d learned it from her mother.

This meant the husband had to ask the wife’s grandmother. When he finally got his chance he asked: “Your granddaughter’s mother told me you taught her to cut an inch off each end of a pot roast before cooking. She swore it was a requirement, but I’m dying to know why? Is there any sane reason to throw away two inches of perfectly good meat in order to cook a pot roast?!?”

Laughing, the grandmother said “Oh, heavens no! You see in those days we were very poor and didn’t own much cookware. I cut the ends off the pot roast so it would fit in my only pan!“[11]

I agree that this parable is quite fitting.  Mormons have assumed that they are supposed to reject the symbol of the cross, without really understanding the actual basis for the taboo.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Mormon disdain for the symbol was more of a late development in Church history, emerging at the grass roots around the turn of the 20^th century, and was institutionalized in the 1950’s under the direction of President David O. McKay, on grounds that it was a catholic symbol.  Prior to this time, many Latter-day Saints (including Church authorities), embraced and promoted the symbol of the cross.

My recently published book, Banishing the Cross: The Emergence of a Mormon Taboo (John Whitmer Books, 2012) traces the development of LDS attitudes toward the symbol, and shows that the cross aversion in Mormon culture actually began as a means to disassociate the Church from Catholicism.  The book includes many 19^th century photos of the cross being worn as jewelry, stitched it into quilts, framed and hung on walls, incorporated in funeral floral arrangements, etc.  Perhaps most interesting of all, I explore in detail the LDS Church’s 1916 Ensign Peak cross monument proposal—a proposal to the Salt Lake City Council that had stirred great controversy within and outside the Church