When you let liberals talk about religion...


...you usually get wince-making statements that make you go "Whisky Tango Foxtrot?"

Feminist Mormon religious columnist Joanna Brooks offers an example of this principle in action:

Big confession: I generally feel a sense of relief when the Christmas season comes to a close.

Except for the fact that the divine feminine will now disappear for another eleven months.

That means something to a Mormon feminist. Protestantism in general is starved of female divinity and iconography. Mormonism is an especially poignant case: our doctrine actually teaches us that God is a couple—a Heavenly Father and a Heavenly Mother—though Heavenly Mother is basically hidden in mainstream Mormon talk and practice.

Except during Christmas time. She comes out of our closets and cupboards and takes center stage in our creches. She gets long American Idol-style solos in our wardhouse nativity plays.

And sometimes, people even read the revolutionary 10-verse sermon Mary gives in Luke 1, celebrating a God that favors the poor and "puts down the mighty."

Our Catholic and High Church Protestant cousins call it the Magnificat. We Mormons (and lots of other folks) don't pay it much attention—the longest piece of recorded speech by a woman in our scriptures—except during Christmastime.

I have to wince when I read this kind of thing - and I'm not a Mormon.

Yes, the LDS does teach that there is a generally unmentioned Heavenly Mother responsible with the Heavenly Father for generating the "spirit children" that includes everyone who ever lived, or didn't quite make it to embodied existence, such you, I, Jesus and Satan.

But as far as I know the Blessed Virgin Mary has never been identified as that - or, a - Heavenly Mother.  Official Mormon theology tends to discourage much - actually all - speculation as to this Heavenly Mother, but it seems a stretch to think - even under Mormon theology - that the embodied Blessed Virgin Mary would herself be the Heavenly Mother who gave existence to the Blessed Virgin Mary as a "spirit child."

Yet, Ms. Brooks identifies Mary with the Heavenly Mother who comes out of the "cupboards and takes center stage in our creches."
Just goes to show what happens when burnishing your credential as an outsider critic of your faith tradition takes precedence over actually knowing what your tradition teaches.