I really beg to differ. Community of Christ had a couple of reasons for the name change but the most important one is that the new name better describes their goal and mission.

In 1998, I sent the president of the church a book I had recently read entitled “Positioning” which says the name says it all whether it’s a product of an organization.

The author of this book illustrated his point by giving numerous examples of perfectly good products and organizations who had such a bad/confusing names that they failed to make an impact on the market. he also mentioned several dozen names that were a success because of their catchy or descriptive names.

I received an e-mail from that president thanking me for the book. He said he read it on board a plane on a trip to California.

It may have been influential in the re-naming of the church. Certainly a long cumbersome name does not lend itself to success.

1. As the biggest and most commonly referred to of the restoration churchs claiming belief in Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has the most at stake in this whole who is/isn’t a Mormon debate.

2. In my opinion, when people refer to the “Mormon church”, they are referring to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints without distinction or, very often awareness, of the existence of splinter branches. In my experience “Mormon church” is used interchangably in the popular vernacular as “LDS church”, whether that is technically correct or not.

3. As long as media outlets lazily and commonly refer to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints as the more common yet open for ambiguous interpretation “Mormon church” without delineating it’s core values against fundamentalist splinter branches, then the battle for hearts and minds must be fought, and whether or not it’s effective, the PR representatives can continue to fight misunderstanding however they see fit with my blessing.

4. This whole argument is an exercise in verbal gymnastics, and as long as it’s a contest, I have no problem in fighting for the term Mormon. I do, however, think it is a silly fight.

5. From this point forward, can we further this battle for intellectual ownership by referring to Mormon as the “M” word? This could lead to some great heated debates.

Community of Christ member: “Whassup my Mormon?”
LDS Church Member: “Don’t you DARE use that word! That’s OUR word!”

It’s fun over here at the bloggernacle!

Living near a huge Jewish population, I must respectfully disagree. The question “Who’s really a Jew?” is alive and well in Israel and other Jewish communities. (So this thread can continue for a few more millennia.)

The question ‘Who’s really a (Mormon, Jew, Muslim, etc)’ exists in every major faith tradition. Or at least I can’t think of any exceptions.

This, coming from Holden Caulfield?

You mean SLC isn’t the center of the know universe?

13 million (only 7 million active) out of 6.7 billion. Is SLC the center of anything?

LF is right. We take ourselves much more seriously than does the rest of the world.

I don’t really know what can be done about the problem, aside from my suggestion that we don’t care. The church took a lot of flack for trying to sweep polygamy under the rug. Now the church is taking a lot of flack for addressing polygamy directly. Neither approach seems to be effective. In a hypothetical world where my points 1-3 were widely understood by the public, I think the church would be more relaxed about the whole subject. It does seem that everything that the church has tried has been directed to either trying to dispel the common misperceptions, or alternatively to avoid contributing to them.

I think perhaps the problem is that the public just doesn’t think about Mormons often enough for them to bother with having an informed opinion about distinctions that are vital to us. Most of us probably don’t think enough about Islam to fully grok the difference between Sunni and Shia. We probably overestimate the extent to which the public thinks about us at all.