[Another in the series of “Responding to Bumper Stickers,” or “Long Answers to Short Questions,” in which I try to give a Latter-day Saint response to a question or claim commonly lobbed against us on X.]
Sometimes it comes up as a question: “If you’re Christian, why don’t you display the cross?” Sometimes it’s an accusation: “Mormons aren’t Christian — they don’t even use the cross!”
There are really two issues here, and although they’re linked to the point that sometimes it’s hard to discern that there ARE two issues, I’m going to try to deal with them separately.
1. Why Latter-day Saints don’t display the cross.
Just because I’m contrarian (okay, not JUST because I’m contrarian, I also think I’m right), I’m going to tell you upfront that I think most Latter-day Saint answers to questions like that are ex post facto justifications, combined with the overlapping Venn diagram of this issue with the one I deal with below. (Man, keeping these two issues apart is HARD.)
The real reason why the cross never became part of the Latter-day Saint lexicon is simply cultural. In the early to mid-19th century, in the “low church” Protestantism from which the early “Mormon” converts were largely drawn, the cross simply wasn’t a common symbol. Most churches didn’t have it on steeples, as that would look too “Catholic” (even “high church” Protestants such as Episcopalians or Lutherans used it only infrequently and cautiously, and more often inside their buildings than displayed outside). Similarly, crosses as pieces of personal jewelry were rare and looked upon with suspicion, as being symbols of “popery.” It wasn’t until the late 19th and early 20th century that cross iconography became common among American Protestants.
The Latter-day Saints as a group left the confines of the United States for the Great Salt Lake area in 1847, and were largely culturally isolated until Utah became a state in 1896, and especially during the 22-year period before the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869. By the time the Latter-day Saints incrementally began to rejoin the cultural mainstream, they had established their own visual set of cues specific to the distinctiveness of their worship. And given that the people continuing the decades-long tradition of railing against the Latter-day Saints and ridiculing what they held sacred were now wearing crosses and putting them on their buildings, can you really blame the Latter-day Saints for not adopting the newfangled signifiers of those who held them in contempt? (Please read that again. I’m not saying that all [or even most] cross-wearers were against the Saints… but most of those who came out loudly against the Saints were wearing crosses.)
2. Why it’s okay that Latter-day Saints don’t display the cross.
See how it’s a different question? Related, but distinct?
As explained above, the cross has never been the universal symbol of Christians, in America or elsewhere. Immediately following the Reformation, Protestant denominations had widely varying views of the cross; some, like Lutherans, largely kept the crucifix (i.e., the cross with Christ’s body) as Catholics used; others, like Anglicans, generally gravitated toward the empty cross; still others, like some flavors of Calvinism, eschewed the cross or any iconography altogether as smacking of idolatry.
But heck, go back more than a thousand years before the Reformation; the cross was only one of the symbols sometimes used among Christian communities before Constantine. Everyone knows about the fish, which was both an acrostic for “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior” in Greek and a reference to “fishers of men.” There were also the anchor, the dove, the Alpha and Omega…
The point is that there’s not one specific, mandated symbol for Christianity.
As mentioned above, many early Latter-day Saints had been drawn from “low church” Protestantism, which were the denominations which — even when they did use or reference the cross inside their buildings — eschewed the Catholic-style crucifix with an effigy of Jesus Christ dying upon it. To many of them, a cross WITHOUT a suffering Jesus was a more triumphant and hopeful symbol of God’s power to resurrect and reconcile his people. In 20th- and 21st-century justifications of Latter-day Saints not using crosses (like I said above, largely ex post facto addressing Issue #1 but focusing more on Issue #2), we just go one step further. Thus:
Said he [a Protestant minister]: “I’ve been all through this building, this temple which carries on its face the name of Jesus Christ, but nowhere have I seen any representation of the cross, the symbol of Christianity. I have noted your buildings elsewhere and likewise find an absence of the cross. Why is this when you say you believe in Jesus Christ?”
I responded: “I do not wish to give offense to any of my Christian colleagues who use the cross on the steeples of their cathedrals and at the altars of their chapels, who wear it on their vestments, and imprint it on their books and other literature. But for us, the cross is the symbol of the dying Christ, while our message is a declaration of the Living Christ.”
He then asked: “If you do not use the cross, what is the symbol of your religion?”
I replied that the lives of our people must become the most meaningful expression of our faith and, in fact, therefore, the symbol of our worship.
– President Gordon B. Hinckley, “The Symbol of Our Faith”
See also: Jeffrey R. Holland, “Lifted Up upon the Cross”
(I would also point out that those temples, as well as our meetinghouses, are full of images of Jesus Christ teaching, healing, ministering to children, emerging from the tomb with pierced hands and feet, coming in His glory, etc. The cross isn’t front and center, but Jesus is very much present.)