A quick note about Mormonism

I was having a conversation about politics with a co-worker a couple of months back and it turned to talks of political funding and organization by religious establishments and I made some comments that apparently distinguished Mormonism from Christianity. Although I said nothing negative about the LDS faith, I distinguished the two faiths as different. This co-worker happened to be LDS. And something he said struck me as kind of funny. He said, “I don’t know why everyone always sets us apart from the label ‘Christian’. We’re Christians too.”

Ever since he said that, I have been paying attention. It seems there is a new trend going on in the LDS church today that holds that Mormonism (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) is just another denomination of Christianity. At face value it seems believable enough. Mormons and Christians both believe that Jesus is the way to salvation. They believe that He is the Son of God. They believe you are saved by grace through faith in Jesus. They believe that the blessed hope in Christ and His gift of salvation will one day land you in heaven, a very nice place where God lives. Beyond that, they both come to your door and try to give you tracts or talk to you about Jesus.

You might be thinking, ‘with all those similarities, how could you say that they’re different?’ Well, let me tell you how the LDS church fundamentally differs from the classical Christian faith. Christians and Mormons use the same terminology, but they mean totally different things by them. A succinct statement of their differences is this: They both believe in God, but they’re not the same God. They both believe in Jesus, but they’re not the same Jesus. They both believe that grace saves, but they’re not the same grace. They both believe in heaven, but they’re not the same heaven.

The god of the LDS faith has no son. The term ‘sons of god’ simply means creations of god. Jesus is not the only begotten Son of God as Christians believe Him to be. He is one of many. And he’s a created being, the spirit brother of Satan (the devil). There is no trinity in LDS theology. In fact, the only reason Jesus holds the position he does as savior of the world is because he essentially raised his hand first when god asked who wanted to die for the sins of mankind. Grace, according to the apostle Paul, is totally unearned. He stated that if you could earn grace, it wasn’t grace, and Christ died for nothing. LDS teaches that although grace is unearned, there are different levels of grace you can attain by your actions, by “living pure” as I have heard it called. Lastly, they both believe in heaven, but the LDS vision of heaven is so entirely different from the classical Christian view, they cannot be the same heaven at all. This last point may be secondary, but the other three are absolute pillars of the Christian faith that cannot be compromised. If Jesus Christ is not God Himself, then we have no means of being redeemed and forgiven of our sins.

But let me tell you the most compelling reason that I think this is kind of a misinformation campaign. If you think about it, you could be a solid Bible believing Christian and elders Johnson and Duarte will still come to your house, offer to give you a Book of Mormon, and then ask you to read it and then pray and ask God if it’s true. And that’s the clincher. They don’t believe you are truly saved unless you are Mormon. In fact, their founder, Mr. Joseph Smith, when he founded the LDS church, received direct revelations from Jesus and from an angel which told him that all of the protestant Christian faiths were false, and even blasphemous. They were abominations. None of them were pure. The Christian faith had been altered from its original beliefs and intent so much so that none of the denominations could be trusted for salvation. This is the reason that Joseph Smith started the Mormon Church, exactly because Christianity as it was known (and is still known today) couldn't cut it.

So if Joseph Smith, the founder of the church, thought all protestant faiths were abominations to God (and Catholics were even worse), how could the Mormon faith be just another denomination of the protestant faith? What does that say about the Mormon faith? The idea of that is self-contradictory, self-defeating. I would even take it so far as to say that the attempt to equate the two is dishonest, and that was my point to my co-worker. I tried to choose my words as carefully as I could so I didn't offend him, I was hoping to just make him think. But if you run into this issue with LDS members who say “We’re just another Christian denomination, just like you,” remember that Joseph Smith sure didn't see it that way. He would have even been offended by that notion.