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Video Transcript:
This video about heretical “Christian” cults has gotten a ton of views in a short amount of time. And guess who’s at the top of their list? That’s right, your friendly neighborhood Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Let’s take a look:
Can you be Christian and believe God is actually a woman in South Korea, or that the Garden of Eden is really in Missouri, or that God is just a metaphor for peace and love? There are some groups that teach this, which raises the question, what does Christian even mean? Who counts as Christian? It means anyone who identifies as a Christian man. You can’t just gatekeep a religion. Well, if Christian can mean anything, then it means nothing. So it has to mean something. There has to be some boundary between true and false Christianity.
I think this is a strawman argument. I don’t think most people are claiming that Christian can just mean anything. Latter-day Saints certainly aren’t making that argument. I think this is also an appeal to ridicule. He’s making the other side look silly (even though it’s not really the position of the other side), and thus primes us to get on board with his perspective, which will be framed as much more reasonable.
Historically, that boundary has been the creeds of the early church, which teach things like the trinity, the resurrection, and basic ideas about the church.
OK, so I’d say that the doctrine of the resurrection has been around a lot longer than the creeds. If a wholesale belief in the creeds themselves qualifies one to be a Christian, then Latter-day Saints would argue that neither Peter, Paul, John, nor any other biblical writers were Christian, because the creeds were developed hundreds of years after New Testament times. Some aspects of those creeds, like Christ’s resurrection, are very clearly an integral part of the New Testament. Other aspects, like the trinitarian view of God, are a lot more fuzzy. Even Harper’s Bible Dictionary acknowledges that “The formal doctrine of the Trinity as it was defined by the great church councils of the fourth and fifth centuries is not to be found in the NT.” So I have a problem with this idea that adherence to these post-biblical creeds determines whether or not you are a true Christian. But stay tuned. We’ve got a lot more to say about this.
All the mainstream Christian denominations believe these creeds. But there are some fringe groups that not only reject the beliefs of the creeds but think that Christians have been deceived for centuries by believing them. So these groups are considered heretical by the standards of historic Christianity.
Let’s start with the Mormons, or as they call themselves, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But we’re not saying that every time. They’re by far the biggest of these groups and have the most interesting architecture, even though their temples look more like sorcerers’ towers than churches.
So, a little insider info here for those that might not know this, but temples don’t look like churches … because they’re not churches. But I do appreciate the sorcerers’ tower joke. It’s a little general. I think a more specific Minas Morgul comparison would have landed better — much more ominous.
But they were started in America in 1830 by this guy, Joseph Smith. They began in New York, but the Yankees kicked them out, so they made their way to Utah, which is where they mostly are to this day.
As a side note here, Utah obviously does have the most dense population of Latter-day Saints in the United States, but overall, less than one-third of Latter-day Saints who live in the United States live in Utah. If we look internationally, there have been more members outside of the United States than inside since the 1990s.
America is very important to Mormons. They think the Garden of Eden was in modern-day Missouri.
So this creator talks about the Church for a grand total of about a minute and a half, and I find it very telling that in that time, he chose to bring up the Garden of Eden. In my decades of activity in the Church, I don’t remember a single time when someone got up to the pulpit to remind us that hey, don’t forget that the Garden of Eden is in Missouri. This is a belief in the Church — there’s some nuance — but it’s really a footnote. It just seems like this creator was trying to dig up the weirdest thing he could find and blast it out to the internet, representing it as one of the hallmark beliefs of a Mormon. C’est la vie.
They think one of the lost tribes of Israel made their way to the Americas and became the Native Americans.
OK, so a little bit of oversimplified history here: The prophet Jacob had 12 sons who became the 12 tribes of Israel. Fast forward, and you’ve got 10 of those 12 tribes living in the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and the other 2 living in the Kingdom of Judah. In 722 BC, Assyria conquered the Northern Kingdom and hauled those 10 tribes off to Assyria — these are the lost 10 tribes. The Book of Mormon is not about any of these 10 tribes sneaking off to America. It’s about two families from Judea, more than a hundred years later, who travel to the New World.
Now, Lehi was a descendant of the tribe of Manasseh, which means his ancestors might have been refugees who fled to the southern kingdom when Assyria attacked the northern kingdom — but this story isn’t really about any of the lost 10 tribes in the traditional sense.
And Lehi wasn’t the first person to arrive in the Americas — his family would have been a small fish in a large pond. My guess is that in the grand scheme of things, Lehi’s genetic contribution to modern Native American populations would be relatively small.
They believe Jesus appeared to the Americans after his ascension.
Absolutely, yes. I don’t see why that’s an issue. And after he visited the Nephites in the Americas, we believe he probably went off and visited other people elsewhere.
And they believe the angel “Moronee” left invisible golden tablets in upstate New York, which Joseph Smith found and transcribed into the Book of Mormon.
Oh boy. His name was Moroni, not Moronee, and the plates were not invisible. Go pick up literally any Book of Mormon, and within the first few pages in the preface to the book, you’ll find the published testimonies of 11 witnesses. I’ve collected about 70 additional statements from or about those witnesses reaffirming throughout their lives that they did indeed see the plates. Some witnesses even held the plates and turned the pages. I want to give this creator the benefit of the doubt, but to claim that the plates were invisible is either a painfully uninformed take or a willful disregard for the corpus of witness statements available. I hope it’s the former, but if it’s the latter, I’m concerned about what else he’s got to say about us. It’s a lot easier to shrug off the Book of Mormon if you can portray it as a figment of one man’s imagination, but that’s not what the evidence points to.
They also believe black people’s dark skin was a curse from God until God changed his mind in 1978.
Ah, the curse of Ham and the curse of Cain. Yes, this was a persistent belief for a long time in the Church — I’m not going to defend it or excuse it. I will say, though, that the idea that black skin was the mark of the curse of Cain was a belief that predated the Church by at least a hundred years in the United States. By the time Joseph Smith came around, the curse of Cain was culturally a popular Protestant belief that many converts brought with them into the Church. It absolutely represents a rough patch of our history, but if this creator considers himself a Protestant, to a certain extent, this is part of his history as well.
Mormons believe God was once a man like we are, and we can become gods like God is, but Christians believe that God has always existed and never changes.
God once being a man we don’t know much about. That’s another thing where I don’t remember the last time I heard that taught from the pulpit. But men and women becoming like God is absolutely a fundamental doctrine of our faith. That is what we believe God’s endgame is for His children. It’s the reason for it all. Now, I am glad that this creator said we become like God. A lot of the time, people think we’re trying to replace or surpass God. Or usurp God’s throne like Satan wanted to do in the Garden of Jackson County, Missouri. But that’s not the case. We just believe that God wants us to know the things He knows and do the things he does. And just as any father glories in seeing his children progress, we believe that our progression in the eternities glorifies God.
Christians also believe in the Trinity, where the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all one being. They’re all the same God and are only different in their relations to each other. But Mormons believe that they are three different beings, meaning they believe in three gods.
Alright, so we’re back to the Trinity. We do believe that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are separate beings. But we do not believe they are remotely similar to the pagan pantheon of competing and fickle gods of antiquity. As Elder Jeffrey R. Holland taught to new mission presidents: “when we’ve made the point about the distinctiveness of Their persons, it is equally important to stress how unified the Godhead is and truly One they are in every other conceivable way … the members of the Godhead are much more united, much more alike, much more the same and much more one than many Christians think we believe and more than we have sometimes adequately explained.”
I have great respect for trinitarians, and I have no problem if the Trinity is what makes the most sense to other people. More power to ’em. But if I’m keeping it real, I just struggle with it. I struggle with the claim that Latter-day Saints believe in a different God when I have yet to meet someone who can actually explain to me what the trinitarian God even is in the first place. And I don’t mean to be harsh, I’m not trying to disparage anyone, I just want to be clear with where I’m at:
People show me diagrams like these to explain what God is, but just because you can draw a paradox on paper doesn’t make it any less of a paradox. I don’t know what this kind of being is. I hear a lot about what God is not — that God has no form, no body, takes up no space, exists outside of time, and is immaterial (meaning that He is not composed of actual matter) — but that doesn’t tell me what or who he or it is. Usually, I’m just told, Well, God is an unknowable mystery, and there’s really no way to comprehend him. And it’s like… why are we attacked so severely for not believing in the right God, when the right God isn’t even comprehensible to begin with? Things I struggle with!
Since Christians and Mormons believe in different gods, they can’t be said to be the same religion
Listen, whenever this question about whether or not Mormons are Christians comes up, there are some people who just think that Latter-day Saints just want to be more mainstream — more accepted — they want to sit at the same table as the cool kids. Let me be perfectly clear: If that was my goal, I’d just become a Protestant. I don’t want to be considered a Christian to be viewed as more Protestant. I want to be considered a Christian because I want there to be zero confusion about my dedication and absolute loyalty to my Savior, Jesus Christ.
Of course, Redeemed Zoomer isn’t the first to take this approach to our faith online, and he won’t be the last. If this response was helpful to you, you might also like this one, in which some very popular pastors that I’m generally a fan of say some very wrong things about the Latter-day Saint faith. I’ll see you there.
Learning More:
Interview with BYU professor Casey Paul Griffiths about “becoming like God”: https://tinyurl.com/4yy4utfv
The Book of Mormon and the Origin of Native Americans from a Maternally Inherited DNA Standpoint, by geneticist Ugo Perego: https://bit.ly/2L3CYrn