Mormon leaders, military veterans and elected officials reacted with anger to a new Department of Defense policy that does not consider The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be a Christian religion as part of a wider effort to cut down the U.S. military’s list of recognized faiths.
“The Pentagon’s decision to list The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints apart from other Christian faiths is wrong and needs to be corrected,” Republican Rep. Mike Kennedy, of heavily Mormon Utah, wrote on X on Sunday.
They literally are Christian, which is the belief in Jesus as the son of God. Full stop. Any other definition is intentionally designed by certain Christians to delegitimize other versions of Christianity.
The biblical canon was determined by several committees hundreds of years after Christianity was founded, and only explicitly formalized for Catholics in 1545! Heck the canon is STILL not fully agreed upon in Christian denominations. It’s clearly a terrible indicator for what defines a Christian.
Moreover, just because one religion decided to add to that canon does not inherently stop them from being Christian. It’s ALL made up, a little extra bullshit doesn’t make it any different.
Christians arguing about definitions and who should have the power to impose their pet view 🍿
I mean, in their canon, Jesus visited America right? Is it the same Jesus, fundamentally?
Yes, Jesus, son of God, born to the Virgin Mary, died on the cross, resurrected. Then only AFTER his resurrection he was supposed to have visited the Americas very briefly.
It’s basically equivalent to Jesus appearing to Saul rather than his secret vacation in America.
I mean, not that there’s any evidence at all for anything in the Book of Mormon (quite the contrary) but that’s not the part that would be incompatible canonically.
i vaguely remember him. played outfield for the giants and astros, right?
No, no…he’s the one who came back and kept a low profile as a record sales clerk, only to be eventually recognized then subsequently whisked up in his sudden stardom.
The Son of God who is fully one with God Himself, the second person of the Trinity, which is one God in three persons.
A ton of the earliest writings in the church were dealing with explaining the Trinity, and nearly every time for the first several hundred years that the Christian church found it important enough to get together and publicly denounce someone as a heretic, it was because of denying some part of that equation (either the Trinity itself, or Jesus as fully God, or Jesus as fully God and one with God the Father). The LDS chucks it out in favor of their own weird “nah, actually everyone’s kinda a god, that’s what’s up with Jesus.” A history dive on “begotten, not made” and the Nicene Creed is helpful here, comparing it with LDS doctrine on the nature of Jesus and on the end times.
That makes them heretics to orthodox Christianity (for denying that Jesus is not “one with the Father”, all homousia) for a similar reason to why Islam views Christians as heretics (because Islam views the Trinity as an assertion of multiple gods, counter to “Allah is one”).
A lot of people see a sort of “X derived from Y” and assume based on lack of any further digging that X and Y are interchangeable, when the very derivation from should call to attention that there was a fork in the road where beliefs diverged. Some of those forks are more divergent from one another than others; Presbyterians and Baptists have more in common than Presbyterians and Catholics, and those two groups themselves have more in common than Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox, and still Catholics and Eastern Orthodox have much more in common than LDS and any Christian denomination you could pick from a hat.
You cannot pretend orthodox Christianity is all of Christianity. That’s ridiculous.
I don’t have to. The Christian church formalized it in 325AD. Joey Smith just wasn’t creative enough to come up with a new heresy. He moved too quick to “okay so let’s do multiple wives and also since my wife is objecting to that God says she’s no longer a prophet and is actually a false shepherd” when he should’ve been doing his homework to make his con more credible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicene_Creed
EDIT: I think maybe you’re confused? I’m not asserting that the uppercase-O Orthodox Church is all of Christianity. I’m using the normal plain meaning of “orthodox”, which is “adhering to the fundamental principles held to be true by a religious group.” All Christians believe that Jesus is part of the Trinity and is fully God, because that’s what Christian means, in the same way that I can assert that all watercraft are things that can travel in water. The LDS faith is not Christian because their
cult leaderprophet decided stupidly to pick the defining trait of Christianity as a thing he wanted to change.The Nicene Creed is NOT the definition of Christianity.
There have always (and I mean always) been sects of Christianity that reject core points in that. Even the most cursory delves into religious history makes that painfully obvious.
If the best you’ve got is “the globally-accepted definition of Christianity that was agreed upon immediately after its founding millennia ago by the closest adherents of Christianity, and was formally codified within the first couple hundred years only so as to explicitly name disagreement with this definition as specifically not being Christianity, and which was only ever disputed in mid-1800s Utah by a random dude who wanted to legitimize his brand-new polygamy cult by pretending it’s part of Christianity is not the definition of Christianity”
…I don’t think you’re in as strong a position as you seem to think.
Please, even a brief cursory search proves that Mormons aren’t the only Christians that denounce the Nicene Creed. If you aren’t even willing to do a simple Wikipedia search to verify your facts, this conversation isn’t worth continuing. Have a good day!
So you mean eastern orthodox?
Because the roman catholic changed the nicene creed around 1000 AD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filioque
That’s an additive change, not a conflicting one.
What you’re saying is like “the US amended its Constitution to give women the right to vote, so you can’t claim they grant the right to free speech.” The fact that the 19th amendment came after the 1st amendment does not mean the 19th amendment disagrees with the 1st amendment; rather, they address two different subjects, both of which independently needed fixing by addressing them in a foundational document.
If anything, the Filioque, as I understand it, strengthens what I’m saying, because it was a change to say that the Holy Spirit proceeds not just from the Father, but from the Father and the Son (Jesus), since they’re one.
That contradicts Mormon teaching even harder, since Mormon teaching is that Jesus is a distinct, separate god, and is not “one” with the Father (Yahweh) in the way that Jesus himself said he was (“I and my Father are one” in John 10; “whoever has seen me has seen the Father” in John 14) or that the rest of the Christian New Testament teach (as distinct from the Mormon editions, which have been changed based on Joseph Smith’s “visions” that all existing manuscripts were somehow secretly corrupted from some hypothetical original text that has never been found nor referenced in any writings prior to Smith coming up with the idea).
Ok, thanks
Nope. I mean the name is there, but this is so easily traced to the grift that one has to really do some mental gymnastics to say it’s even a religion much less a Christian one.
How often did Jesus teach about how dark skin was a curse from God?
The bible was a building block to the grift of Smith, that is all.
You’re twisting definitions. “Religion” is a widely applicable term, and just because somebody is doing something bad with a religion doesn’t invalidate its taxonomy.
No I am not twisting definitions. I am saying it’s easy to see that this one has nothing to do with the religious premise it jumped on and everything to do with grift.
They might all be grifts, but this one is explicitly easy to see that they just jumped someone else’s train. And therefore it is nothing to do with the other various sects.
Way more often than mainstream Christianity wants to admit. It’s literally the root of white supremacy…but that’s not a popular subject among the modern Christians.
I would love for you to quote some scripture backing that up
Start here and scroll down to the Christianity subtitle. It starts with the curse of Cain. I was taught this growing up, and it’s the basis of white Christians sidelining brown and black people within the church. Also, remembering that Christianity is a white religion that was pushed on slaves in America…and then sidelined outside of it by the same damn people!
Yeah, so did I. Jesus never said anything about the mark of cain.
Correct. It’s in Genesis. The common mistake a lot of Christian apologists make is to simply dismiss the Old Testament unless it serves them (gay references).
That’s what you responded to and you just admitted your original answer was bullshit. They didn’t say “Christianity” they said “Jesus.”
People dismiss a lot of the Old Testament because it’s largely irrelevant since Jesus “died for our sins” and we stopped paying attention to a lot of the laws from back then like wearing clothes of many different types of fibers or men shaving their beards.
As someone who was raised Christian but is an atheist now, but even with all the crazy bullshit I dealt with in the sect I was raised in, the mark of Cain was never connected to race.
But it’s dismissed because a lot of the Old Testament literally doesn’t matter now. Modern Christian’s don’t sacrifice lambs to God, because Jesus was the sacrifice for everyone. It’s not dismissed by apologists, it’s also dismissed by many mainline Christian sects (Catholicism respects the Old Testament more than protestant churches). The Old Testament is the history, and is similar to the Jewish texts it was pulled from, so only the New Testament really matters in the larger picture of Christianity.
I’m not trying to deceive anyone here. I’m also an atheist after being raised evangelical. I allow carry it further in that I’m anti-religion.
I dismiss the entire Bible, not just the OT.
You seem to be confusing Jesus and Christianity
The scripture itself does not in any way imply that the mark of Cain was dark skin and your link doesn’t argue otherwise.
It is/was a commonly held belief among Christians for quite some time, and the link explains that and which scripture it derived from.