When They Say 'Mormons Aren't Christians'
The most frustrating argument-starter ever...
I ran an “apologetics” website for several years. Actually, it wasn’t an apologetics site because I tried to avoid that. There was a lot of “defense of the faith” content, but I was mostly interested in exposing anti-Mormon tactics. When you are dealing with anti-Mormons, you’re not dealing with an honest person. You’re dealing with a person who resonates with lies. They are addicted to a sensation of contention and, unchecked, it can evolve into outright hate, and violence.
At the lowest level, you’re dealing with an ignorant person who thinks they know something. That’s hard to fix. A person has to be in the position of questioning themselves and most people are not that reflective. If you’re dealing with a religious bigot who has been primed by a hireling priest or pastor, they’re a hard nut to crack. For the most part, they don’t even understand the beliefs of their own denomination. They’ve never read anything but a few Bible verses and said the “Sinners’ Prayer” to get “saved.” The underlying reason for their animus against us is that we represent a challenge to that comfortable ignorance. The possibility that they might not be saved by grace alone means that their comfortable self-satisfaction may be unfounded. God might really want them to repent, not spend Sunday watching football, smoking, drinking, and a tenth of their increase.
A lot of Latter-day Saints spend an unwarranted amount of time trying to convince sectarian Christians that we are just like them. We are not. We are THE Christians. They are sectarians, followers of apostate doctrines, formulated by scheming councils hundreds of years ago. They believe in a “Triune” being that simply does not exist. Elder Parley P. Pratt once said something to this effect: “There are two kinds of atheists. One believes that nothing is God; the other believes God is nothing.”
The atheist said that God doesn’t exist—that there is nothing that is God in the universe. It’s impossible to say that with certainty because you’d have to be God to prove it. You’d have to know everything and be able to see every place in eternity to determine that no such being existed—and at that point, you’d be omniscient, God.
The sectarian says that God is an immaterial essence that has no form, body, parts, or passions. Never mind that the Bible is replete with passages of God showing himself to people with a head, arms, fingers, body, feet, and even “back parts.” Never mind trying to explain what Jesus meant when he said “My Father is greater than I.” The intellectual hoop-jumping required to make sense of this is far beyond unreasonable. It’s mere sophistry to give a lie the appearance of truth. The sectarian believes that an immaterial nothing is God.
When it comes down to it, in my experience, I call them “Biblicans” because the Bible is their God, not God himself. When you converse with a sectarian and mention that the Bible is missing (by its own admission) some seventeen books and that you can point out obvious contradictions in some texts, the Biblical will react with hostility. Why? Because you have blasphemed his God. Biblicans claim the Book to be inerrant, perfect, whole, perspicacious, without flaw. I’m sorry, but that would be a description of God. The Bible was written by men. It was translated by men. Councils of men voted to decide what would be accepted as holy writ and what would be excluded. To claim the Bible is perfect is to attribute to it attributes of God. It makes the Bible an idol. Biblicans are idolaters. They worship a book. If you say something they consider negative about the Bible, they will seek to destroy you. Thus when they say we are not Christians, by whatever measure they define Christianity, I say “Good! Thank God!”
Now, a corollary of the argument that Latter-day Saints aren’t Christians, some will admit the point that we do believe in a being named Jesus Christ. It’s on the sign at our meeting houses, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We believe in a book that mentions Jesus on almost every page. (There’s more talk about Jesus in the Book of Mormon than there is in the Bible!) To get around that admission, they have to qualify it. They say we believe in a “different Jesus” or that we believe in “another gospel.” They will lock onto this like a pit bull because they have a Bible verse they can quote. They don’t understand any of the scriptural or historical context of that verse. They don’t know that another gospel was already being preached to first-century saints. Almost every book after Acts in the New Testament was written to root out that false gospel. What was the false gospel? Neoplatonism and Gnosticism.
Greek thought was influential in corrupting Judaism, ancient Christianity, and even Islam to some degree. It came down to the belief in one God. For there to be only one God, and for Christ to be that God, they had to explain away the notion that spirit was more refined and higher than matter. For God to become flesh, in the Incarnation, that posed a problem. Even more problematic was the idea that Jesus (and thus God) was resurrected bodily and that he rose into heaven with his body. That would mean that the flesh played an important role. How could a God who had a body dwell everywhere at once, or how could he dwell in a believer’s heart? It led to all kinds of conplex rationalizations.
Because of Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, many Christians believe the resurrection to be a metaphor. Catholics in the “stations of the cross” arrive at an empty tomb and a God that is bodily present in a wafer. Many Christians conceptualize God in this scenario: God the Father created a paradise and put Adam and Eve there. They got frisky in the garden, had sex and he kicked them out. The rest of us are sinners because of them. Having had his plan all messed up by the serpent, God’s “Plan B” was to leave heaven, come down here himself and fix things, then he got himself killed. Finally, he rose from the grave, and now exists as the Holy Spirit, in a kind of relay-race Godhead, where an “unchangeable” God changed into three different beings. Finally, with Islam, the Greek Neoplatonist and the Gnostics convinced their teachers that Jesus was not really crucified, that an angel took his place on the cross, and that Jesus lived to a ripe old age and died in East. This is why Islam sees Jesus as a holy prophet, not the Savior, not divine.
This is why Peter and John talk about the spirit of antichrist being already present in the Church. The key to detect it was the resurrection. If a believer confessed that Jesus was literally resurrected, then he was on the right track. If he believed the Gnostics and Neoplatonists, he had doubts about it. Paul’s fifteenth chapter of 1st Corinthians goes to great lengths to testify of the literal resurrection of Jesus.
Jude encouraged believers to stay faithful to the gospel “which was once delivered to the saints.” Jude speaks of “certain men crept in unawares” (apostates) who seduced the saints with false doctrines.
Our Biblican detractors don’t know any of this. They don’t know the history. They don’t read the actual text of the Bible. What they do read, their clergy explains away. The “certain men” are still out there blinding the eyes and hardening the hearts of their followers to the truth.
Do we want to be accepted as that kind of “Christian?” We shouldn’t desire that. We wish to be unmolested. In the past, and in some places today, these wicked “Christians” killed our prophet, harassed our missionaries, protest our temples, and even testified to governments to keep the restored gospel from going forth. We are willing to participate with them to do humanitarian service in the world, because that binds their hands, in some measure, from persecuting us. I say “in some measure” because they persist in trying to block the work. They just contract it out.
There are some 800 “ministries” and parachurches that exist simply to publish anti-Mormon media and literature to the world. The products of these ministries, many of which are actually for-profit businesses, are purchased and distributed by various denominations and churches. There used to be a megachurch in Texas that showed the anti-Mormon film, The Godmakers, to their youth groups every semester, to “inoculate” them from positive contacts they might have in school with their Latter-day Saint classmates. The churches host “anti-cult” conferences and seminars and they pay big bucks to these “consultants.” In their promotional literature, they call themselves the “counter-cult industry.”
The result is that almost every single convert to the Church inevitably comes in contact with anti-Mormon content before their baptism. It’s far more likely in the Internet age. I once mused that average, seemingly pleasant people, could suddenly turn nasty because of the anti-Mormon programming. It works kind of like those “Agent Smith” guys in The Matrix movies. You could have a grandma, all nice and sweet, and when she hears the word “Mormon,” she instantly becomes nasty and turns on you. The gray-haired granny turns into an “Agent Smith.”
I say this tongue-in-cheek, but there is some truth to it. I experienced it myself numerous times. Before I joined the Church in 1978, the devil took no interest in me whatsoever. I could do pretty much anything and people would be fine with it. When I started studying the Church and missionaries came to the house, a neighbor lady I barely knew intercepted my mother the next day. This lady had never so much as said “Hello” to me in the whole time we lived in that neighborhood. I knew she was religious because she had a son a few years younger than me who went to a private Christian school. When she saw the missionaries at my house, she made a beeline to my mother the next day and told them I was joining a cult. She really upset my mother greatly. It took some time to get her settled down and to think about what she had felt in her heart while the missionaries taught us.
I have seen this happen many times, more than I can recount. In most cases, our detractors, who say we aren’t really Christians are really Biblicans, who believe in an immaterial nothing, which they have supplanted by granting the attributes of God to a physical object: a book. If what they mean is that we aren’t idol-worshipers like them, that’s a good thing.
For most “Christians,” all they want is a “get out of hell free” card, kind of like Monopoly. They want to be saved by grace alone, meaning they want to eat the fruit of the tree of life and live forever in their sins, without ever having to repent. In my high school years, I attended several churches, much like Joseph Smith, trying to find which one was of God. I went to a Methodist church with a friend. I asked him why they said the “Apostles Creed,” when they didn’t have any apostles. I asked him why they professed belief in one church, holy and catholic, when they rejected Catholicism. He didn’t have any answers to those questions. Neither did the pastor. Finally, I asked him once, “Why do you go to the Methodist Church?” His answer was enlightening—and probably far too representative of the people of that faith.
My friend said that it was a nice church to go to because it didn’t demand too much of you. If there wasn’t a God, and it was all made-up, you didn’t waste a lot of time and energy there; and if there was a God, then you were covered because you went to church.
Ask a Baptist how what he believes differs from Methodists, or Episcopalians, or Presbyterians, or Lutherans, and you’ll be hard-pressed to get an informed answer. Most people pick a denomination either because that’s where their family went, or because they like the kind of music and preaching. Some people want stately organs and “softly-spoken magic spells” (hat tip to Pink Floyd) and other want fire and brimstone to keep you awake. Black people want churches with up-tempo music and call-and-response preaching. It’s a cultural, cathartic thing for them. In other words, most people don’t pick a church because they believe it to be “true.”
I think of the line from the old First Vision movie, where the boy Joseph asks about which of the churches was true. An older man answered, “All churches are true, so long as they preach Christ.” As Joseph observed in the film, “But they contradict one another.” God can’t be the author of the vast panorama of religious disagreement.
Either one church is true or none of them are. There can’t be two true churches that disagree with one another.
When I hear someone say that “Mormons aren’t Christians,” it makes my eyes want to roll back into my head. Their argument is evidence of an ignorance so profound that not even the Spirit of God can convince them otherwise. And in the end, that’s the only solution. Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice.” His sheep don’t argue back. They don’t resort to anti-Mormon arguments devised by devils in for-profit ministries and collared clergy who are hireling priests, teaching God’s children to worship a book as God itself.
Bear your testimony and press on. There are the elect to find, lost sheep who are waiting to hear the voice of Jesus in our message.