THE LDS CHURCH 

Gary South has a must read column in the Politico about the Mormon religion.  I agree with him – no bigotry is intended, but there are things people need to know about it. And in this age of tolerance it takes some personal courage to come out and say I have a problem with a few things.  So do I.  Go ahead and label me a bigot, but heck, 85% of the Reidheads out there are LDS.  The other side of my family has been involved since day one.  I have a right to say what I think. 

“…In today's context, however, the most notable and troubling question about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is not about church governance. Rather, it is about the Mormon Church's official view —though recently soft-pedaled by the church hierarchy for obvious reasons —- regarding the very validity of all other self-professed Christians, their faith traditions and their rituals.

 

The fundamental raison d'être of the Mormon Church is the core belief that no other Christian denomination whatsoever —- whether Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Assemblies of God, Baptist, Anabaptist, you name it —- is valid. In fact, Mormons assert that there was no legitimate Christian church whatsoever, and therefore no legitimate Christians, virtually from the time the last remaining apostles died off at the end of the first century until the founding of the Mormon religion in 1830 by the self-proclaimed latter-day prophet Joseph Smith. They refer to this nearly 1,800-year interregnum as the "Great Apostasy," which pretty much speaks for itself…. He reported a vision in the forest in which both God the Father and Jesus the Son appeared before him. Smith asked the spectral heavenly presences which denomination he should join. Here, in Smith's own words, in "Pearl of Great Price," a writing published by the Mormon Church, is the response he claims to have received directly from the mouth of God (my comments added in brackets):

 

"I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination [apparently, including the Nicene Creed and the Apostles' Creed, the two most common summations of Christian belief] in His sight; that those professors [those who professed those creeds] were all corrupt; that 'they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men. …'"

All Christian creeds an abomination? Every follower of an existing denomination corrupt? So much for ecumenical spirit — or even basic religious tolerance. This means, in Mormon doctrine, that the post-apostolic Roman Catholic Church has been apostate during its entire 2,000-year history; the Eastern Orthodox churches that split from Rome in 1054 also were and remain illegitimate; even the various denominations founded by the great Protestant reformers in the 16th century — Martin Luther, Thomas Cranmer, John Calvin, Huldrych Zwingli, Jan Hus —- are all null and void.

 

How does this hard-line theology play out in real life? Let's take baptism, the nearly universally accepted, biblically mandated rite of initiation into the Christian faith (Jesus himself was baptized by John the Baptist). Even the Roman Catholic Church acknowledges the validity of baptisms carried out by other faiths if they are performed using water and the Trinitarian formula ("in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit"). The overwhelming majority of Christian traditions also believe that emergency baptisms are valid even when administered by a layperson, say at a moment of great peril or impending death, when no ordained clergy are available.

 

But Mormons believe that no baptism performed between the extinction of the original 12 apostles and the founding of Mormonism in the 19th century was valid, and that even today, only holders of the Mormon priesthood can perform an efficacious baptism. The ubiquitous Mormon missionaries who circle the globe —- Romney himself was one, in France, while he was in college —- are trained specifically to proselytize and convert members of other Christian faiths and bring about their rebaptism into the Mormon Church.

 

What about all those billions of putative Christian souls through the last two millenniums who thought they were saved via baptism in a non-Mormon faith but were unwittingly lost? Mormons hold that only a posthumous proxy or "vicarious" baptism by a qualified Mormon practitioner, in temple ceremonies off-limits to non-Mormons, will ensure they end up in paradise. Hence the church's famous focus on extensive genealogical research.

 

This "our way or no way" approach is pretty much unique to Mormons in this day and age. No doubt there remain some hard-liners in the Vatican who still believe Roman Catholicism to be the only "one true church." But that attitude is most certainly not shared by rank-and-file Catholics in this country, millions of whom have abandoned the church of their upbringing and many of whom have defected to evangelical brands of Christianity. While there are still no doubt some anti-Semitic Christians who believe God doesn't hear the prayers of Jews, most American Christians today believe that Jews are God's chosen people and that they will be in heaven.

 

I wager that this exclusionary Mormon theology, once widely revealed, will come as a shock to most U.S. Christians, regardless of their particular denominational preference or worship style. This is a country where ecumenism and church shopping have been de rigueur for decades. Christians in our pluralistic society are accustomed to local interfaith councils, interdenominational prayer breakfasts, Shrove Tuesday pancake suppers shared by various denominations, fall harvest dinners that rotate among the church halls of different local denominations. They are accustomed to Lutherans and Presbyterians sharing their church buildings with Korean Methodists and to Episcopalians and Lutherans exchanging ordained clergy….”