Is Mormonism Christian?

2 responses to “Is Mormonism Christian?”

1. brad | 10.May.07 at 1:28 pm | Reply

   Whoa, I wish I had time to write something more thoughtful.

   What a fantastic article! Balanced, realistic, and kindly done.

   Adrienne and I were plunged fairly deeply into “Mormonology” back in 2005/2006 when we had extended dealings with several missionaries who would rotate around. I went to a couple of Mormon baptisms and we read a fair amount of the BoM. The missionaries helped us while Adrienne was big-pregnant with Lexie, and seemed interested to be our friends – in fact we’ve come to really enjoy a local Mormon matriarch’s company when we get to see her. She was pretty open with us about how she embraced Mormonism after having grown up Catholic (her Catholic priest actually encouraged her to do so!) – though there were apparently many taboo things they were not supposed to discuss with us non-Mormons.

   Ultimately, we decided it was confusing to Stephen when he’d see them and exclaim, “JESUS!” and so for our young family’s sake, we decided not to dig too much deeper. But we did learn a lot and made friends. Overall, we came away very strongly echoing Fr. Neuhaus’s observation that “the Mormon mission… is about as pure an instance of American cultural imperialism as can be imagined, albeit a benevolently intended imperialism.” And that it was based on a lot of very suspicious fabrications by Joseph Smith. And that the Book of Mormon should be at least revised or something because it sounds pretty ridiculous.

2. jen | 10.May.07 at 2:03 pm | Reply

   i was at the lds conference center having a tour on monday when someone asked me that question. given that i was in an lds building, with about 20 lds members in earshot, not to mention on the roof with a 4 story fall if i should be thrown off, my answer was “yes”.