[Another in the series of “Responding to Bumper Stickers,” or “Long Answers to Short Questions,” in which I try to give a Latter-day Saint response to a question or accusation commonly lobbed against us on X.]
I always like to get into definitions whenever there’s a debate, because understanding what the other person means by the words used is half the battle.
And this one gets to one of those biggies: “Are Mormons Christian?”
And the first part of the answer needs to be, “Depends on what you mean by ‘Christian.'”
And no, this isn’t trying to wiggle out of it or split hairs. This is really the core of the issue, and it’s one I had brought home to me during a debate a few years ago that went on much too long.
I’d point out that I had faith in Jesus as the Son of the Living God and as the Redeemer and Savior of the world, and would simply be denied.
What it finally came down to was that, in the eyes of the other party, I wasn’t couldn’t be Christian if I didn’t accept that all other professing Christians — Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox — were “saved.”
Aha! So that meant to define “Christian,” we needed to define “saved.”
Now, Latter-day Saints have, I think, two big divergences with traditional Christianity on what it means to be “saved,” which means that we need to go yet another layer deep to define some terms underlying “saved.”
One is the definition of “faith,” as in being “saved by faith.” I’ve dealt with this at length elsewhere, and I encourage the side quest to go read that post. But the short version for our purposes is that pistis, the Greek word translated “faith” in the Pauline epistles, never means an intellectual belief in specific doctrinal propositions. In 1st-century koine Greek usage, It’s always faith in a person, and translates best as a combination of trust in / loyalty to — an attitude and relationship to someone which encourages or spurs a definite kind of behavior. Thus the lengthy list of Old Testament examples of faith in the Pauline epistles, in which the behavior of Abraham et al was “accounted to them for faith” — they weren’t saved by the specific acts (there’s nothing intrinsically salvific about, say, attempting to sacrifice your son), but because they trusted in, and were willing to loyally follow the commandments, of, the Lord.
We can argue all day about the things we believe about God; that has nothing to do with the faith we have in God.
The second is about the verb tense of “saved.” Many, especially evangelicals, express that “I am saved,” as a right-now thing. Latter-day Saints are more likely to express the hope that “I will be saved.” These are not a conflict. The best analogy I ever saw was one from fishing: When is the fish “caught” — when it’s first on the hook, or when it’s in the boat? The answer is the both are right: The fish on the hook is “caught” as long as it does not get off the hook. In the same way, I’m sure every evangelical knows at least one person who could honestly proclaim that they were “saved” at one point, but who, through a loss of faith and/or bad life choices, no longer lives or believes as a Christian. I suppose the Calvinist-adjacent conclusion would be that such a person never was actually “saved,” they only thought they were, which makes the idea of “being saved” utterly unknowable and the Holy Spirit indistinguishable from error; the other way to look at it is that they were “saved” at one time, but became “unsaved” at some future point. In other words, everyone who can enthusiastically say “I am saved” is saved conditionally, dependent not on God, but on their own agency of maintaining the trust/loyalty relationship of faith in the Lord. (Latter-day Saints use the phrase “endure to the end,” which simply means don’t wriggle off the hook.)
So, in a very real sense, Latter-day Saints believe that practically no one on Earth is “saved” right now in the ultimate sense, i.e., being in the boat where it’s simply not possible to wriggle off the hook anymore; but at the same time, we would presume that all honest and devoted followers of Jesus Christ, those who put their trust and loyalty in Him, are “saved” in the conditional sense…. provided they stay on the hook, and allow themselves to be drawn closer and closer to the boat.
“But, Nathan, that’s evasion, because Latter-day Saints teach that their priesthood ordinances are necessary. Is a protestant evangelical ‘saved’ right now? Is the Pope ‘saved’ right now?”
Right now? You mean if in one second they went from where they are to *POOF* the final judgment? No. The covenants made in priesthood ordinances are necessary.
But we don’t believe that you go directly from death to the final judgment. We believe a space given to the souls of men beyond this world but before the final judgment, when those who didn’t have opportunity to make the covenants that are the centerpiece of saving ordinances — everyone from those whose time and place of birth literally did not allow them to hear the Good News, all the way to God-fearing Christians who were never in a place to receive those ordinances — will have an opportunity to accept a greater truth than they had known in their lives, and that the necessary ordinances can be performed on their behalf. But that’s a whole ‘nother discussion; suffice it to say, that we deny salvation to none, and presume that those God-fearing Christians not of our faith will not be denied any blessing which they could not inadvertently receive while on Earth.
By contrast, a general feeling that I see currently among the bulk of traditional Christianity — Protestant, Orthodox or Catholic — is that a member of any of those three groups could be “saved” right now, although that kind of ecumenicism is a fairly recent development; it wasn’t too many centuries ago that the Catholic church was excommunicating entire countries because of Protestantism, and Protestants of all stripes were calling Catholics “the whore of Babylon.” (And that doesn’t count the evangelical anti-Catholics who are fighting the anti-Protestant Catholics right now on X, with the “Ortho Bros” flexing at everyone…) So the standard by which my Protestant debate opponent could accept the three main strains of historic Christendom as “Christian,” but not Latter-day Saints, was not a terribly sure one.
Conclusion, if there is one: I’m not sure there’s a consistent definition of “Christian” one could use which would accept Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Christians but exclude Latter-day Saints. The only possibilities I can see would either be one based on acceptance of the Creeds (which already has its own post) or that uses that ecumenical “You’re saved! And you’re saved! EVERYONE is saved except Mormons!” definition that’s very recent, historically speaking.
TL;DR (and don’t’cha hate it when people put that at the END?): You may not include as Christians, but we include you. [insert smiley-face emoji here]