What Redeemed Zoomer Gets WRONG about “Mormons”

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Video Transcript:

This video about heretical “Christian” cults has gotten a ton of views in a short amount of time. And guess who’s at the top of their list? That’s right, your friendly neighborhood Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Let’s take a look:

Can you be Christian and believe God is actually a woman in South Korea, or that the Garden of Eden is really in Missouri, or that God is just a metaphor for peace and love? There are some groups that teach this, which raises the question, what does Christian even mean? Who counts as Christian? It means anyone who identifies as a Christian man. You can’t just gatekeep a religion. Well, if Christian can mean anything, then it means nothing. So it has to mean something. There has to be some boundary between true and false Christianity.

I think this is a strawman argument. I don’t think most people are claiming that Christian can just mean anything. Latter-day Saints certainly aren’t making that argument. I think this is also an appeal to ridicule. He’s making the other side look silly (even though it’s not really the position of the other side), and thus primes us to get on board with his perspective, which will be framed as much more reasonable.

Historically, that boundary has been the creeds of the early church, which teach things like the trinity, the resurrection, and basic ideas about the church.

OK, so I’d say that the doctrine of the resurrection has been around a lot longer than the creeds. If a wholesale belief in the creeds themselves qualifies one to be a Christian, then Latter-day Saints would argue that neither Peter, Paul, John, nor any other biblical writers were Christian, because the creeds were developed hundreds of years after New Testament times. Some aspects of those creeds, like Christ’s resurrection, are very clearly an integral part of the New Testament. Other aspects, like the trinitarian view of God, are a lot more fuzzy. Even Harper’s Bible Dictionary acknowledges that “The formal doctrine of the Trinity as it was defined by the great church councils of the fourth and fifth centuries is not to be found in the NT.” So I have a problem with this idea that adherence to these post-biblical creeds determines whether or not you are a true Christian. But stay tuned. We’ve got a lot more to say about this.

All the mainstream Christian denominations believe these creeds. But there are some fringe groups that not only reject the beliefs of the creeds but think that Christians have been deceived for centuries by believing them. So these groups are considered heretical by the standards of historic Christianity.

Let’s start with the Mormons, or as they call themselves, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But we’re not saying that every time. They’re by far the biggest of these groups and have the most interesting architecture, even though their temples look more like sorcerers’ towers than churches.

So, a little insider info here for those that might not know this, but temples don’t look like churches … because they’re not churches. But I do appreciate the sorcerers’ tower joke. It’s a little general. I think a more specific Minas Morgul comparison would have landed better — much more ominous.

But they were started in America in 1830 by this guy, Joseph Smith. They began in New York, but the Yankees kicked them out, so they made their way to Utah, which is where they mostly are to this day.

As a side note here, Utah obviously does have the most dense population of Latter-day Saints in the United States, but overall, less than one-third of Latter-day Saints who live in the United States live in Utah. If we look internationally, there have been more members outside of the United States than inside since the 1990s.