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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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Mormons don't see Christianity as synonymous with the true faith. The see Christianity as a big tent full of many denominations and their own Church as the true faith within that big tent.

Eh. This isn't really true. "The true faith" is faith in Christ, meaning love, obedience, loyalty, worship, and trust in the Son of God, qualities not confined to people in any particular religion. The LDS church doctrinally being "the true church" doesn't mean we have a monopoly on truth or even that in every respect we have more truth than any other denomination; it means we have the most truth and, perhaps even more important, God's authority to establish his kingdom on earth. This is quite comparable to the Catholic view of the nature of the Catholic church.

The LDS church doctrinally being "the true church" doesn't mean we have a monopoly on truth or even that in every respect we have more truth than any other denomination; it means we have the most truth and, perhaps even more important, God's authority to establish his kingdom on earth.

Critically, it is a claim that you are the only church with real priests whose ordinances (sacraments to Catholics, cleric spells to unchurched nerds) actually work.

American folk Christianity avoids the question, but the combination of scaraments that actually work, ordained ministry, and apostolic succession (as believed by Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, LDS and some Lutherans) gives "real Church" vs "fake Church" a different and more significant meaning that it has in sola fide priesthood-of-all-believers Protestantism.

True, but our belief in a single authorized baptism is also accompanied by a belief that said baptism can be accepted even after death, so it’s not exclusionary as a complete package! And you really do need to include both, seems to me. It’s not as if this is the only very significant theological difference among Christian sects.

Well, qualified in one respect. It’s not as if we think that God ignores the prayers or genuine authentic intentions toward God of others. Functionally someone who confesses a sin to a Catholic priest, exercises faith in Christ, repents of their ways, is essentially forgiven (or will be) - just the priest didn’t actually serve an official role in it. So I guess I still don’t quite see it. Perhaps similar to how many Christian sects have walked back beliefs that the unbaptized can literally never enter heaven and won’t get a chance to, Mormons have also toned back the emphasis on how other sects are all extremely misled people. Early LDS history, (in)famously, was not quite the same - many especially older Mormons even thought of the Catholic Church as a somewhat devilish deception. So in that sense there’s an argument to be made that this distinction is no longer as true as it used to be.