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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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I’m trying (was trying?) really hard not to explicitly litigate the Christian point unless someone wants me to, but I do want to register that part of the Mormon dissatisfaction with your reading of the situation is that while any Mormon will freely concede the first point about the Trinity beliefs being decently different, the point about seeing Jesus as insufficiently divine is seen as rooted in a false and/or bigoted understanding of our doctrine. As a trivial example, we believe Jesus to be Jehovah of the Old Testament. So while we might call ourselves, I dunno, 80% the same about Jesus’ role and identity, maybe higher, others seem to feel that the figure is something like 10% - which, wherever you put the actual figure, it’s definitely not there. As a matter of “general religion”, viewed broadly, we LDS consider Jesus’ atonement and assumption of our sins an absolute and pivotal requirement to get to “heaven” and in fact to avoid eternal death. Sure there are some divergent ideas about what heaven looks like but isn’t that a bit… academic? Especially when traditional Judaism doesn’t even stress a concept of Heaven and Muslims specifically reject Jesus as having a special role altogether, so when people lump us in with them it feels even more strange and absurd. And even more so when you consider that the internal model one has of the true nature of God debate has, in practical terms, almost zero outward manifestation. We even use the same key phrase that Catholics and many other Christian churches require to mutually recognize baptism. And it’s not like if you talk to a regular Christian about the nature of God, they won’t say something that violates the Nicene Creed is a not insignificant number of cases in pretty short order.