Why Do Christians Seem To MISREPRESENT Mormonism?

I made a very brief appearance recently in one of Pastor Jeff's Hello Saints videos about those who are doing evangelism outside of the general conference center. When I was poking through some of the comments from that video, here's a couple of comments that I saw. God loves Mormons guy has posted so much inaccurate information on his channel. He regularly lies about our faith and uses straw man arguments pretty much exclusively. Ah, the straw man king. He constantly makes straw man arguments and gish gallops. To be told what I believe and hear someone rant about how that is heretical when I don't believe that is tiresome.

He consistently misrepresents and even lies about us our beliefs and practices. There were others, but you get the point. This is certainly not the first time I've heard this accusation that I misrepresent LDS beliefs. But it really got me thinking, why do people accuse me of that? Not just me, but other Christians as well. What is it about what we're saying that makes people feel that we're misrepresenting them? I mean, I'm not trying to misrepresent anyone. What good would that do? Why would I waste my time? I work to site my sources and show where I'm getting my information from so that agree or disagree, people can see I'm not inventing ideas.

And yet, this is without a doubt the most common critique that I get. People say I misrepresent LDS beliefs, that I'm strawmaning things. People accuse me of quote mining obscure statements that don't represent Mormonism. Here is why Christians seem to misrepresent eldest beliefs so often. Mormonism makes a very unique claim. It claims to have modern-day prophets and apostles who speak on behalf of God. When I was first learning about Mormonism, I figured that the most logical place to start learning about LDS beliefs was the apostles and prophets of the LDS church. I was quickly informed that past prophetic teaching did not accurately represent Mormonism.

That a lot of what prior LDS prophets had taught were their opinions and speculations, not doctrine. Okay? If not all teachings from LDS prophets are authoritative or official, then where should I go if I want to learn about binding LDS doctrine? A lot of people told me that it's the living prophets who help guide us. Through the living apostles and prophets, God gives more light and can even correct errant teachings from prior leaders. All right. Well, that sounds pretty good until you start actually trying to learn about Mormonism from the current prophets and apostles because you quickly realize that they don't actually clarify very much about past teachings or theology or doctrines.

Plus, a lot of modern Latter-day Saints still end up disagreeing with what the LDS leaders are saying. And then what's going to happen in 10 or 20 years? Are the current teachings of the leaders going to become obsolete just like past leaders teachings have become obsolete? Am I going to have to relearn official LDS doctrine every decade or so? So, in the end, it didn't actually seem like the modern-day apostles and prophets were the best way to learn about official LDS beliefs. Maybe the best way then would be to learn it through the scriptures. But when you study it, even the Book of Mormon doesn't contain some of the most essential beliefs and practices of the LDS faith.

things like celestial marriage or proxy works or exaltation. If you look at the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price, they certainly have more teachings. But even still, Latter-day Saints really didn't appeal to the teachings of their scriptures. They appealed to the fact that they had modern apostles and prophets. Over the years, I kind of realized that Latter-day Saints were learning their teachings from an amalgamation of different sources. You had the official church manuals that were a part of regular Sunday instruction, but you also had things like culture. People would learn things culturally.

You have various scholars and professors. You even have popular YouTubers. All of these different sources help Latter-day Saints identify their personal beliefs and what they consider to be official. Different wards have different doctrinal cultures and convictions. Sometimes people favor the opinions of scholars over their own prophets. This is partially what produces such a variety of different beliefs, even despite the claim to having modern-day apostles and prophets. I mean, think about this. People are seldom, if ever, excommunicated from the LDS church because of personal belief. I mean, as long as you get past the baptismal interview questions, you can almost believe whatever you want as long as you don't publicly teach against the church.

So the question then is how do we arrive at understanding what official doctrine is? And given the variance of LDS beliefs, should Christians limit their critiques to only those things that Latter-day Saints have said is officially representative of the LDS church. Latter-day Saints not only have a variety of views of doctrine, they also have a variety of views on what constitutes official doctrine. There are really three major views. Here's what they are. First is the scripture primary view. Some people hold an LDS version of solos scriptorra. This view holds that only what is substantiated by the standard works is binding.

But that teaching is only official if it has been explicitly stated or implicitly laid out in the standard works somewhere. Things must become canonized in order to be official. Some people believe that prophets and apostles identify a subset of scripture that's binding. So maybe not everything in the standard works is official, but the things that are official must be somewhere in the standard works. Others hold that while scripture is the general standard for official doctrine, the first presidency and quorum of the twelve apostles, we'll just call them the 15, can go beyond scripture, issuing binding doctrine that isn't canonical.

In this view, official doctrine can expand upon scripture, but it cannot contradict scripture. Second is the prophet primary view. Some say that the prophet has the final say so and that scripture can be corrected by prophetic utterances. Thus the prophet is more authoritative than the standard works and his teachings become the metric of officiality. Sometimes this means that a prophet can only be speaking officially when he's speaking at general conference. Others think it's a little bit more general. Others might place the authority collectively with the 15 instead of being just with the prophet.

If all 15 agree and make a collective statement, that's a binding or official doctrine. A great example of this is the family proclamation. Even the doctrine of heavenly mother is never mentioned in scripture. But the 15 have issued a statement saying heavenly mother exists. So is heavenly mother official or not? If you think not, you probably hold to a scripture primary view. If you think Heavenly Mother is official, then you probably hold to a prophet primary view. If you're familiar with Jacob Hansen of Thoughtful Saints, his view called the collective witness model states that there is no one supremely authoritative source.

No source by itself can present official or binding doctrine. The frequency, authority, and mode of deliverance are all relevant for determining whether or not something's official. The more a thing is talked about by authoritative sources, the more likely it's official. Others simply believe that there is no such thing as official doctrine. Neither scripture nor prophets can provide binding doctrine. What's most important is right practices and right living. If there's no standard for determining official doctrine, how can we limit ourselves to critiquing only that which is official? Well, we don't.

We address more than just official teaching. And here's why. There are three categories that Christians will regularly interact with. We will address what the individuals we speak to actually believe. We'll address what has been taught by prophets and apostles, which includes prophetic teachings that are recorded in the standard works, and we'll address church authorized materials. I critique and interact with all three on different occasions. Is that misrepresenting LDS beliefs? something can be taught by past LDS leaders and even believed by a host of Latter-day Saints and yet some will deny it saying we don't believe that because they don't deem it an official teaching.

Sometimes an individual will believe something and yet say we don't believe that. Latter-day Saints seem to want us to limit our critique to this realm of things they deem official, even if it's something that has previously been taught and is even currently believed by some members. Let me just give you one example of how this played out for us. I recently released a video on our channel explaining why we disagree with the idea of a great apostasy. I gave a list of what some people say about the nature of an apostasy. On that list, I said that some people believe Christianity had lost priesthood authority, Christianity lost authoritative prophetic revelation, that there was a corruption of Christian doctrine, that the full gospel of Jesus was lost, that closed canon indicated an apostasy, and that scripture was corrupted.

I received a host of messages and comments with people saying, "I misrepresented and straw manned beliefs." Okay, why? What about what I said made them feel that I was strawmanning this position? I think it was for one of three reasons. First, I didn't accurately portray what someone personally believed. Second, I critiqued beliefs that weren't deemed official, and thus, I implied that Mormonism officially believed something that was actually unofficial. Or third, I accurately described a widely held or even official LDS belief, but I stated it in language that Latter-day Saints were either uncomfortable or unfamiliar with.

All of these reasons for an apostasy are either things that are personally believed by some Latter-day Saints or have been historically taught by some LDS leaders. In the video, I even acknowledged that there's a spectrum of views concerning the nature of the great apostasy. And yet, because I presented some views that weren't seen as official doctrine, I was seen as mischaracterizing or misrepresenting Mormonism. But I don't believe that officiality is the standard for evaluating truth. Latter-day Saints seem to limit topics of potential disqualification to a small list of internal things deemed both important and official, if there is anything that can disqualify a prophet in the first place.

If a prophet's teachings are a target, then evangelicals evaluate the whole thing. But many Latter-day Saints only consider this tight bullseye that they label official for determining their legitimacy. And even then they disagree among themselves where the bullseye is on the target. Brigham Y. Young taught Adam God. The belief that Adam is actually our heavenly father. A father not just of our physical selves but also of our spiritual selves. Well, both Latter-day Saints and evangelicals can agree that this doctrine is false. But most Latter-day Saints would maintain that Brigham. was still a legitimate prophet because Adam God was never an official teaching and it's not central to our understanding of the gospel.

In other words, Latter-day Saints ask that evangelicals only critique as potentially disqualifying those things that are official teachings and that we not characterize Mormonism by unofficial speculations or opinions, even if those opinions have been widely held by Latter-day Saints. When I point to Adam, God is disqualifying. I am in the eyes of many treating it like an official or central teaching when Latter-day Saints don't believe that it is. When we do this, some claim that we are misrepresenting Mormonism as having an official doctrine that it doesn't have. For Latter-day Saints, the only fruit on a table that can be used to potentially disqualify a prophet is official fruit.

Deuteronomy 18 · 1 Samuel 3

I agree that we engage with teachings that go beyond what is deemed official. I just don't think that that's misrepresenting Mormonism, especially given the eldest claim to having modern prophets. That's really what sets the LDS church apart here. How do you test apostles and prophets? If an LDS prophet stood up in general conference and he taught that God was a rock, Jesus didn't exist and in order to have eternal life, I needed to bow down to a statue at 3:00 a.m. every Tuesday morning. Would that constitute this guy being a false prophet? I think so. And I think that at least some Latter-day Saints would agree with me on that.

The Apostle Peter warns, "There will be false teachers among you who will secretly bring in destructive heresies." One of the marks of a false teacher is bringing in beliefs that are destructive to the soul. Teachings are a legitimate grounds for evaluating prophets. But what's the standard? Can someone ever teach something that's false? The role of a prophet in the Old Testament was primarily revelatory. Deuteronomy 18 says, "I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers, and I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him." I mean, think about Elijah or Isaiah or Ezekiel.

They would act a little crazy, come out of the wilderness with a message of indictment against God's people. They would say, "Thus sayaeth the Lord," and then they'd either die or go back to the wilderness. They weren't the presidents of God's people because the prophets trafficked in revelation and words. The examination of prophets to see whether they are really from God dealt primarily with what they said. We have no biblical reason to limit the realm of testing to a small subset of what they said. The target for testing is not the small bullseye. Here's one point where I'd likely disagree with a lot of my LDS friends.

If a prophet persistently teaches falsehood, then he is a false prophet. In 1 Samuel 3, it describes how God protected Samuel from teaching false things. And Samuel grew, and the Lord was with him, and let none of his words fall to the ground. If a prophet prophesies a future sign that does not come to pass, he's false. If he teaches people to pursue a false god, he's false. God in his indictment of the false prophets of Israel stated that when they spoke the inventions of their own minds and their own hearts, when they spoke words that God had not given them to the people, well, that marked them as false prophets.

So you and I must have a high standard for prophetic reliability if we're to be in line with the pattern that the Bible presents. When I test Brigham Young, I evaluate what he taught and make a determination about whether or not he was a true prophet. I do that even if the entirety of the LDS church today states that whatever thing he taught was false. I do it even if this teaching was never deemed official. So when Christians say LDS leaders have taught XYZ, we are not necessarily saying that all Latter-day Saints believe that, even though some might. We are evaluating that leader's teachings for the sake of testing his prophetic claim and thus the foundational claim of Mormonism to have restored prophets to the earth.

Officiality is not the standard that the Bible presents for testing prophets. You and I need to obey what God has commanded in the New Testament. Do not despise prophecies, but test everything and hold fast to what is good. Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God. For many false prophets have gone out into the world. Beware of false prophets who will come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorn bushes or figs from thistles? We are bound by God to reject those who fail these tests.

I would argue that officiality is really just a means of creating plausible deniability. If you only hold that official teaching is the only category of things that could potentially disqualify a leader, then what you're saying in effect is that LDS leaders can teach virtually anything they want and not be held accountable for it.