Other Religions

Interfaith relations have been improving, with the Church leadership recognising and supporting the need for positive relations with other faiths. Historically the Church was isolationist, and in some views, supremacist. They see themselves as Christian, and their faith to be the true Gospel that restores, and therefore overrides, all the previous versions of Christianity. They have a different idea of Jesus Christ from other Christian denominations, which is non-Trinitarian, meaning that Jesus and God are seen as separate gods, united in purpose, rather than aspects of the same being. This means that they are not seen as Christian by some other Christians, for whom non-Trinitarianism is a heresy. Other Christian denominations do not accept Mormon baptism as a valid sacrament, and vice versa. Members of other denominations must be baptised again if they want to join the Mormon Church. For much of their history, Mormons did not engage with other faiths as equals, rather they tried actively to proselytise members of other Christian denominations.

The LDS Church has become less stigmatised now, with a higher public profile, and more engagement with other faiths. American Evangelicals continue to have an ambivalent relationship with the LDS. During the 2012 presidential campaign, an Evangelical minister and former governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, made an issue out of the LDS doctrine that the devil fell from heaven and was a brother of Jesus. The candidate for the Republican Party in that campaign, Mitt Romney, is a member of the LDS Church and, to reassure voters, had to make a public statement that he would not be ruled by his faith – much as John Kennedy did with regard to his Catholicism in the 1960s. The LDS Church has cordial and cooperative relationships with Muslims, especially in terms of humanitarian work in the Middle East. They share such values as modesty, temperance, and family. Relations with the Jewish community have been complicated by the controversy over baptism, which many Jewish groups see as a form of historical revisionism, but Mormons in general feel a strong affinity for Judaism as a covenanted religion.