The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (to use its proper name) is arguably America’s most important indigenous religion. It is a universal faith, but also “very American”, reckon Richard and Joan Ostling, authors of the excellent “Mormon America: The Power and the Promise”. Its history is entangled with America’s. Like American settlers, Mormons were pioneers who travelled far for religious freedom. Like America, Mormonism has grown fast. Smith had 26,000 followers when he died. Now he has more than 13m, more than half of them outside America. And within America, by one estimate, Mormonism is the fourth-largest denomination.

As it has grown, it has moved towards the mainstream. Its leaders renounced polygamy in 1890. Its members, following Smith’s view that the American constitution was divinely inspired, are patriotic and prone to public service. Mormons are also one of the best-behaved groups in America. Practising ones shun alcohol, cigarettes and even coffee. They work hard, marry, have lots of children and set aside an evening each week for quality time with the family. The 53,000 dark-suited, white-shirted, tie-wearing Mormon missionaries who fish for souls around the world can seem like America personified: earnest, friendly, optimistic, fond of Jesus and eager to tell you about it.

Yet many Americans have doubts about Mormonism. Only 53% of non-Mormon Americans think Mormons are Christian, despite the words “Jesus Christ” in the church’s name. Many evangelical Protestants think them heretics””the ruder ones regularly heckle Mormon conferences. Some secular Americans voice the opposite complaint: that Mormons are too pious and too likely to knock on your door.

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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is one of the fastest-growing faiths in South Florida, its expansion fueled mainly by Hispanic converts who find the religion’s emphasis on family and values appealingly familiar. Local growth is mirrored in the development of the church in Latin America and elsewhere, where worldwide membership topped 13 million earlier this year.

The reach of the Mormon faith was at the fore of the political arena Thursday after Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney gave a 20-minute speech to discuss his Mormon roots and whether his faith would affect decisions he might make in the Oval Office.

South Florida has about 13,000 Mormons in 40 to 50 congregations. These congregations, or units, belong to five stakes, similar to dioceses, three in Miami-Dade and two in Broward and south Palm Beach. One stake in Miami is comprised solely of Spanish-speaking units and the other four have at least one or two Spanish-language units, says Scott Richards, first counselor of the Fort Lauderdale stake.

”Our strongest growth is from converts and from people who know somebody already in the church,” Richards said. “Possibly half are Hispanic. We probably mirror the population.”

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Is Mormonism Christian?” is a very important question. The answer is equally important and simple. No. Mormonism is not Christian.
If you are a Mormon, please realize that CARM is not trying to attack you, your character, or the sincerity of your belief. If you are a non-Mormon looking into Mormonism, or if you are a Christian who is simply researching Mormonism, then this paper should be of help to you.
The reason Mormonism is not Christian is because it denies one or more of the essential doctrines of Christianity. Of the essential doctrines (that there is only one God, Jesus is God in flesh, forgiveness of sins is by grace alone, and Jesus rose from the dead physically, the gospel being the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus), Mormonism denies three of them: how many gods there are, the person of Jesus, and His work of salvation.
Mormonism teaches that God the Father has a body of flesh and bones (D. & C. 130:22) and that Jesus is a creation. It teaches that he was begotten in heaven as one of God’s spirit children (See the Book, Jesus the Christ, by James Talmage, p. 8). This is in strict contrast to the biblical teaching that he is God in flesh (John 1:1, 14), eternal (John 1:1, 2, 15), uncreated, yet born on earth (Col. 1:15), and the creator all (John 1:3; Col. 1;16-17). Jesus cannot be both created and not created at the same time. Though Mormonism teaches that Jesus is god in flesh, it teaches that he is “a” god in flesh, one of three gods that comprise the office of the Trinity (Articles of Faith, by Talmage, pp. 35-40). These three gods are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. This is in direct contradiction of the biblical doctrine that there is only one God (Isaiah 44:6,8; 45:5). See Trinity for a correct discussion of what the Trinity is.
Because Mormonism denies the biblical truth of who God is, who Jesus is, how forgiveness of sins is attained, and what the gospel is, the Mormon is not Christian — in spite of all his claims that he is.

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Michael Cromartie, an expert on evangelicals at Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, said Romney may have succeeded with those who are not hard-core fundamentalists. “He was trying to assure them that he was not some sort of Mormon theocrat,” Cromartie said.

But Shaun Casey, an assistant professor of Christian ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, said Romney may have lost some evangelicals when he admitted his church has distinct beliefs about Jesus.

“I really don’t think it does get at kind of the more red-meat specific doctrinal issues that some of those folks in Iowa — and frankly, the Republican Party — are looking for,” said Casey, who’s working on a book about similar religion dynamics in John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign.

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Mitt Romney obviously felt he had no choice but to give a speech yesterday on his Mormon faith. Even by the low standards of this campaign, it was a distressing moment and just what the nation’s founders wanted to head off with the immortal words of the First Amendment: A presidential candidate cowed into defending his way of worshiping God by a powerful minority determined to impose its religious tenets as a test for holding public office.

Mr. Romney spoke with an evident passion about the hunger for religious freedom that defined the birth of the nation. He said several times that his faith informs his life, but he would not impose it on the Oval Office.

Still, there was no escaping the reality of the moment. Mr. Romney was not there to defend freedom of religion, or to champion the indisputable notion that belief in God and religious observance are longstanding parts of American life. He was trying to persuade Christian fundamentalists in the Republican Party, who do want to impose their faith on the Oval Office, that he is sufficiently Christian for them to support his bid for the Republican nomination. No matter how dignified he looked, and how many times he quoted the founding fathers, he could not disguise that sad fact.

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Yesterday, at the end of Mitt Romney’s speech, he told a story from the early days of the First Continental Congress, whose members were meeting in Philadelphia in 1774: “With Boston occupied by British troops . . . and fears of an impending war . . . someone suggested they pray.” But because of the variety of religious denominations represented, there were objections. “Then Sam Adams rose and said he would hear a prayer from anyone of piety and good character, as long as they were a patriot.”

Were Adams alive today, he most certainly would hear a prayer from a Mormon. It is hard to imagine a group more patriotic than the modern Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But there is reason to believe that voters in Iowa and elsewhere will not accept Mr. Romney’s invitation–put forward implicitly in his remarks yesterday at the George Bush Library–to ignore religious differences and embrace him simply as a man of character who loves his country.

A recent Pew poll shows that only 53% of Americans have a favorable opinion of Mormons. That’s roughly the same percentage who feel that way toward Muslims. By contrast, more than three-quarters of Americans have a favorable opinion of Jews and Catholics. Whatever the validity of such judgments, one has to wonder: Why does a faith professed by the 9/11 hijackers rank alongside that of a peaceful, productive, highly educated religious group founded within our own borders?

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About 15 people marched alongside the Muslim float in this city’s notoriously fleshy Gay Pride Parade earlier this year, with various men carrying the flags of Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Turkey and even Iran’s old imperial banner.

While other floats featured men dancing in leather Speedos or women with scant duct tape over their nipples, many Muslims were disguised behind big sunglasses, fezzes or kaffiyehs wrapped around their heads.

Even as they reveled in newfound freedom compared with the Muslim world, they remained closeted, worried about being ostracized at the mosque or at their local falafel stand.

“They’re afraid of the rest of the community here,” said Ayman, a stocky 31-year-old from Jordan, who won asylum in the United States last year on the basis of his sexuality. “It’s such a big wrong in the Koran that it is impossible to be accepted.”

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For generations of rural religious polygamists like those Warren S. Jeffs once led, this was the big town and the citadel of sin all in one.

St. George, founded on the southern route to California in wagon train days, was the place to buy groceries or spend an occasional night out. But it was also the local fortress of mainstream Mormonism, which is vehement in its opposition to polygamy.

The polygamists, in turn, looked down on Mormons as apostates who lost their way more than 100 years ago by denouncing polygamy, and thus the teachings of the church’s founder, Joseph Smith, in a political compromise to achieve statehood for Utah.

Now Mr. Jeffs is being tried on felony charges that he was an accomplice to rape in arranging polygamous marriages between under-age girls and older men, and the jury is being drawn from a pool of St. George residents.

The trial is expected to throw a sharp light on polygamy and on the culture of Mr. Jeffs’s group in particular, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is estimated to number about 10,000 people throughout the West. Jury selection began Friday, and Mr. Jeffs, 51, could face life in prison if convicted.

The old and bitter history of intra-Mormon relations hangs over everything here. But many people said the divisions were not what they once had been. Even as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormon Church is known, has cracked down on polygamy in recent years, an intermingling of cultures has begun to bubble up here, opening hearts and minds in greater understanding, if not quite tolerance.

Economics, not religion, is driving the change.

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At a time when the Mormon Church is drawing heightened public visibility because of Mitt Romney’s presidential bid, the church is grappling more openly with one of its darkest chapters.

The “Utah War” has largely faded from American memory as the Mormon Church ”“ and the public’s acceptance of it ”“ evolved. But one incident from that time stubbornly lingers and is now the subject of a fictionalized film that opens in theaters Friday.

On Sept. 11, 1857, Mormons aided by native American allies massacred about 120 unarmed men, women, and children bound for California by wagon train. The slaughter took place amid war hysteria: The US Army was marching toward Utah to confront Mormon leaders.

After covering up the Mountain Meadows massacre for years, the church is supporting an exhaustive Mormon research effort to leave no stone unturned. The findings, unflattering in spots, are being broadcast worldwide in the latest edition of the church’s magazine.

“It’s clear that at very important levels the church is opening itself in ways that it had not felt comfortable with [before],” says Sarah Barringer Gordon, a law professor and religion expert at University of Pennsylvania. “People [in Utah] really understand ”“ perhaps as they hadn’t until the last five, six years or so ”“ that there’s a need and a possibility for real investigation and acceptance of a painful past.”

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In this wide valley where the twin spires of the Mormon temple dominate the landscape and some neighborhoods have a Mormon chapel every few blocks, Mitt Romney’s bid for president is both a proud sign of progress and a cause of trepidation.

Many Mormons here are rooting for Mr. Romney, a fellow church member whose success in business, Adonis looks and wholesome family tableau seem to them to present the ideal face of Mormonism to the world. Among the Republican front-runners, Mr. Romney, former governor of Massachusetts, recently was the leader in campaign fund-raising; his candidacy is, for many Mormons, a historic moment of arrival.

“He represents the best of what the church can produce,” said Kenneth W. Godfrey, 73, a historian of Mormonism and of this valley about 80 miles north of church headquarters in Salt Lake City.

But even for the many Mormons who support Mr. Romney, the moment is fraught with anxiety because his candidacy is bringing intense scrutiny to their church, and could exacerbate longstanding bigotry.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormon Church is called, has been fighting for legitimacy since its founding 177 years ago in upstate New York. The church’s first prophet, Joseph Smith Jr., was killed by a mob in Illinois and his followers fled from persecution and settled in Utah.

While Mormons are by now successfully integrated and prospering in the American mix, memories of that persecution are still fresh. Many current members can trace their great-great-grandparents to the church’s earliest pioneers, and children grow up reading their ancestors’ original diaries. Many Mormons fear that Mr. Romney’s campaign may reopen old wounds.

“I thought we might get mud thrown at us,” said Lula DeValve, 82, a retired teacher and a Democrat who volunteers with the League of Women Voters.

John Hatch, 30, a history student at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, said, “What most Mormons desire is acceptance.”

“We see ourselves as normal,” Mr. Hatch said. “We struggle with those outsiders who see us as weird ”” the magic underwear stuff,” a reference to the ritual garments that Mormons are supposed to wear under their clothing.

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Janet and Lars Bergeson recently held a prewedding lawn party for their son at their home, surrounded by farms on a bluff in sight of Mount Bergeson. The landmark, named for a Swedish Mormon who arrived in 1860, is a reminder of their ancestors’ religion.

The couple left the fold long ago, so they knew they would not be allowed to attend the temple wedding and eternal sealing of their son, Nils Bergeson, 24, to Emily O’Hara, 25. The young couple are Mormons in good standing who hope to join the Peace Corps.

Despite years away from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, being shut out of a family affair in the temple rekindled dormant emotions for Janet Bergeson, 52, as the rest of the family prepared for the wedding. Comfort came from users of a Web site that Mrs. Bergeson began participating in about six months ago, www.PostMormon.org.

“Just being able to discuss these things online, that’s helped me shape where I am today,” she said.

The Web site is the primary focus of the Post-Mormon Community, a nonprofit group founded in 2002 that tries to help those struggling after a loss of faith, said Jeff Ricks, the executive manager of the organization.

Some arrive at PostMormon.org shunned by family members or doubting a doctrine. Some PostMormon.org visitors are gay, many in heterosexual marriages and with children, Mr. Ricks said. A few have been officially disciplined or excommunicated. The common denominator, though, is that they seek an anonymous and confidential way to find support, he said.

The Web site is one of several that attract Mormons who have left the faith or are questioning it. Another, www.exMormonFoundation.org, additionally says its mission is to unveil the “harm” caused by the church and to provide a “countervoice on Mormonism.” A third site, www.exmormon.org, provides support, though it also attracts “ex Mormons,” a term that some say connotes anti-Mormonism. Indeed, exmormon.org has a large archive of arguments against the church and its doctrines.

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