Are Mormons Protestant or their own thing?

[Thom18]

A “protestant” is a Christian who is in protest of the Catholic Church. They have valid, trinitarian baptisms and are monotheistic. Mormons are not these.

 

[TheLittleLady]

Official LDS Mormons do not believe in the Trinity, a core belief to be called Christian. They are a non-Christian polytheistic religion.

 

[q54332]

I have made that very comparison before lol, great minds think alike

 

[Pattylt]

I want to comment on the perception of how nice and wholesome the Mormons appear to others.
First…many of them genuinely are but for many it’s a face they present to the public for appearance sake and to enable them to evangelize. Many of them, behind closed doors, are depressed, have many family issues, are backstabbing and don’t practice what they preach. Of course, this can be said of many Christian branches as well, but they’re trained to hide their problems more than any other religion I’ve seen.

Again, many of them are super nice and genuinely wholesome. The problem is that ALWAYS seem to be this…and they aren’t…and it’s not just one or two of them. They have some of the highest suicide rates and child abuse has often run rampant with very few coming into the light of legal investigation. It’s similar to how JWs have hid behind the cult until investigators discovered the coverup. To me, nothing says cult more than this type of behavior. I have a hard time not being suspicious of the happy clappy aura they are always presenting.

No one want their dirty laundry out in public but most don’t deny it’s there!

 

[Ridgerunner]

the dominance that the Catholic Church had over society in general

Seems like quite an overstatement to me. The Church had significant influence over some aspects of life; things like the days feudal lords could not war without being excommunicated. But the Church was also defied plenty and in very significant ways, as with the Fourth Crusade and the 16th Century sack of Rome.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I agree. Much of what we think is typical of Mormons is the outer facade.

 

[JohnStrachan]

The the average bloke, the pope was the closest thing to God himself in the Middle Ages. And this applies to 99% of the population as they were uneducated, ill-informed, not-well-traveled, simply (in mind and activity) and easily impressed with superstition. Whatever the Pope said, may well have been carved in stone.

 

[Hodos]

What do you guys think? I say yes because they mostly agree with the reformation but some protestants throw them under the bus and say they are not protestants, what do you guys think.

They do not agree with the Reformation in any way, shape, or form. For starters, they don’t believe in the Christian God and have a completely different understanding of Christ.

 

[JonNC]

A “protestant” is a Christian who is in protest of the Catholic Church. They have valid, trinitarian baptisms and are monotheistic.

That is not what Protestant means, as that is not the origin of the formal protest.
But that is a different thread.

 

[lanman87]

Personally, I think that if Protestantism did not already exist, then Mormonism would not have existed or not existed in the same way T

Before the reformation no church other than Catholicism was tolerated by the State. What the reformation did was start a change in the church/state relationship so that by the 1800’s we had freedom of religion instead of a state mandated church.

I would argue that the rise of Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christian Scientist and other peusdo-Christian groups is a result of Freedom of Religion. However, you could also argue that without the reformation their never would have been Freedom of Religion (or even a constitution of the United States).

 

[Thom18]

Thom18:

A “protestant” is a Christian who is in protest of the Catholic Church. They have valid, trinitarian baptisms and are monotheistic.

That is not what Protestant means, as that is not the origin of the formal protest.
But that is a different thread.

I mean, it’s in the name, protestant.

 

[JohnStrachan]

Myth, literacy rates weren’t as high as they are now but the masses were hardly a bunch of imbeciles. They were just as smart as we are now.

You`re joking right? Literacy rates were non existent with the exception of nobility, merchants and the clergy. People rarely traveled 20 km beyond their hometown in their lifetimes. As Thomas Hobbes said, life was: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” People lacked sophistication and knowledge of the world. They couldn’t read their bibles even if they were allowed to - much less try and interpret the Word.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Please allow me to respectfully disagree, at least in part.

I think it depended on time, place, politics, and class. Just for instance, a lot of medieval literature is obscure to us because we’re nowhere near as well-educated in literature, language or many other disciplines as were the audiences of those writers. And while the noble classes and clergy were the best-educated, they were by no means the only ones who were well-educated. There were many people in the business world who were very highly educated. In our own language, Chaucer alone would make those who govern this nation look painfully ignorant, and Chaucer was a commoner…a wool merchant. The Medicis, Sforzas, and many other politicians were bankers and merchants, not nobles.

And many were much better traveled than is often supposed. Italian jewelry commonly featured Baltic amber, and church altars in France often glowed with candles made of Russian beeswax. Italian faience is found in Scandinavia. Spanish often ate North Sea cod on Fridays and during Lent, and Asian luxuries graced the wives and mistresses of Doges.

Without question there were peasants and hirelings who knew little of learning other than the sacred stories gained from attending Mass and pondering stained glass windows, and knew their own language, a little “Church Latin” and little else.

But while undoubtedly many were superstitious, the real differences between people then and now is that more of them actually believed in God than do we. That’s not superstition except to atheists and skeptics.

And Popes probably were more revered in the last two centuries than they were in the Middle Ages, and often for good reason.

 

[jofa]

They couldn’t read their bibles even if they were allowed to - much less try and interpret the Word.

Printing press wasn’t invented until the 1400’s, so only some of the very wealthy owned one of the hand copied bibles.

 

[Ridgerunner]

People rarely traveled 20 km beyond their hometown in their lifetimes. As Thomas Hobbes said, life was: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

Of possible interest, among those things in which the Church did have influence, marriage laws regarding consanguinity and affinity were very much more strict then than now. It was almost impossible to marry within one’s own tribe in the early Middle Ages because of it, or one’s neighborhood later on. The objective was to break up tribalism, and it did a fair job of it.

One might read “Canterbury Tales” to learn that traveling prodigious distances was common, and not just among the nobility and clergy. Recall that among the travelers was a Reeve and a Miller. The Knights Templars and Knights Hospitalers were organized to protect pilgrims to the Levant, of which it is reasonable to believe there were many.

While AVERAGE lifespans were shorter than now, a “normal” life span was not that much different from biblical times (three score and 10 years) or now. Diets, other than in occasional times of famine, compared favorably with our own.

I think we moderns pride ourselves excessively. Yes, we know how to turn an ignition key of a machine that will run 140 miles per hour, though we have no idea how it really works. But we are as ignorant as stones when it comes to knowing anything about Boethius or Augustine, or, indeed, how long it takes to walk from the Pas de Calais to Compostela. And we still don’t know how the Crusaders made the concrete that has withstood the sea for centuries on the shores of Israel.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Printing press wasn’t invented until the 1400’s, so only some of the very wealthy owned one of the hand copied bibles.

Of course, they had the liturgical cycle which, in the course of three years (less including weekdays) one hears virtually the entire New TEstament spoken orally and much of the Old. Lutherans and Anglicans thought well enough of it to retain it.

 

[JonNC]

I mean, it’s in the name, protest ant

The protest was against government authorities, not the Church, at the Second Diet of Speyer in 1529.

The Lutheran members of the Diet, under the well-founded impression that the prohibition of any future reformation meant death to the whole movement, entered, in the legal form of an appeal on behalf of themselves, their subjects and all Christians, a protest on 25 April 1529. They protested against all those measures of the Diet which they saw as contrary to the Word of God, to their conscience, and to the decision of the Diet of 1526, and appealed from the decision of the majority to the Emperor, to a general or German council, and impartial Christian judges. Their action created the term “Protestantism” - still used today as a name for this religious movement.[2]

Diet of Speyer (1529) - Wikipedia

The formal protest was against government, sort of like when Bishop Loti appeared before Congress to protest the HHS mandate.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I think you’re right. For my time and place, I’m not the worst educated of men, but it is embarrassing sometimes to read older writings and realize how much better read so many people were in times past.

 

[stoplooklisten]

Since Martin Luther’s split circa 1517, there have been many splits and splinters in the Body of Christ. Since 1517, the LDS church is far from the only group that has invented new doctrines and practices.

 

[Legend]

Mormonism is entirely its own entity. I have heard it described as the 19th-century version of Scientolog’

…or, latter-day Gnosticism!