Grieve with your LDS friends

“They are attacking us like never before. We have to stick together. We have to resolve to be loud and public about our faith.”

My Latter-Day Saint (LDS/Mormon) friend who is a bishop said this to me the day after the brutal ramming, shooting, and arson at the LDS Stake (church building) that left many dead. This happened right on the heels of the president of the LDS church, Russell M. Nelson, dying in his home at the age of 101 after serving in the highest office of the Mormon church for seven years. In addition, many LDS people I’m friends with strongly identified with Charlie Kirk and felt connected to his assassination as well. It’s been a heavy week for our LDS friends, family, and neighbors on top of what has been a brutal few weeks for Western Civilization.

Yet, when my friend said this, in my gut I wanted to argue with him about what “us” meant and what he meant by “our faith,” because we don’t in fact share a faith. But I kept my mouth shut.

The response for evangelicals in the short term is simple: Weep with those who weep. Express simple, pure-hearted condolences. Ask our LDS friends how they’re handling the news, if they’re scared to go to their ward gatherings, and pray for them. Some evangelicals have had a hard time doing this, to the chagrin of public LDS and conservative figures like Glenn Beck, who wrote in response to evangelicals critiquing LDS theology in the wake of recent tragedies: “I am not asking you to change your beliefs. I am not even asking you to stay silent forever. I am asking, humbly and respectfully, that you consider saving that fight for another day. We already agree on so much. The times are so dark.”

It isn’t just that we don’t want to look heartless; we don’t want to be heartless. Spines of steel are of little value when they’re accompanied by hearts that are cold. As with all evangelism and criticism, timing matters. The enfleshment of the eternal Son of God reveals to us something about ministry we often take for granted: incarnation and service precede preaching.

Here’s my concern, though: Beck asked if we could save “that fight for another day.” That is good, but for many evangelicals, “saving that fight” actually means “never having the fight.”

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m all in on having necessary doctrinal conflict. But I’m also interested in being loving and wise and doing what I can to ensure that the timing is appropriate.

Two days after Kirk’s assassination, an LDS friend at the gym said, “Charlie and I disagreed about a lot, but we agreed about the most important thing: Christ.”

“No,” I responded, “you and Charlie did not agree about Christ. Charlie believed that Jesus was begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father. Our churches might use the same words, but we assign radically different meanings to those words. I’m happy we can grieve together over this evil act, but I don’t want to allow this tragedy to erase our real and meaningful disagreements in the name of Kumbaya.”

In a world where the vibe is shifting in favor of religion in a plurality of ways, we cannot allow ourselves to fall into the traps of false unity with people who identify with the name of Jesus. LDS rejection of the Trinity, of creation ex nihilio, and of justification by faith, and belief in multiple heavens, the prophet status of Joseph Smith, the brotherhood of Jesus and Lucifer, and others are serious errors that amount to heresy. These are Tier 1 level doctrinal disagreements. In the gospel sense, Mormons are not Christians.

The words of Joseph Smith himself should guide our view on this. In a vision he says was from Jesus, he was told, “all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt; that: ‘they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof.’”

At the same time, the fresh wakes of tragedy are not the proper time and place to get into doctrinal disputes. There is a real sense in which people who identify with the name of Jesus will be hated on his behalf, even if they get the doctrine of Jesus wrong. In that, we can grieve with our LDS neighbors. For now, we grieve, we pray, and then we do the work of evangelism with courage in love as we’re led by the Holy Spirit.