Mormon leaders, military veterans and elected officials reacted with anger to a new Department of Defense policy that does not consider The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be a Christian religion as part of a wider effort to cut down the U.S. military’s list of recognized faiths.
“The Pentagon’s decision to list The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints apart from other Christian faiths is wrong and needs to be corrected,” Republican Rep. Mike Kennedy, of heavily Mormon Utah, wrote on X on Sunday.
In fairness, do traditional Christian faiths really consider the LDS church as a Christian variant?
It has Jesus in it, and in claims lineage with existing christy faiths the same way Christianity claims to be a continuation of the Jewish faith and Islam to be a continuation of both, but the rest of the whole Josepth Smith thing is... well, let's say colorful to put it kindly.
I grew up Catholic in Utah and no Catholic I knew saw the LDS church as anything other than a crazy cult that strangely succeeded.