The difference between LDS and other Christians

 

Kirk Rollins

@nicoraytruth

the real difference between LDS and other Christians Ask what separates Mormons from other Christians and people reach for metaphysics. The creeds. Nicaea. The Trinity against the Godhead. The grove. Those things are real, and they matter to maybe one believer in ten. Walk into any Catholic parish or nondenominational church and ask the people in the pews to explain the Trinity. Watch what happens. Water, ice, and steam. That is modalism. An egg with a shell, a white, and a yolk. That is partialism. Jesus as the first and greatest being God ever made. That is Arius, the man Nicaea was called to condemn. And when they pray, they picture exactly what Joseph saw. A Son on His knees in Gethsemane, crying out to a Father who is not Himself. Nobody lives in the creeds. People live in their prayers. Then ask them about heaven. Better yet, go to a funeral and listen to the eulogies. He is fishing with his dad again. She is back with the husband she buried ten years ago. Grandpa is watching over the kids, and one day the whole family will sit at one table again. Nobody at that graveside is longing for the vision of the divine essence the old theologians promised. They want their mother back. That is the heaven Joseph described in 1843: "that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory." Our non-lds christian neighbors already live in the mormon heaven. Just nobody told them whose house it is. So what actually divides us? One claim. Mormons say God speaks through a living prophet, a man with a name and a face, whose words can bind the whole Church and become scripture. Everything else grows from that root. The Godhead. Eternal families. Degrees of glory. Work for the dead. None of it came from philosophers. All of it came as revelation, and all of it stands or falls on whether revelation came back. God has spoken or God is speaking

https://x.com/nicoraytruth/status/2102894822600429769?s=20

Jason Hansen

@HansenWJason

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4h

This is so true about the united version of Heaven. But why is it that only one faith actually teaches it as part of their doctrine even though most believe it? Is it because that is our most desired conception of heaven?

Kirk Rollins

@nicoraytruth

·

4h

collective unconscious (Jungian thought) or we slightly remember premortal existence

Jason Hansen

@HansenWJason

·

4h

Absolutely we do. It's a fondness that we long for and hope to return to. Have you ever read the series The Great and terrible? The first book is "the brothers". Obviously just for fun but wow did it do a good job with creativity about the pre-existence.

Brigham Young

 

Kirk Rollins

@nicoraytruth

When Joseph fell at Carthage, the Saints were a leaderless people with a price on their heads, and by every law that governs such movements, this one should have ended there. A movement built on a martyred founder scatters and dies; it is nearly a rule of nature. This one did not die. Brigham Young, a plainspoken carpenter from Vermont, stood up in the smoking ruin of everything the people had built, and by the sheer iron of his will he refused to let them come apart. He did not inherit a kingdom. He inherited a wound, and a target, and ten thousand terrified souls, and he picked them up and carried them out. A thousand miles, on foot and by wagon, across rivers and plains and mountains, into a desert no one else on earth wanted, because it was the only ground far enough that the world might finally let his people live. He planned the exodus like a general and shepherded it like a father. He buried the dead along the trail and kept the living walking. When he came through the last canyon and looked out over a valley of salt and sagebrush that any sane man would have called a graveyard, he did not flinch and he did not despair. He said this is the place. And then he did the most audacious thing any leader of this people has ever done since Moses. He told a starving, frostbitten, exhausted remnant to build. There was no water where they needed it. No timber. No certainty the ground would yield a single season’s bread. There was a killing winter, and crickets that came in black clouds to devour what little they dared to plant. And into that emptiness Brigham spoke a civilization. He pulled the rivers down out of the mountains in the first irrigation works the American West had ever seen. He laid out a city in clean squares with his own hand and his own eye. He planted across a thousand miles of wasteland an entire commonwealth of towns and farms and temples, not by accident, not by drift, but by deliberate design, as a sustained act of faith, because he believed God had given his people a place and it was his charge to make it bloom or die in the trying. Brigham took the most worthless land on the map and commanded it to bring forth life, and it obeyed him, because behind the command was a faith that would not entertain the possibility of failure. Understand what this means for you, sitting comfortable and well fed in a Church whose survival you have never once had to fight for. Every blessing you take for granted rests on a foundation that hunted, half starved people laid with their bare hands under his direction. The temples you walk into exist because Brigham would not let the building stop. The very endurance of this Church, that it survived the decades when extermination was not a memory but a living and legal threat, is the work of his unbreakable conviction that God was not yet finished with this people. Joseph was the seer who tore open the heavens. Brigham was the lion who made certain there would still be a people left on the earth to receive what the heavens had poured out.

https://x.com/nicoraytruth/status/2060943080451428533?s=20

the valley is changing Zion

 

Kirk Rollins

@nicoraytruth

Why is the LDS Church softening on the cultural questions it once fought in public? The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. The Church is headquartered in Salt Lake City, and Salt Lake City became an aggregate of extreme leftists. It is not complicated. Institutions are run by men, and men absorb the climate they live in. Start with the ground under the Church Office Building. In 2010 the Church's adherents were about 59 percent of Salt Lake County. By 2018 the Church's own rolls put members at 49 percent of the county, the lowest share since at least the 1930s, and one independent researcher estimated that only about 24 percent of county residents were active members. Statewide, Pew now finds that half of Utah adults identify as Latter day Saints, down from 58 percent in 2007, while 34 percent claim no religion at all, a higher share of nones than the national average. More than half of Utah's growth in 2024 came from people moving in. They are not arriving as converts. In 2020 Joe Biden became the first Democrat to win a majority in Salt Lake County since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. In 2024 Kamala Harris carried the county by ten points, and Utah was the only state in the nation where she improved on Biden's share. Salt Lake City has not had a Republican mayor since 1974, and it has already elected its first openly gay mayor. Today a majority of the seven member city council is openly LGBTQ, and one councilman is described in the press as the body's only straight white male. When the Legislature banned pride flags from government buildings in 2025, the city answered within hours. It made a rainbow flag, a trans flag, and a Juneteenth flag official city flags with a sego lily in the corner, and the council passed the ordinance unanimously. Now the culture. Gallup ranked the Salt Lake metro seventh among the fifty largest in the country for the share of adults identifying as LGBT, ahead of Los Angeles, and the Williams Institute found that no metro had shifted more since 1990. The Pride parade pulls close to 150,000 people through downtown every June, and the Pride Center keeps its offices on Main Street, a block from Temple Square. The Saints themselves have moved with the city. In 2007, 24 percent of Latter day Saints told Pew that homosexuality should be accepted by society. By the latest survey it was 46 percent. PRRI found that 53 percent of Latter day Saints now support same sex marriage, up from 27 percent in 2014 The Church has more than seventeen million members on six continents, and its fastest growth is in places where the membership would find these moral debates unthinkable. But the fifteen men who decide live within a short drive of one another in a single valley. Their grandchildren sit in Salt Lake County classrooms. Their employees at the Church Office Building, at KSL and the Deseret News, at City Creek, are hired from a county that is no longer half Mormon on paper and perhaps a quarter Mormon in the pews. Their neighbors vote for Harris. The mayor they must work with on downtown and the 2034 Games is a Democrat who raised a trans flag over city hall to spite the Legislature. Every dinner table, every hospital visit, every grandchild who comes out, lands in the same few zip codes. A worldwide church takes its temperature from one thermometer, and the thermometer is bolted to a wall on North Temple. That is the disproportion. The members are scattered across the earth. The decisions come out of one valley, and the valley changed its mind. The pioneers walked into this valley to get away from the world. The world followed them in, bought the house next door, won the council seat, and raised its own flag over city hall. Zion was supposed to change the valley. Unfortunately, the valley is changing Zion.

https://x.com/nicoraytruth/status/2100056387074347052?s=20

Archer Rowan

@ArcherRowsaway

What I know of the mission department has black pulled me on church employees. I think a majority of church employees are democrat progressives, and many of the 70 are, too.

Kirk Rollins

@nicoraytruth

·

2h

yup

Jason

@Bitcoin4Freedom

·

4h

Nonsense. Church leadership has been rock solid on all of the important issues. They're one of the only Churches that hasn't bent to the wind. The language may be more inviting, but the rebar of the doctrine has stayed strong, and that's not changing.

Kirk Rollins

@nicoraytruth

·

4h

In 2008 this same Church went to war over Proposition 8 in California. The First Presidency had a letter read from every pulpit in the state calling the Saints to give their time and their means, and they answered with an estimated twenty million dollars, roughly half of everything the Yes campaign raised, and the great majority of the volunteers who knocked the doors, and when it passed the protests came to the gates of the Los Angeles Temple. Seven years later it publicly endorsed Utah's nondiscrimination law. In 2019 it reversed the policy that had labeled members in same sex marriages apostates and barred their children from baptism, and that same year it dropped its opposition to the state's conversion therapy rule once the language carved out religious counseling. In 2020 BYU deleted the homosexual behavior section from its Honor Code and then spent two weeks explaining what it still meant. In 2022 the Church endorsed the Respect for Marriage Act, praising it for "preserving the rights of our LGBTQ brothers and sisters."

Kimball Call

@KimballCall

·

4h

IDK, I think some of middle Church management might be vulnerable to this, but I don't the brethren are as much as you think. Based on what I know, which isn't a lot but maybe more than some.

Kirk Rollins

@nicoraytruth

·

4h

doesn't middle management have a huge impact on the body? We are witnessing this firsthand.

@ThoughtfulSaint

get in on this

Kirk Rollins

@nicoraytruth

·

3h

@thndrnlghtn

Do you really think someone in their 90s knows what is happening on the ground throughout a church this large? Of course not. That is not a criticism of them. It is just reality. At that age, and with an institution this big, you have to rely heavily on the people around you. Advisers, staff, department heads, committees, and middle management are the ones telling you what the problems are, what members are thinking, and what needs to be done. And that is where the real issue is. If that layer of the Church is younger, more progressive, and more influenced by the culture than the senior leadership, then it has enormous influence over the direction of the institution. They decide what information gets elevated, how problems are framed, what solutions are presented, and how policies are actually carried out. So the question is not just, “What does the First Presidency believe?” The question is also, “Who is advising them? Who is writing the reports? Who is framing the issues? Who is implementing the decisions?”

Stephanie Morgan

@FreedomMomUSA

·

3h

I think you underestimate the prophets and apostles and their ability to know what is going on in the world and what the current problems are. I also think you underestimate how in tune they are with God directly and Christ ability to lead the church.

Kirk Rollins

@nicoraytruth

·

3h

I'm not disputing any of that

Jeanine Elsholz

@JeanineElsholz

·

3h

I always find it so fascinating that you speak so convincingly about Salt Lake City, and yet as someone who lives here, I can tell you are not getting your information from first hand experience. Most of the time it is so far off that I wonder what you are even taking about. It seems to me like you are expecting our church leaders to be fighting hand-to-hand combat (like they used to!), while God is flying a B2 stealth bomber in this battle.

Kirk Rollins

@nicoraytruth

·

2h

1. Salt Lake City is a rainbow dumpster fire. Fact. 2. I just want you guys to engage in the culture war because the survival of the nation is at stake. Remember this voice?