Why a Latter-day Saint's answer to "are you Christian" takes a minute

The first of the Church's Articles of Faith reads: "We believe in God, the Eternal Father, and in His Son, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost." Read alone it sounds like any Christian creed. The Gospel Topics page on the Godhead adds the part that does not: "the members of the Godhead are three separate beings", and "the Father and the Son have tangible bodies of flesh and bones, and the Holy Ghost is a personage of spirit". They are described as "one in purpose and doctrine" and "perfectly united" in carrying out what members call the plan of salvation. So the unity members affirm is a unity of will and work, not of substance.

The source text members cite is short. On April 2, 1843, at Ramus, Illinois, Joseph Smith gave a set of instructions now printed as section 130 of the Doctrine and Covenants. Verse 22 says the Father has "a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man's", that the Son does also, and that the Holy Ghost "is a personage of Spirit". That is the whole of it, one verse, and it settles most of the questions a visitor asks.

The Nicene Creed of 325 describes the Father and the Son as of one substance, and the churches that descend from it hold that the three persons are one God in being. Wikipedia's article on the Latter-day Saint view states the difference flatly: the movement "has not adopted or continued to hold the doctrine of the Nicene Creed" that the three are of the same substance. Scholars sometimes file the Latter-day Saint position under "social trinitarianism", three beings whose oneness is relational. Members themselves mostly say "Godhead", never "Trinity", and leave the philosophy to others. The practical upshot for a conversation is that a member and a Catholic or Baptist colleague can say the same sentence, "I believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost", and mean two different things by the word "one".

Two further points keep the conversation honest. The Church does not describe its position as a rejection of Christ's divinity; its Gospel Topics page on Christians affirms that members follow Him and calls the Book of Mormon another witness of Him, so the disagreement is about the nature of God, not about whether Jesus is God's Son. And the difference is not a quiet one on either side. Wikipedia records that in a 2016 Pew poll 51 percent of the American public said Latter-day Saints were Christians and 32 percent said they were not, a split that had barely moved since the 2011 figures at the top of this page. For a manager the useful fact is that the member across the table knows all of this and has usually rehearsed the answer.

It did not arrive all at once, and the dates matter to members because the Church teaches that its doctrine comes by revelation over time. Wikipedia's history of the subject runs as follows. In 1830, the year the church was organised, revelations described God as an embodied being. By 1832 Joseph Smith was teaching that the Father and the Son were distinct personal members of the Godhead. His 1838 account of the First Vision, the experience he dated to his youth in upstate New York, described "two personages". The full statement, with the Holy Ghost as a personage of spirit, came in the Ramus instruction of April 2, 1843, fourteen months before Smith's death. The Church presents the sequence as clarification; critics present it as change. This site records the dates and leaves the rest to the reader.

Ask a Latter-day Saint colleague whether they are Christian and you will get a yes, usually followed by a pause and an explanation. The yes comes from the name on the building and from the teaching: the Church's Gospel Topics page on Christians states that "Jesus Christ is the Savior of the World" and that members "strive to follow Him as the way to happiness in this life and eternal life". The pause comes from the numbers at the top of this page. Members know that many of the people asking hold the creedal definition, under which belief in one substance is part of what makes a Christian, and that by that definition they fail. A 2010 LifeWay Research poll, cited by Wikipedia, found three in four American Protestant pastors did not regard them as Christians. So the honest answer takes a minute: yes, we worship Jesus Christ as the Son of God and Savior; no, we do not hold the Nicene formulation; and there are other differences too, the Book of Mormon, living prophets, and a restoration after what the Church calls an apostasy.

The executives on this site handle the question by moving from doctrine to conduct. Bill Marriott, asked in March 2012 about a successor, set the bar at character rather than religion: "It's important that the candidate be a person of strong moral character." David Neeleman told the Deseret News in 2006: "I believe the Mormon Church is one of the most misunderstood organizations on the planet." Clayton Christensen's Harvard students, according to a 2010 profile, were struck that a professor of his standing said plainly that he believed in God; one of them, Connie Zhang, later joined the Church. If you are the one asking, expect a yes, expect the footnote, and do not expect the footnote to be an argument. Members are taught to describe what they believe, and most have had this conversation many times before.

The unity members affirm is a unity of will and work, not of substance.