Structural Proximity and the Need for Exclusion

Disagreeing and Being Kin Are Not the Same Thing

Jews and Christians disagree about whether Jesus is the Messiah. This is not a soft disagreement, it is binary, total, and permanent: one side is right and the other is wrong, and there is no third position that splits the difference. Yet nobody who has thought about it for any amount of time concludes that Judaism and Christianity are therefore unrelated religions. They share the God of Abraham, the Hebrew scriptures, a moral law, and a covenant history that runs through the same patriarchs and prophets. There is complete disagreement, but the kinship still exists without any contradiction.

The Latter-day Saints and the Catholics disagree in exactly this way, bindingly and forever, and that disagreement does nothing to loosen a kinship that runs deeper than the one either of them has with Protestantism. The measure of how deep a disagreement cuts is what the two parties are actually fighting about. Judaism and Christianity are arguing about what the whole enterprise is, whether the central event of history has happened yet, a disagreement that reaches all the way down to identity. The Latter-day Saint and the Catholic are arguing about something much shallower: they agree completely on what business they are in, a church founded by Christ that carries real authority and dispenses necessary ordinances under a hierarchy that descends from God, and disagree only about who holds the rightful authority to run it. That is an argument about management, not mission. Protestantism, as we will see, is having a third kind of argument entirely, one about whether the business needs that kind of management at all.

The Throne Both of Them Are Fighting Over

The cleanest way to picture the situation is a contested throne. Two claimants each insist they are the rightful king and that the other is a pretender with no legitimate claim to the crown, and their disagreement is absolute. They cannot both be the rightful monarch, each regards the other as definitionally not the king, and no amount of negotiation will ever resolve it, because one of them is right and the other simply is not.

Look at what that bitter, permanent quarrel takes for granted, though. Both claimants agree that there is a throne. Both agree that legitimacy passes down a real line of succession. Both agree that the kingdom requires a sovereign and that the only question genuinely in dispute is who rightfully holds the office. Their entire war is conducted inside a thick set of shared assumptions about what a kingdom is and how authority works. Two men can only fight over who is the rightful king if they both already believe in the throne.

That is the Latter-day Saint and the Catholic, and the Orthodox standing right beside the Catholic. Each holds that Christ established a church with genuine authority, that this authority is not something an individual generates for himself but something transmitted through an ordained line, and that the entire question is who actually holds it now. They give different accounts of the line of succession, and we will get to those, but they are unmistakably fighting over the same throne. The fight itself is the proof - you do not argue this particular argument unless you have already agreed on everything that makes the argument possible.

Protestantism is not a third claimant to the throne. Protestantism is the position that abolished the monarchy. It is not in the succession dispute at all, because it denies there is a throne to inherit in the first place. That is a deeper disagreement than the one Catholics and Latter-day Saints have, a disagreement about whether the whole framework even exists, and it is the reason the supposed Protestant-Catholic alliance against the Latter-day Saints is so strange once you look at it directly.

What the Two Claimants Actually Share

The kinship between Latter-day Saint and Catholic theology is not a matter of vibe or mutual fondness, and it certainly is not a matter of agreeing on doctrine. It is structural, and the structure is specific and empirical.

Start with the rejection of sola scriptura. Catholicism holds that scripture is one part of a larger living deposit of faith, read within sacred Tradition and interpreted by the teaching authority of the Church, and that the Bible alone was never meant to be the sole rule. The Latter-day Saints reject the Bible-alone premise just as firmly, holding to an open canon and to continuing revelation through living prophets. Both traditions look at the Protestant claim that the text by itself is the final authority and answer, in their own ways, that this cannot be right, because a text cannot interpret or govern itself. They disagree about where the additional authority lives, but they agree completely that there has to be additional authority, and that the Bible was never built to stand alone.

Then there are the ordinances. For both Catholicism and the Latter-day Saints, the sacred rites are not symbols that illustrate a salvation already complete, they are necessary, they actually do something, and their validity depends on being performed by someone holding the proper authority to perform them. Catholicism teaches that baptism is necessary for salvation and that the sacraments are real means of grace. The Latter-day Saints teach that the saving ordinances, from baptism on through the temple, are essential and must be administered by the priesthood. This is the single sharpest point of kinship, because it is the exact opposite of the standard evangelical position that ordinances are mere symbols and that faith alone accomplishes the whole of salvation. On the question of whether the rites are necessary and authority-dependent, the Latter-day Saint and the Catholic stand together, and the Protestant stands across the room.

The shape of authority is the same too. Catholicism has the Pope as the successor of Peter, the supreme earthly authority, supported by a structured hierarchy of bishops. The Latter-day Saints have a living prophet, with a First Presidency and a Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, also a structured and hierarchical living authority. Both reject the Protestant priesthood of all believers, the idea that no ordained office stands between the individual and final religious authority. Both insist that authority is concrete, located in identifiable offices, and held by specific people.

What is striking, once you start listing the genuine structural differences between Latter-day Saint and Catholic theology, is how few of them there actually are. They share the rejection of sola scriptura, the necessity and authority-dependence of ordinances, the hierarchical living authority, the conviction that a church is constituted by transmitted power rather than by individual access. The real disagreement, when you finally isolate it, narrows down to the single binary already named: who holds the authority. That is one disagreement, enormous and unbridgeable, sitting atop a mountain of shared structure. Which makes it all the more telling what happens when the two traditions actually meet at the baptismal font, because there, on the one rite where the kinship should be most visible, Rome manufactures a difference that is not really there.

Baptism by Exclusion

Start with a fact that ought to be embarrassing. The Catholic Church does not require converts from most Protestant churches to be rebaptized, because it recognizes their baptism as valid. It does require rebaptism for converts from the Latter-day Saints. So Rome extends sacramental recognition to the Protestants, whose entire movement was founded on rejecting the authority-and-sacrament structure that Rome and the Latter-day Saints share, while withholding that recognition from the Latter-day Saints, who actually agree with Rome that the structure is necessary. The tradition that rejects the shared structure gets recognized, and the tradition that affirms it gets turned away.

The stated ground for rejecting Latter-day Saint baptism is a difference over the nature of the Trinity. Hold that up against the formula itself and it begins to wobble. Latter-day Saint baptism is performed in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, by one holding priesthood authority, and the words are all but identical to the Catholic ones. The Latter-day Saint ordinance reads, "Having been commissioned of Jesus Christ, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen," against the Catholic "I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." The Latter-day Saint version is, if anything, more explicit about acting on Christ's authority, and the only daylight in the naming of the Godhead is Ghost for Spirit, two English words for one and the same divine person. The Vatican knows this. Its own theologian, in explaining the 2001 ruling that declared Latter-day Saint baptism invalid, openly granted that at first glance the Latter-day Saints appear to baptize in the name of the Trinity, then rested the rejection not on the words but on what he claimed the words mean to the person saying them. Because the Latter-day Saint is judged to understand the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost differently from the way the councils defined them, the ruling holds that the minister does not intend what the Church intends, and the baptism does not count.

That reasoning collapses under Catholicism's own rules. Catholic doctrine could not be clearer that a minister's defective understanding does not invalidate a baptism. The official standard is that the minister must intend to do what the Church does, and the Church's own guidelines state in plain words that this "does not necessarily mean holding the Catholic doctrine of Baptism." The Council of Trent settled that a heretic who baptizes with the right formula and the intention of doing what the Church does performs a true baptism. Catholic commentators are emphatic that to require correct understanding of the minister would be the ancient heresy of Donatism, which the Church condemned, because if every sacrament depended on the private theological competence of the one administering it, no one could ever be sure of anything. The technical term for the principle is ex opere operato, the sacrament works by virtue of being performed correctly, not by the worthiness or comprehension of the minister. So a Catholic priest who personally misunderstood the Trinity, who held in his own head something very like the view Rome attributes to the Latter-day Saints, and who baptized a convert with the standard formula, would confer a valid baptism, and the convert would not be rebaptized. Wrong understanding, even heretical understanding, is forgiven everywhere, and it does not break the sacrament.

The contradictions in how Rome applies this principle go further than the LDS case alone, and laying them out side by side makes the arbitrariness visible. The Apostolic Church uses a Jesus-only formula drawn from Acts 2, explicitly not the Trinitarian formula of Matthew 28, and the Catholic Church rules its baptism valid. Oneness Pentecostals use a functionally identical Jesus-only formula and explicitly reject the Trinity in favor of modalism, a more radical departure from Trinitarian orthodoxy than anything in LDS theology, yet their rulings land differently depending on who is being assessed, with no transparent principle offered to explain the difference. Meanwhile several Protestant bodies, including Restoration Movement groups that explicitly reject creeds as binding, receive valid rulings despite doctrinal irregularities that on any consistent application of the stated criteria would require examination. The LDS Church uses the correct Trinitarian formula and is ruled invalid.

The most self-undercutting item is the CDF's own ruling document. In the text explaining the LDS invalidation, the CDF states explicitly that "errors of a doctrinal nature have never been considered sufficient to question the validity of the sacrament of Baptism." That sentence appears in the same document that then proceeds to invalidate LDS baptism almost entirely on doctrinal grounds, that Mormon theology holds a different conception of God. The document that invalidates LDS baptism contains, in its own body, the principle that should have prevented the ruling. It is not a contradiction imposed from outside but a self-refutation within a single text that exposes the likely socio-political intent.

There is a further cost to the move that is easy to miss. Baptism is, for Catholicism, arguably the most important sacrament of all, the gateway through which a person first enters the Church and is cleansed of original sin, and Rome has chosen this of all rites to make conditional on a correct understanding of the Godhead. To require that the baptizer or the baptized hold the right metaphysical view of God before the ordinance counts is to make the validity of the sacrament depend on an intellectual achievement, on getting a doctrine correct. The companion essay "Saved by Grace" traces exactly this move in Protestant theology, where a salvation supposedly by grace alone quietly turns out to require believing the right things, which is a work in everything but name. Rome, in this one ruling, lands squarely on the same logic, making its most important sacrament hinge not on grace and not on authority but on the convert's theological correctness, which is the very works-by-another-name standard that both Catholicism and Protestantism claim to have risen above. The tradition that is supposed to anchor validity in authority ends up, here, anchoring it in an exam.

Here is the fact that should have ended the matter before it began. Latter-day Saint theology intends, by its baptism, exactly what the Catholic Church intends by its own: to follow Christ's example in being baptized, and to do so in order to enter His church. That is not a similar intention, it is the identical intention, stated in the same terms. The Latter-day Saint at the font is not trying to perform some other rite that merely shares a name with Christian baptism. He is trying to do the very thing Christ did and commanded, for the very reason Christ gave. So when the ruling says the Latter-day Saint minister does not intend to do what the Church does, it is simply wrong about the intention, which is the same. The one real difference left standing is the authority claim, whether the priesthood performing the baptism is genuine, and that difference is precisely the one the Catholic and the Orthodox already hold against each other while still recognizing each other's baptisms. Rome forgives that exact category of disagreement everywhere except here.

Set the two cases side by side and the pretense falls apart entirely. A Catholic minister with a mistaken, even heretical, grasp of the Trinity baptizes validly, because his intention to do what the Church does covers for his faulty understanding. The Latter-day Saint minister, using a nearly identical formula and intending the identical act, is declared invalid. The only thing Rome can point to as the difference is its bare assertion that the Latter-day Saint understanding of God is not merely mistaken but so foreign that the minister cannot be said to intend Christian baptism at all. That is the entire load-bearing move, and it is pure assertion, because it has to declare that the Latter-day Saint conception of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost falls so far outside the bounds that it does not even count as the kind of error the Church forgives in heretics, which is just the contested conclusion, that the Latter-day Saints have God wrong, dressed up as a premise.

The reverse case seals it. Imagine a Latter-day Saint minister and convert who, through some honest confusion, happened to hold in their own minds the exact Catholic conception of the Trinity while performing an ordinary Latter-day Saint baptism with the usual words. By Rome's own logic there would be nothing left to object to. The form is right, the intention was always identical, and now even the contested understanding matches the Catholic one precisely. The rejection would have no ground left to stand on. Which tells you the rejection was never really about the correctness of anyone's belief, because correctness could be fully present and the machinery would still have to invent a reason to exclude. The decisive factor was never what the minister understands or intends. It was which institution he belongs to, which is a border, not a doctrine.

There is one more move buried in the standard, and it is the deepest flaw of all. To intend "what the Church does" assumes there is a single, universal Church whose intention can be matched or missed in the first place. The sister essay "There Is No Popular Christianity" shows at length that no such universal Church exists. There is the Catholic Church, the Orthodox communions, the Latter-day Saints, and the thousands of Protestant bodies, and they do not merely differ, many of them regard one another as heretical organizations leading souls to hell. So when Rome says the Latter-day Saint fails to intend what "the Church" does, the phrase can only mean what the Catholic Church specifically does, because there is no universal Church to intend toward. The standard, stated honestly, is not "did you intend to perform Christian baptism," it is "did you intend to do what we do." That is not a test of theological correctness at all. It is a membership check, and a membership check is the definition of othering.

When all the inconsistencies are laid alongside one another, the one consistent thread is not theological but institutional. Protestants disagree sharply with Catholic soteriology but accept the legitimacy of the post-apostolic church. The Eastern Orthodox reject the Filioque but do not claim Rome apostatized. Oneness Pentecostals are theologically radical but pose no organized challenge to Catholic authority. The LDS Church, uniquely, claims that the entire post-apostolic church fell into a genuine apostasy, that the priesthood authority was lost from the Earth, and that Catholic sacraments therefore lack valid priestly authority entirely. That is not a disagreement within a shared framework. It is a direct and total challenge to the institutional legitimacy of Rome itself. The LDS ruling is the only one where Rome had to contradict its own stated principles to get the desired outcome, because no consistent application of those principles would have produced it.

The Protestant challenge to Catholic authority is irritating but survivable. It says you may have had the authority passed down to you, but actually anyone can access God directly through scripture and the institutional transmission was never necessary. That's a disagreement about the nature of authority, but it leaves the Catholic historical claim mostly standing. It doesn't say Peter wasn't the first bishop, or that the councils were fraudulent, or that fifteen centuries of sacraments were void. The Protestant is wrong, in the Catholic view, but wrong in a way that leaves Catholic history intact. The Catholic attack on the Protestant is equally soft in return: you originated your beliefs from us, you just got the authority question wrong, and the Catholic claim doesn't even place a premium on its own authority in certain respects, since in Catholic theology anyone can baptize anyone in an emergency. Neither challenge voids the other's history.

The LDS claim does something categorically different: it says the chain snapped and the authority was lost, which means every pope, every council, every ordination, every sacrament performed under the claimed apostolic line for the better part of fifteen hundred years was performed without the genuine priesthood to back it. It voids the authority of both traditions entirely, and this is simply too much to bear, regardless of any structural agreement that might otherwise exist. The Protestant and the Catholic can form an alliance against the Latter-day Saint precisely because the LDS claim doesn't undermine them symmetrically: it threatens the Catholic existentially while the Protestant, who already rejected the necessity of transmitted authority, is barely threatened at all. They have opposite reasons to dislike the LDS claim and a shared interest in keeping it outside the tent, and neither of those reasons has anything to do with whether the claim is true. The alliance is the product of that shared self-interest, and it is the clearest case in the entire essay: every other version of the rejection could at least pose as a doctrinal concern, while this one, followed to its source, reduces to two institutions protecting themselves.

So the two traditions cannot agree on the baptism. What they can agree on, the Catholic and the Protestant both, is the exclusion. The Protestant and the Catholic, who recognize each other's baptisms while holding incompatible theologies, and who would each unchurch the other on the things that determine salvation, find their common ground exactly where the sister essay "There Is No Popular Christianity" said the fractured coalition always finds it: at the boundary, in the shared project of keeping the Latter-day Saint outside. They do not concur on what baptism is, or on what salvation requires, or on who holds authority, or on what the Church even is. They concur that the Latter-day Saint does not belong. The doctrine is the paint, and the fence is the point.

None of this is cause for offense, because it is no insult to the Latter-day Saints that Catholics do not regard their baptism as valid, and the reverse holds just as plainly, since the Latter-day Saints do not regard Catholic baptism as valid either, each tradition believing the other lacks the authority it claims for itself. That mutual disagreement is honest and expected, and what invites serious curiosity is something else: that the Catholic Church accepts the baptisms of others on the very basis it uses to reject the Latter-day Saints, an asymmetry that serves as corroborating evidence for the socio-political motivation this whole episode exposes.

What Catholics and Protestants Actually Share

The obvious objection to everything so far is the one a Protestant will raise immediately, and it deserves a straight answer. Surely, the objection goes, Catholics and Protestants are closer to each other than either is to the Latter-day Saints, because they share the Trinity, the creeds, the Bible, the early Church, the Church Fathers, and fifteen centuries of common history before the Reformation ever happened, while the Latter-day Saints showed up only in the nineteenth century with new scripture and new prophets. How could the newcomer possibly be closer to Rome than the movement that broke off from Rome a mere five hundred years ago and kept most of its theology?

The answer is that the things Catholics and Protestants share are actually the wrong measure. What they share is an inheritance: the same founding text, the same ancient councils, the same historical spine, the same vocabulary. What they divide on is the operating system: how a person is saved, what the sacraments do, where authority lives, whether works are necessary, and what a church fundamentally is. Shared inheritance is surface, while the operating system is structure, and the Reformation was not a quarrel about the surface, it was a break, precisely and explicitly, over the structure.

Look at what actually separates Rome from the Reformation. They divide on justification, the very question of how a sinner is made right with God, with Rome teaching an infused righteousness sustained through the sacraments and the Reformers teaching righteousness imputed by faith alone, a disagreement so sharp that the Council of Trent pronounced the Protestant view anathema and Protestant theologians returned the verdict by calling Trent a denial of the gospel. They divide on the sacraments, with Rome holding that baptism regenerates and the Eucharist conveys real grace, and much of Protestantism holding that these are symbols that accomplish nothing in themselves. They divide on authority, the Catholic resting it in a teaching magisterium and apostolic succession, the Protestant resting it in scripture alone with no human institution standing above the individual conscience. They divide on whether salvation can be lost, on purgatory, on the role of works, on the place of Mary and the saints, on the number of the sacraments. None of these are footnotes, they are the machinery of salvation and the definition of the church, and on all of it the two traditions are not merely different but were forged in mutual condemnation.

Now set that against the Latter-day Saint and the Catholic. The two of them diverge on the surface, on the Trinity as popularly construed and on fifteen centuries of shared history the Latter-day Saints do not claim. They converge on the operating system. Both hold that authority must be transmitted and cannot be self-generated. Both hold that ordinances are necessary and must be performed by that authority. Both hold that a church is constituted by power received rather than by access claimed. The Catholic and the Protestant share the inheritance and divide on the structure. The Catholic and the Latter-day Saint diverge on the inheritance and share the structure. The whole question is which of those layers actually defines what a church is, and the answer is not seriously in doubt, because the surface is what a tradition displays and the structure is what it runs on.

This is exactly why the shared history between Rome and the Reformation, real as it is, functions as a distraction. It makes the alliance feel natural, two old relations with centuries of common memory, and it quietly hides the fact that the family split over the deepest thing there is. The Reformation kept the portraits on the wall and tore out the foundation. The Latter-day Saints are charged with having different portraits, while quietly pouring the same foundation Rome stands on.

Laid out question by question, the pattern is hard to miss. On every structural question that decides what a church is, the Latter-day Saint and the Catholic give the same answer and the Protestant gives the opposite one.

On the Trinity, Don't Concede the Distance

It is tempting, when laying out where Latter-day Saint and Catholic theology differ, to put the nature of God at the top of the list and call it the great gulf between them, and that concession is a mistake the essay should refuse to make.

The companion essay "A Guess Dressed as a Creed" makes the full case, so this essay will not rerun it, but the short version matters here. The Latter-day Saints can affirm the Nicene Creed as it was actually written: one God, three distinct persons, one shared divine nature. The exclusion of the Latter-day Saints from Trinitarian orthodoxy does not come from the creed itself. It comes from a layer of additional specification, the move from "one substance, one shared divine nature" to "one numerically single, incomprehensible being," that was read into the creed later and is not in the original text. Once you hold the creed to what it says, the supposed Godhead gulf between the Latter-day Saints and the Catholics narrows dramatically.

Which means the nature of God is not a place where Latter-day Saint theology is somehow farther from Catholicism than Protestantism is. If anything, taking the creeds at their actual word, the kinship there runs deeper than people assume, not shallower. The honest reader will go to the Trinity essay ("A Guess Dressed as a Creed") and weigh it. For this essay, the point is only that the Godhead should not be handed over as the obvious great distance, because it is not nearly as great as the casual version of the argument pretends.

There is a particular bind here for the Protestant who wants to use the Trinity as the wedge. He holds to sola scriptura, scripture alone as the rule of faith, and he has no agreed authority that settles which reading of scripture is the correct one, which is the entire reason there are so many Protestant denominations in the first place. So on what ground does he declare the Latter-day Saint reading of the Godhead heretical? It is a reading of the same scriptures he reveres, and without an authority empowered to adjudicate interpretations, his own principles give him no way to rule it out. The Latter-day Saint interpretation might as well have come from one more of his own thousands of sects, and he would have no consistent basis for expelling that sect either. The moment he reaches for the creeds to make the exclusion stick, he runs into a different problem, because the creeds were defined by the Catholic authority his Reformation rejected, and if he is going to lean on them he has to explain why he accepts that authority here and nowhere else. Should he accept the creeds anyway, there is the further oddity that the specificity he needs, the extra clause that would exclude the Latter-day Saints, is not in the creeds as the councils wrote them. He is left waiting for a precision the Catholics never added and that his own tradition has no authority to supply.

There is a further inconsistency that sits right under the surface of this whole argument, and it concerns Judaism. At the popular level and in significant theological literature, Christians widely hold that Jews worship the same God, or at least a God close enough to speak of in the same breath, despite the fact that Judaism explicitly rejects the Trinity, denies the divine nature of Christ, and has no concept of the Holy Spirit as a third divine person. Vatican II affirmed that Muslims adore the one God, and surveys of pastors, theologians, and ordinary believers consistently find the same-God view applied generously to Judaism and even Islam. Yet the Latter-day Saints, who affirm Christ as divine, who baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost using the Trinitarian formula word for word, and whose theology reaches toward the divine nature rather than away from it, get excluded on Trinitarian grounds. The tradition that explicitly denies the Trinity and the divinity of Christ gets the benefit of the doubt, while the tradition that affirms both but holds a different metaphysical account of the divine substance gets excluded. If the Trinity formulation is genuinely the dividing line, that line should fall between Christians and Jews far more clearly than it falls between Christians and Latter-day Saints, but almost no one draws it there. The standard is not principled. It is applied precisely where it produces the desired result and set aside everywhere it would not.

The Line of Succession They Disagree On

The kinship does not erase the disagreement, and the disagreement is, as mentioned, irreconcilable. The Latter-day Saints and the Catholics give flatly incompatible accounts of how the crown passed. Catholicism claims continuity: the authority Christ gave to Peter has descended in an unbroken chain of ordination from then until now, never lost, never interrupted. The Latter-day Saints claim restoration: that the authority was in fact lost in an apostasy after the apostles died, and was given back directly by heavenly messengers in the nineteenth century. These cannot both be true. If the chain was never broken, there was nothing to restore, and if it had to be restored, the chain was broken. One of these accounts is correct and the other is simply wrong, and there is no clever framing that lets both stand.

So the Latter-day Saint and the Catholic are, to each other, the pretender to the throne. Rome regards the Restoration as a fiction and the LDS priesthood as invalid. The Latter-day Saints regard the long centuries between the apostles and the Restoration as a genuine apostasy, which means they regard the chain Rome treasures as having been broken long ago. This mutual rejection will never be reconciled, in exactly the way Judaism and Christianity will never reconcile on the Messiah. Anyone who tells you the two traditions are secretly compatible underneath is selling something.

Notice, though, what the rejection itself requires. To accuse each other of being the false claimant, both sides have to agree that there is a true claimant, that authority descends through a real line, and that holding that authority is what makes a church the Church. The Catholic objection to the Latter-day Saints, that the apostasy they claim cannot be demonstrated and rests on revelation Catholics do not accept, is not evidence against the kinship this essay describes but a perfect example of it. It is a family argument, conducted entirely on shared premises about what authority is and why it matters. Protestantism is not even in that argument, because it rejects the premise that the argument is about anything real.

Two Kings Versus No King

The monarchy gives the cleanest way to state the whole thesis. Picture two different kings ruling two different realms. They produce different laws, hold different courts, trace different lines of succession. For all those differences, they are running the same kind of system: a single sovereign, authority flowing downward from one legitimate source, legitimacy resting on a real chain of transmission back to that source. A dispute between the two of them about whose line is the rightful one is a dispute inside monarchy. It is not a dispute about whether monarchy is the right system.

That is the Latter-day Saint and the Catholic. Apostolic succession and restoration are two rival accounts of who holds the crown and how it passed to them, but both take for granted that a crown exists, that it must be held by someone specific, and that legitimacy depends on real transmission rather than on each subject crowning himself. Their differences are differences of degree, two dynasties within one form of government.

Protestantism is not a third king. Through sola scriptura and the priesthood of all believers, it does not advance a rival claim to the crown, it rejects the concept of the crown. The right word for that, used precisely, is anarchy, and the precision matters, because the word is not an insult here. This is not anarchy in the everyday sense of disorder or chaos, and Protestant congregations are very often highly organized, disciplined, and orderly. It is anarchy in the strict political sense: the absence of a single governing sovereign whose authority is transmitted through a real chain, with authority instead distributed to each individual believer and each local congregation answering for itself. That is a difference in kind, not a difference in degree. The Latter-day Saint and the Catholic are two kings disputing a throne. The Protestant has dissolved the monarchy and handed the crown to everyone, which is to say to no one.

This is why the alliance against the Latter-day Saints is so odd on inspection. When a Protestant joins a Catholic to rule the Latter-day Saints out of Christianity for getting authority wrong, the Protestant is siding with a tradition whose entire theory of authority he has already rejected, against a tradition that shares that theory with the Catholic. The two kings have more in common with each other than either has with the man who abolished the throne, no matter which of them that man is temporarily standing next to.

A Word of Respect for the Reformation

It would be easy to read all of this as contempt for Protestantism, and that reading would be wrong, so let me say plainly where the genuine respect lies.

Martin Luther is not a villain in the Latter-day Saint story. He is closer to a forerunner. He broke a real monopoly on access to God, at genuine risk to his own life, and the long line of religious liberty that runs from the Reformation through the dissenting movements of Europe and into the religious freedom written into the American founding is the very same line that made the Restoration possible. Joseph Smith could claim a vision, gather a church, and publish new scripture in the open, protected by law in a way that would have been impossible in earlier centuries, at least until bad actors violated the very laws meant to protect him and killed him at Carthage. That protection existed at all because the ground had been cleared, at great cost, over the preceding three centuries. Latter-day Saint theology is in that sense a beneficiary of what Luther began, not an enemy of it. The Reformation did not arrive where the Latter-day Saints believe the truth actually lies, but it pruned the garden in a way that provided Christ fertile soil to plant His restoration in. Thus, while reverence for the theology that was derived from Luther may wane among Latter-day Saints, reverence for Luther's actions as a figure in religious liberty is sustained at the highest level.

It is also easy to forget, in the midst of this alliance, what the Catholic Church thought of the man the Protestants now invoke as their founding hero. The Edict of Worms in 1521, issued jointly by Rome and Emperor Charles V, declared Luther a notorious heretic, demanded his capture, and explicitly permitted anyone to kill him on sight without legal consequence. The edict called him a "demon in the appearance of a man" whose heresy must be exterminated. The only reason Luther died in his bed rather than at the stake was that he was popular enough to make executing him politically inconvenient, and that sympathetic princes hid him. A century earlier, Jan Hus had made the same mistake of trusting a promise of safe conduct from a Church council and was burned anyway. Luther knew the precedent and feared it. So the tradition that now extends its hand to Protestantism in a shared alliance against the Latter-day Saints is the same tradition that, within living memory of figures Luther himself knew, burned men for exactly what he was doing and would have done the same to him given the chance, making the alliance not merely theologically incoherent but historically bewildering.

Protestantism Evolves Sideways

There is a tempting but wrong way to describe Protestantism, which is to call it stagnant, and that is plainly false. Protestantism changes constantly, more than either Catholicism or the Latter-day Saints. The right distinction is not whether it changes but how it changes.

Picture two ways a thing can grow. One is a field of plants sprouting from shared soil, many separate growths spreading outward at roughly the same level, each going its own direction, none building on the others, nothing accumulating into a single structure. The other is a stalagmite, one structure rising slowly upward because each new layer is laid down on top of the last, building height through continuity. Protestantism grows like the field. Catholicism and the Latter-day Saints grow like the stalagmite.

The reason is the authority gate, the same mechanism this whole essay turns on. With a living authority to say what the tradition is, change accumulates: each development is added to a single structure and builds on what came before. Without that authority, there is nothing to make change accumulate, so it scatters instead, sideways, into thousands of parallel and often contradictory branches. The lack of an authority gate does not stop Protestantism from evolving, it just changes the evolution from something that stacks into something that disperses. It is breadth without height, where the apostolic traditions have height that gathers everything into one growing thing.

There Is No Coherent Protestantism

The sideways growth leads to a sharper claim than mere fragmentation, and this is where the essay's response to the online alliance lands hardest. Push the point far enough and you have to ask whether "Protestantism" names a single thing at all.

Catholicism is a definable thing. Ask what the Catholic Church teaches on almost any question and there is an authoritative answer, because there is an authority empowered to give one. The same is true of the Latter-day Saints. Ask what the Church teaches and a real answer exists, grounded in living authority. Now ask what Protestantism teaches on a given question, and there is no answer, because there is no body that can give one. There is no Protestant authority that can say what Protestantism holds, which means there is no doctrine that some Protestant body cannot diverge on while remaining, by its own lights, fully Protestant. "Protestantism" does not name a church, and it does not even name a fixed set of beliefs. It names a branding category, a family resemblance held together by little more than the shared label of not being Catholic and a general gesture toward the Bible.

On first-order moral matters, the kind a tradition exists in part to answer, Protestant bodies sit on opposite sides of their own aisle. Some ordain women and some forbid it. Some bless same-sex marriages and some condemn them. They divide on abortion and on the medical transition of minors. These are not housekeeping quarrels, they are disagreements about what God requires, and Protestantism contains the full spectrum of answers with no mechanism to settle any of them.

Set that against the apostolic traditions. On these same questions the Latter-day Saint and the Catholic are very likely to land in the same place, and to land there firmly. Both the Latter-day Saint and the Catholic regard elective abortion as the taking of innocent life, and both regard the medical transition of children as a grave harm done to a body God made. That convergence is not an accident of temperament. It is what a living authority produces: a stable line on the hardest questions, held because someone has the standing to hold it. The factual ground underneath should be stated precisely, because it is sometimes assumed away. Across both pro-life sources and the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute, the hard cases, rape, incest, danger to the mother's life or health, and fetal health problems, together account for only low single-digit percentages of abortions. The great majority occur where neither the mother's life nor the child's health is in danger. Reasonable people argue about what to do with that fact, but the apostolic traditions answer it with one voice, and Protestantism answers it with many.

So the contrast is the argument. Two traditions with transmitted authority converge cleanly on the gravest questions a faith can face, while the tradition without that authority cannot hold a single line even among its own members. If "Protestantism" cannot speak with one voice on whether elective abortion takes an innocent life, in what meaningful sense is it one thing at all? This is the same point the sister essay ("There Is No Popular Christianity") makes about Christianity as a whole, run one level down. That essay showed there is no single "Christianity Church" with the standing to excommunicate anyone. This one shows that there is not even a coherent Protestantism inside it, the fractal continuing all the way down. Catholicism and the Latter-day Saints are real, definable bodies, while Protestantism is a label stretched over a swarm.

When a Protestant invokes "historic Christianity" or "the rest of us" to read the Latter-day Saints out of the faith, he is invoking a unit that does not exist, held together by branding, while standing against two traditions that genuinely are what they claim to be. The one member of the conversation making a coherence-based exclusion is the one whose own tradition has no coherence to stand on.

When the Magisterium Changes Its Mind

There is one more parallel that the Latter-day Saint and the Catholic share, and it is the one Catholics are usually least eager to name, because it cuts close to the thing they most want to deny they have in common.

Catholic doctrine has developed enormously over the centuries, often arriving at binding teachings that the earliest Church plainly did not hold in their finished form. Indulgences were introduced under Pope Urban II in 1095. Mandatory clerical celibacy was imposed by the Second Lateran Council in 1139. Transubstantiation was defined as dogma at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. The Immaculate Conception became binding dogma only in 1854, having been denied by figures as central as Thomas Aquinas in earlier centuries. Papal infallibility itself, the doctrine that anchors the Church's authority to define all the others, was not defined until 1870. These are not minor elaborations; they are salvation-relevant definitions that the apostolic church plainly did not teach in those terms.

Catholicism has a sophisticated and sincere account of all this, and this exposition is no attempt to mock them for it. The account is development of doctrine. The deposit of faith, on this view, closed with the death of the last apostle, and the Magisterium does not add anything new to it. It only draws out, clarifies, and makes explicit what was implicitly present in that closed deposit all along, however many centuries the drawing-out takes. Revelation ended in the first century, and everything since is the Church deepening its understanding of what it already had.

Here is what is hard to miss, though, once you set the two traditions side by side. The thing Catholicism calls development of doctrine, the Magisterium issuing genuinely new, binding, salvation-relevant clarity across the centuries, looks strikingly similar to the thing the Latter-day Saints call ongoing revelation. Both traditions agree that the Church must keep receiving authoritative direction over time, that questions arise which the original deposit did not visibly settle, and that a living authority is needed to settle them. The appearance is similar between the two, but the claims about what they are actually doing differ some. The Latter-day Saints believe they receive genuinely new information and new mandates directly from God, additions to what was previously known. Catholicism believes it receives no new revelation at all, only a deeper elucidation, perhaps divinely guided, of what God already delivered in full to the apostles. One claims fresh content from heaven; the other claims clearer sight of content already possessed. So they are not doing the identical thing under different names. What is remarkable is how alike the two processes look from the outside even though the underlying claims differ, because in both cases the practical result is the same: a living authority hands down new, binding direction the earlier Church did not visibly have, whether that direction is called revelation or development. Catholicism insists on the second word, because the first would concede that revelation did not end with the apostles, which is a wall it cannot afford to breach. The Latter-day Saints simply call their experience what they believe it to be. It is, to return to the image, two kings governing their realms in visibly similar ways, with one of them careful to insist that his most recent decrees were technically issued under his predecessor's original charter.

Which means that even here, where the two traditions differ on what exactly is happening, the structural kinship holds. Both hold that the Church receives binding direction over time through a living authority, and they differ on whether that direction is new revelation or deepened understanding. The Protestant, who has no Magisterium and no prophet and no mechanism for binding new clarity at all, is once again the one standing outside the shared structure, disputing not which word to use but whether the thing itself should happen at all.

Refusing the Catholic Apologist's Version

It is only fair to acknowledge that many Catholics reject this essay's thesis. A well-known Catholic Answers tract quotes LDS President Gordon B. Hinckley saying Mormons are no closer to Protestantism than they are to Catholicism, then argues the Latter-day Saints are actually further from Catholicism than Protestants. The case rests almost entirely on the nature of God, the Godhead presented as creedal Trinity on one side and Latter-day Saint heresy on the other. As covered above and at full length in the Trinity essay, the Godhead is precisely the place where the apparent distance shrinks once you hold the creeds to what they actually say. The strongest evidence the Catholic apologist offers for distance turns out, on inspection, to be evidence for proximity. Beyond that, the structural claim this essay makes is narrower than the one he is knocking down: not that Latter-day Saint theology equals Catholic theology, which would be absurd, but that the two share the conviction that a church requires transmitted institutional authority and necessary ordinances, which Protestantism rejected at the Reformation. That claim survives every content-level difference a Catholic apologist can name, because it was never a claim about content.

The Closeness That Survives the Quarrel

The Latter-day Saints and the Catholics, with the Orthodox alongside them, make the same foundational claim: Christ established a church, gave it real authority, and that authority is maintained through a literal, hierarchical, divinely sanctioned structure. They disagree, totally and permanently, on who holds that authority now, and that disagreement will never be resolved. They are two claimants to one throne, and one of them is the pretender. The real fault line in Christianity runs between the churches that hold authority must be transmitted, Catholic, Orthodox, and Latter-day Saint, and the churches of the Reformation that hold it need not be. On one side sit roughly two-thirds of all Christians on earth. On the other stands Protestantism, defined by the rejection of that conviction. The Latter-day Saints are not the outlier in that arrangement, Protestantism is.

So when the alliance forms in the comment section, it helps to see what actually drives it. It is not that the Catholic and the Protestant are the close pair, because on everything structural they are not. It is that the Latter-day Saint claim threatens them both in a way they do not threaten each other. A Catholic and a Protestant can each regard the other as merely mistaken, one misreading scripture, the other misplacing authority, with the quiet hope that better interpretation would bring the other home. The Latter-day Saint claim offers no such consolation to either of them, because it does not say they read the Bible slightly wrong. It says the authority was lost entirely and had to be restored, which leaves neither of them standing. To grant the Latter-day Saints the name of Christian is to grant a claim that nullifies both hosts of the alliance at once, and that is an insult neither can absorb. So they exclude together, not because their theologies are kin, but because the threat is shared. The exclusion is socio-political, not structural, and the structure tells the truer story: on what a church is and how salvation comes, the Catholic and the Latter-day Saint were always the closer pair.

Take It as Flattery

There is almost no question that this attempt at othering Latter-day Saint theology rests on no logical theological basis, because the contradictions to it are vast. It is clear that the othering happens for some other reason, and that reason is not hard to name: Latter-day Saint theology does not generally concern itself with conformity. In honesty, from a Latter-day Saint perspective, there is only one way to take this othering, and that is as flattery. It is flattering to be recognized as different from all other churches, because that is precisely our claim. We did not need another reformation, we needed a restoration. You can call us the others, but so are you, amongst yourselves, and it is an honor to be recognized for our revelation rather than our conformity.

We believe in Christ, the great Jehovah, the God of the Old Testament and the Savior of the New. We believe that Christ's church and authority were lost from this Earth, and there are plenty of evidences of it, not the least of which are tens of thousands of denominations and an inability to reveal new, undiscovered doctrine or scripture. Those evidences do not matter, though, against our actual claim of truth. Instead, read the Book of Mormon, pray to God, and see whether He did not restore His authority and His church upon the Earth. That is our claim and our invitation in one.