Ep. 174: Exploring the World – Mormonism

Kourtney Cromwell:
Welcome to the indoubt Podcast, where we explore the challenging topics that young adults often face. Each week, we talk with guests who help answer questions of faith, life and culture, connecting them to our daily experiences and God’s word. For more info on indoubt, visit indoubt.ca or indoubt.com.

Ryan McCurdy:
Hey everyone. It’s so good to be with you on this episode of indoubt. My name is Ryan McCurdy, your host. And today we are going to continue on with our little series on exploring the world and religions and different perspectives. And today we have with us Lynn Wilder, and she is coming from the perspective of somebody who used to belong to the Mormon Church and has now stepped out and is a faithful follower of Jesus Christ. And so let’s take a listen to her story and learn about Mormonism.

Ryan McCurdy:
Well, welcome to today’s episode. I’m very excited to have with me, Lynn Wilder. Lynn, thanks for being on the air with us today.

Lynn Wilder:
Ryan, I love what you do, so thank you.

Ryan McCurdy:
Appreciate it. Now we are going to get into a conversation about Mormonism. And you have some experience with the Mormon Church and the Latter-Day Saints movement, and so we’d love if you could just share with our listeners. What is your connection to Mormonism? And how did you get to where you are now?

Lynn Wilder:
Wow. This is really a contemporary conversation for Christians to be aware of. I think a lot of Christians are not aware of the fact that people are streaming out of the Mormon Church. People are leaving Christianity in general, but people are just streaming out of Mormonism. Why? Because they can get on the internet, type in Joseph Smith, and hear all kinds of things that they didn’t know before because they’re kind of taught not to investigate or listen to sources outside of their church sources. But the Internet’s so accessible now, and even if you have to do it in the middle of the night, you can get all kinds of information that you couldn’t get previously. So that’s certainly one reason.
And then there a few policies have caused people to leave in recent years. But all of this gets very confusing because recently Mormons have decided that they are Christians too. When I joined the Mormon Church in the ’70s, we did not want to be called Christians. Christians were lesser than us. We had the fullness of the truth. You were Gentiles. We were the real Jews, Mormons being the real Jews. But since I actually think it’s a political thing, since Romney ran for president, that Evangelicals were not going to vote for him unless they believed that Mormons were Christians too, so there’s this huge push now to kind of blur those lines between Mormonism and Christianity. So this is a great time to be having this conversation.
Personally, I grew up Christian if you can believe that. And at the age of 25, my husband and I were looking for a church to join. He’d grown up Baptist and I was Presbyterian. But Mike and I did not know the Word. We never opened the Bible. And when the Mormon missionaries knocked on our door, we assumed it was just a Christian option. Right? Here’s the funny thing about that. According to the Pugh Institute in the last few years, about 83% of people that go into Mormonism come right out of nominal Biblical Christianity, so it’s people that have heard of Jesus and know a little about the Word, prophets and angels, and have some interest in that, but certainly do not know the Word of God. So of course, the bottom line in all of this is if you’re a Bible-believing Christian, you need to know what your Bible says. It says a lot of things about false faiths like Mormonism.

Ryan McCurdy:
Right. You grew up as a Christian, and then in your mid-20s, you and your husband, you said you became Mormons. Could you speak a little bit to that, how you go into Mormonism a little bit more, and then your experience in the Mormon Church, and then what it looked like when you left?

Lynn Wilder:
One of the big hooks I think for people with Mormonism is this teaching of eternal families. We want to believe that everything can be perfect, that marriage can be wonderful, and our kids can be the best at everything they do. Real life hits eventually, but certainly in your 20s, when all that’s in your future, Mormonism teaches that marriage can be for this life and for the next if you earn the right to go to a Mormon temple and be sealed together as a family, that the husband and the wife and the kids can all live with Heavenly Father on their own world in the next life. And I know that’s freaky strange to people outside of Mormonism. But the idea of eternal families and this warmth, and come join us, we’ll take care of you, was very inviting for me. And I think it is for a lot of people.
They’re really good at loving on folks, bringing you pies once a week, whatever it takes to love you into the Mormon Church. And then once you’re one of them, we’re going to take care of you. We’ll make sure you get a job. And life’s good.

Ryan McCurdy:
It’s an integrated, kind of like your whole life is consumed with this belief system. Had you experienced that in your Christian faith beforehand?

Lynn Wilder:
No. Just went to church every week. We might’ve had a few activities when I was growing up as a teenager. But no, church life and Jesus were not this integral part of who I was. Mormonism then became my identity. And that’s one reason why it’s so hard to get extricated from Mormonism, is it’s a culture. It’s not just a belief system. It’s the culture. It’s the family. Everything I was, was Mormon. Everything I thought was Mormon. My scriptures were Mormon. My friends were Mormon. My job, I was a tenured professor at Brigham Young in Provo, Utah, was Mormon. So I didn’t really even know how to negotiate the outside world.

Ryan McCurdy:
Here’s a question for you. How would you describe Mormonism to somebody who’s never heard of it in a few sentences or a few minutes?

Lynn Wilder:
Well, you know, what matters in faith is that you have the right God and the right Jesus and the right way to salvation. And so Mormonism has a different God, a different Jesus, and a different way to be reconciled to God. So it can’t in any way be … It’s not compatible with traditional Christian faith. And yet, here’s the thing. We think it is because Mormons use the exact same religious words as you do. But none of them have the same meanings, so Mormons will say to you, “I’m saved by grace. Jesus died for me on the cross,” and Christian goes, “Oh, wow. They must be Christian. Right?” Well, none of that means the same that it does to you.
The definition of faith is different in Mormonism. Angels are different. Heaven is different. Salvation is different. Atonement is different. It becomes really confusing when you’re trying to have a conversation with a Mormon. And yet, these things are on purpose, I think from the hierarchy of the Mormon Church. They want to very much muddy the waters so that Christians will believe that they are Christians too. There are some basic doctrines in Mormonism that are very far outside of Biblical Christianity. One I mentioned before is that you can be married in the next life. And as a Mormon, a righteous man can actually earn his way to become a god, and then he gets his own world. So he’s got a wife and likely multiple wives because polygamy is an eternal principle according to Doctrine and Covenants 132 in Mormonism.
You have the belief in marriage in the next life. You have the belief in a man becoming a god. And you believe that righteous men will be polygamists, which is similar to Islam, in the next life, many women. And another very troubling thing in Mormon scripture, currently there today 26 times, says that dark skin is a curse. These are some basic doctrines that would put Mormonism outside of … It wouldn’t be the same God of the Bible that’s teaching those kind of things that’s teaching Mormon doctrine.

Ryan McCurdy:
Absolutely. What does salvation look like for the Mormon?

Lynn Wilder:
Well, there are kind of two levels of salvation. I’m going to use the term eternal life. Mormons have three different Heavens. And the bottom Heaven is for the Holy Ghost. The middle Heaven is for Jesus. And then the upper Heaven is ruled by God the Father. And the only way you can get to the upper Heaven is to be worthy and then get a temple recommend, and then go to the Mormon temple. There are three levels in their top level. It’s called the Celestial Kingdom. If you want to get to the very top, you have to be sealed to a worthy Mormon for this life and for the next life. And it’s all about work, so eternal life has to be earned. And yet, the Bible’s really clear. Right? Eternal life is a gift. It’s a free gift. Grace through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s a huge basic difference that –

Ryan McCurdy:
That’s a big difference.

Lynn Wilder:
Has to be earned in Mormonism.

Ryan McCurdy:
Totally. In the eyes of God, we all are seen. Those of us who are in Christ are seen as is Christ. We are forgiven, and so there’s no, you’re better than this person, you’re better than that person. It’s all through faith in Christ. And so that’s a huge difference.

Lynn Wilder:
Yeah. They don’t really talk about a personal relationship. And some of the Mormon prophets in the past, they have living prophets on the Earth that speak for God. So you have this almost Amway system from the top to the bottom, kind of a CEO who tells somebody what to do, tells somebody what to do, tells somebody what to do.

Ryan McCurdy:
Like a pyramid scheme kind of thing.

Lynn Wilder:
Yeah. Which means that when Jesus died on the cross, the temple veil was torn, six inches thick, torn from top to bottom, which means man didn’t tear it. God tore it so that we now have direct access to the father through the Son. Mormon churches put the veil back up. They literally have veils in the Mormon temple that you have to pass through. And in order to pass through that veil, you have to have the right handshakes and signs and tokens, which are Masonic. Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, was a Mason.

Ryan McCurdy:
Okay. I was going to ask about Joseph Smith. He was a Mason. I interrupted you, but he’s a Mason.

Lynn Wilder:
He is really an interesting character.

Ryan McCurdy:
Those who don’t know about him, he was from the 1820s, and he was considered a prophet of Mormonism, the founding prophet of Mormonism. Is that correct?

Lynn Wilder:
Yeah. The story is that there were a lot of churches to join. And he lived in New York at the time. He didn’t know which one to join. He went out into the woods to pray at the age of 14. He had a demonic experience, where he thought he was going to die. Great trouble overwhelmed him or something, he said. And then all of a sudden, he saw light. And he says he saw Jesus and God standing above him. They told him to join none of the churches at the time. They were all corrupt. And that the true church would be restored through him. Now, this is one of my favourite quotes from Joseph Smith. He said, “There are many things in the Bible which do not, as they now stand, accord with the revelations of the Holy Ghost to me.”
In other words, Joseph Smith had this Holy Ghost that was talking to him through his first vision. And then this Angel Moroni, supposedly visited him several times in his bedroom and taught him. But the things that the Angel Moroni, and his Holy Ghost were teaching him were not lining up with the Bible, so he was throwing out the Bible. Well, not completely because they use it to Christians. It’s – the Book of Mormon and the Bible are not so different. They have very similar languages. And there’s parts of the Bible plagiarized right into the Book of Mormon. Many, many chapters right out of Isaiah in the Book of Mormon and Matthew five is in the Book of Mormon.
To a Christian like me, who didn’t know my faith very well, it sounded very Christian. The Book of Mormon and the Bible are not so terribly different. But then as Joseph Smith established the church 10 years later in 1830, and this Holy Ghost continued to talk to him, and he started writing down these revelations, they got stranger and stranger and farther and farther away from Biblical faith. And that seems to be a pattern that’s happened in a number of religions. Right? It’s kind of not a unique thing to Mormonism. It happened in Islam when another angel came and brought another gospel, and Jehovah Witnesses, several other places.

Ryan McCurdy:
It’s really interesting how there are layers to it. And one of the layers seems Biblical, Judeo-Christian background. But then the other is completely extra-Biblical, this additional teaching. And when somebody like Joseph Smith comes along, it’s like, “Well actually, there’s more. Actually, let me teach you something.” And it just sounds like, from my perspective hearing your sharing this, is he wanted life a certain way. And it didn’t line up with scripture, and so he went and did his own thing and created his own following.

Lynn Wilder:
And people started believing him and following him. And maybe he was quite surprised about that. I don’t know. You’ve hit on something really major that makes Mormonism different from Biblical faith. They do not trust the Bible.

Ryan McCurdy:
Right.

Lynn Wilder:
They say they use it. They have four books of scripture. Three of them came from Joseph Smith, supposedly directly from Jesus. But they tell you the Bible is not always reliable. They say it’s been mistranslated. This is a huge thing that separates Mormonism from Biblical faith. This is right out of the Book of Mormon today. After the Bible went forth through the hands of the great and the abominable church, that would be the traditional Christian Church, there are many plain and precious things taken out of the book. And because of these things, an exceedingly great many, that would be the Christians, do stumble, ye in so much that Satan has great power over them.
That’s what I believed about Christians when I was a Mormon. But what happened to my family was all of our sons served Mormon missions. When my third one went on his mission, he was sent to the Bible Belt, to Orlando, Florida. And he started bumping up against Evangelical Christians that told him Mormonism was not compatible with Biblical faith and told him what the gospel was by opening the Bible and saying Ephesians 2:8-9, “You’re saved by grace, not by works, lest any man should boast.” He started reading the Bible as a Mormon missionary. Got radically saved three weeks before the end of his mission, and it’s a fascinating story if you haven’t seen Micah’s testimony. It’s actually gone viral. It’s got more than 10 million views.

Ryan McCurdy:
Wow.

Lynn Wilder:
But he then gets kicked off his Mormon mission. We were told he has the spirit of the Devil in him for professing that he’s saved by grace through faith. And he begs his parents to read the Bible. And of course, my mindset is I don’t trust it because that’s what Mormonism had taught me all those years. But I begin reading it. It’s like, wait a minute. This isn’t Mormonism. And the other thing I realized was, I’m a researcher, it has internal consistency. It has the same message repeated over and over. It doesn’t have these contradictory scriptures like Mormonism has. Joseph Smith would say one thing in the Book of Mormon, and say the exact opposite in the Doctrine and Covenants a few years later. And so Mormonism teaches that God evolves, that he’s always learning, and that he changes. And it never occurred to me. I would rather have a God who knew it all from the beginning because that’s a little scary if he doesn’t know all things.

Ryan McCurdy:
And even for him to be God, to truly be God, he needs to be complete and perfect and whole. And that’s what it means for him to be God. And so the fact that he could grow is like, well.

Lynn Wilder:
Yeah. The Mormon God, though, was once a man who earned his God-hood. Right? And then is continually progressing. That’s not a god, that’s a man-god. That’s not the God of the Bible. The very first verse I read in the Bible was John 1:1. And I’m scratching my head. In the beginning, was the Word. I think that’s Jesus. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Jesus wasn’t God from the beginning. He earned his God-hood. Right there, the Holy Spirit’s just opening my eyes.

Ryan McCurdy:
Totally.

Lynn Wilder:
And I’m like, “Whoa. I don’t think this is the same God.” But then the Bible’s very clear about what the gospel is, who God is, who Jesus is.

Ryan McCurdy:
Maybe we could ask this question then. How do Mormons view Christians?

Lynn Wilder:
Certainly in the past, as lessors. And they would say it this way: “You have a little of the truth because you have the Bible.” And then under their breath, they’ll say, “And it’s corrupt.” Right?

Ryan McCurdy:
Right.

Lynn Wilder:
We have three perfect scriptures on top of that. You have a little of the truth. We have the fullness of the truth, is the way they put it. But the truth is the Bible is not compatible with Mormon scripture. They’re opposites. But Mormons don’t know that because they’re taught you have a little of the truth. They have the fullness. They just need to add their Mormonism to your Christianity. But literally, if you read the Bible, there’s nothing in there that’s compatible with Mormonism. But this is not a new problem. Right? After Jesus died and the apostles began to spread the Gospel, I read somewhere that probably within 19 years of Jesus’ death, the Book of Galatians was written because already people were coming in behind Paul and the other apostles and teaching false gospels and bringing works into the equation and saying that you have to do X, Y, and Z in order to be saved, where Paul had taught this gospel of, it’s grace. You’re saved by grace through faith in Jesus.
That’s what the whole New Testament’s about, is these false teachers coming in and corrupting this very simple, powerful gospel over and over and over. And yet, I don’t think Christians are terribly familiar with all those passages on false Christs, false gospels. Even talks about false apostles. Do you know the Mormon Church has 12 apostles at any one point in time? Talks about false teachers, false gospels. And those things are all really important to pay attention to because Mormons get most of their converts right out of nominal Christianity.

Ryan McCurdy:
Right. Christians who don’t maybe know their faith that well, they profess, but they don’t practice kind of thing. Lynn, I want to kind of get into the direction of asking. How can we as followers of Jesus, the one true God … I read that the Mormons don’t believe that God is a trinity, that they’re all equal. They’re different, that the father, the son, and the spirit are different. And we believe that, no, actually they are one. They share the same essence, not just the same thoughts, but they are truly one. I guess one of the questions I have is: How would we as followers of Jesus, if we encounter Mormons, how could we encourage them and maybe share the goodness of the gospel that we have with them in a way that they would hear it?

Lynn Wilder:
One of the things that makes our ministries unique actually, is that we don’t hit against Mormonism particularly, or Mormon history. We simply offer the God of the Bible. And if you can get someone into the Word, the Holy Spirit makes it very clear who God is, who God is not, what the message is, what the message is not. And so for any non-believer, the answer is the Word says very clear that it’s living an active and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword, and that it has power, that he sends it out. And it doesn’t return void.
But I called it my Berlin Wall of Mormonism was so thick that I had to read that Word over and over, and I felt like the Word was making little pockmarks in that big old concrete wall until there was a crack. And then eventually, everything fell. But this Mormon missionary son of mine said he read the New Testament a dozen times before the full import hit him that the God of the Bible was not the same as the God of Mormonism and that he needed to give his life, surrender everything.

Ryan McCurdy:
Okay. Here’s the question as we kind of wrap up our time together. Where would be an avenue for listeners to learn a little bit more about Mormonism? Do you have resources for us?

Lynn Wilder:
Yeah. God did a freaky thing a few years ago, opened a number of doors for me to write this story as a BYU professor from Biblical … Or from Mormonism to Biblical faith. That book came out at a critical time in Mormonism when things were kind of toppling. Came out in 2013. And it continues to just rocket in sales because many Mormons are leaving. They need to know where to go, and they never had thought that Biblical Christianity had their answers because they were taught it was corrupt. Unveiling Grace, the book, and then unveilingmormonism.com is our website. This book has been powerful. People are coming to find Jesus, but also this Mormonism missionary son started a ministry the day he walked off his Mormon mission. And that’s called adamsroadministry.com. You can find them online, adamsroadministry.com, and tons of resources there.

Ryan McCurdy:
This is fantastic. Lynn Wilder, thank you so much for being with us and sharing with us about Mormonism and the very stark differences between our faith in Christ and the faith of Mormons. And so thank you for spending this time with us and sharing. And hopefully, as we go from this place, and after hearing a little bit more about it, we can share more tactfully with those of our friends who are Mormons. Thank you so much for being with us today.

Lynn Wilder:
You’re welcome. And have a heart for them because certainly, they need freedom in Jesus.

Ryan McCurdy:
Absolutely. Amen. Amen. Thanks, Lynn.

Lynn Wilder:
Thank you.

Ryan McCurdy:
Thanks so much for joining us on this episode of indoubt with Lynn Wilder, talking about Mormonism and the subtle differences that from the outside don’t seem like a big deal, but when we get into the theology of what it actually means to be in relationship with God, to know God, to be saved, we see that there’s a big difference from what our Biblical faith is and what Mormonism is. I hope and pray that you learned some interesting information about what it means to be a faithful follower of Jesus and how we can share our faith with Mormons because they need to know the goodness of our faith in Christ and that we are saved by grace alone. We pray and hope that indoubt has encouraged you. And if you want to connect more with us, you can email us at info@indoubt.ca, and stay connected with us for next week’s episode as we talk with John Wiebe about social media.

Kourtney Cromwell:
Thanks so much for listening. If you want to hear more, subscribe on iTunes and Spotify, or visit us online at indoubt.ca or indoubt.com. We’re also on social media, so make sure to follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.