cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/47886949
Mormon leaders, military veterans and elected officials reacted with anger to a new Department of Defense policy that does not consider The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be a Christian religion as part of a wider effort to cut down the U.S. military’s list of recognized faiths.
“The Pentagon’s decision to list The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints apart from other Christian faiths is wrong and needs to be corrected,” Republican Rep. Mike Kennedy, of heavily Mormon Utah, wrote on X on Sunday.
What? I grew up atheist, but that sounds absolutely mental to me. Protestantism is an off-shoot of Catholicism, so if Catholics aren’t Christian then surely neither was Martin Luther?
Many protestants see Catholics’ reverence for saints (to the point of literally praying to them) as idols or graven images.
Something like 20-30% of all the Ten Commandments is about that, so I’m not sure that I can blame them.
I mean it doesn’t change the reality that they’re Christians, but still.
I learnt that in Sri Lankan, they don’t really have the word Protestant in their vocabulary, so they just say Catholic and (implied non-Catholic) Christian. I imagine it’s like that in a lot of parts of the world that’s majority Christian, where Christian just becomes a word meaning denomination unspecified whilst Catholic is a whole other thing. Though I have also heard people say they thought Catholics did that count as Christians, due to misconceptions about worshiping Mary and the saints being disqualifying because “you shall have no gods before me”.