Chapter 13: Cult or Culture?
In Acts 1:8, the resurrected Jesus sends the apostles out to “be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” The apostles were eyewitnesses to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. As they move out from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth, that message does not change, but the way it gets communicated does.
We see this when Peter stands up and preaches in Acts 2 in Jerusalem. He does so as an insider. He addresses his listeners as “Fellow Jews.” When he speaks to his fellow Jews, he does so by referring to the Scriptures that all Jews believed in. The heart of the message is that “This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead.”
Now go to Acts 17, and we see Paul in Athens. Spiritually speaking, Athens and Jerusalem have little in common. For Paul, a self-described “Hebrew of Hebrews,” Athens would have represented the ends of the earth. When Paul shares the Good News in Athens, he does so as an outsider. He does not point to the Old Testament Scriptures because the people there would not have been versed in the Scriptures.
He does point to creation. He also points them to the reality of a coming judgment when he says, “He will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.” The audiences in Athens and Jerusalem are different, but the message is centered on the crucified and risen Christ.
As we bring the Good News to Utah, it is not like Jerusalem, and neither is it like Athens. There is another place that Jesus mentions that it is like. Jesus commands the disciples to be his witnesses not only in Jerusalem, Judea, and the uttermost parts of the world, but He also sends them to Samaria. Why Samaria? Samaria was a place where a rival religious culture existed alongside the Jews and claimed to be the one true faith of the God of the Bible. The Samaritans and Jews had shared a long history of antagonism with one another. The Jews saw the Samaritans as the competition.
Utah is a modern-day Samaria. I believe there is an analogy to be made that Mormons are to evangelical Christians what Samaritans were to Jews. Mormons are, in many ways, the competition. They have a different Gospel and are intent on taking that Gospel to the world. In Part 3 of this book, we ask the question, “What would Jesus do?” How would Jesus reach out to the people of Utah? We answer that by looking at how Jesus reached out to the Samaritans during his earthly ministry. Before we go there, it is important first to understand this unique Utah culture in which we live.
It was not common in 1989, when we arrived in Utah, for evangelicals to see Mormon Utah as a culture. Most evangelical Christians at that time dismissed it as a cult. One of the things that cemented that idea in people’s minds was a bestselling Christian book written in 1965 by Walter Martin called Kingdom of the Cults. One of the primary entries in that book was a section on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Most American Christians believed that the best way to deal with Mormonism was the way Walter Martin dealt with it in his book: to prove that it was a cult according to the Bible. As long as we could keep producing information that exposed the false claims of Mormonism, then it would be held in check. Yes, truth matters, and we must build on the solid foundation of truth we find in the Bible. Our primary reason for being here is not to expose a cult. It is to reach a unique religious culture with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
The term “cult” is not a helpful one in Utah. Walter Martin’s definition of a cult was, “A group of people gathered about a specific person—or person’s misinterpretation of the Bible.” I do believe that Mormonism is built around a specific person’s misinterpretation of the Bible. More on that later.
The problem is the use of the word cult. Cult has a far broader definition than the one Walter Martin gave it. One of the dictionary definitions of the word cult is “a system of religious belief or worship.” Using that definition, any religious group could be labeled a cult.
There is a more popular definition of the word cult. It is often used to refer to a group whose beliefs and practices are outside the mainstream. The problem with evangelicals in Utah using the word cult to refer to the LDS Church is that, here in this place, we are the ones outside the mainstream. Evangelicals constitute a relatively small minority of people in Utah. We are the cult.
Here in Utah, Mormonism is a culture. It is a way of life. Yale professor Harold Bloom put it this way: “Like the Jews, they (the Mormons) are a religion that has become a people.” For the local church to be effective in Utah, it must be willing to understand Mormon culture. The Mormon people have a distinct way of looking at the world.
Mormon culture is a “church culture.” They have a distinct way of looking at church that is very different from the way that we look at it. People who are raised in the LDS Church have very clear ideas about what church is supposed to be like. An active Mormon shows up on a Sunday at a church like CenterPoint and sees people dressed casually instead of wearing shirts and ties and dresses. They come in and hear “rock and roll” music in worship and see people engaging in the music by raising their hands. They listen as the pastor preaches for over 30 minutes, and people seem engaged. It all seems kind of strange and even “cultish” to them.
We also must understand that the LDS Church has spent incredible energy and resources in the last generation trying to shed the cult label. Over the last generation, the LDS Church has been involved in this great project in which they have sought to change the way that people look at them. Mormons have come a long way in this regard. To see that, you only need to look at national politics.
In 1989, the year we moved to Utah, I would never have imagined a Mormon being able to run for president with any success because Mormons still seemed to be such outsiders. Then the 2002 Olympics came to Utah, and Mitt Romney’s star began to rise. The games were mired in scandal when Romney was called to come in and save the Olympics. The games went so well that the world was left with a positive impression of Romney, Utah, and the LDS Church. After the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002, the thought occurred to me that Mitt Romney could one day be president.
That was not a new thought to Mormons. To many Mormons, Romney was destined for the highest office in the land. There is an actual prophecy attributed to Joseph Smith, known as the White Horse Prophecy, in which he taught that one day the U.S. Constitution would be hanging by a thread, and a Latter-day Saint would emerge to save our country. To many Mormons, Mitt Romney was destined to become that man.
Romney ran in 2008 and lost to John McCain for the Republican nomination. Romney ran again in 2012 and got the nomination. Romney lost the general election to Barack Obama, but his candidacy showed just how much people’s attitudes about Mormonism had changed. Somewhere during that election cycle, it hit me that Mormons, without really changing what they believe, had done an incredibly effective job of shedding the cult label and achieving mainstream status.
How have they done it? One answer is that there has been an intentional effort on behalf of the church to remove anything that makes them appear cultish (different) as it presents itself to the world. You see examples of that everywhere. Here in 2026, the Church opened its revamped visitors’ center at Temple Square in Salt Lake City. Sandra Tanner, an author and lifelong observer of all things Mormon, said this about her visit to the new visitors’ center:
“There is no mention of Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, the restoration, priesthood, only Jesus, God, and families forever. They show a film explaining the temple and its ceremony, sort of...” In the film, they show what looks like a temple session with people dressed in white, with an explanation that everyone dresses in white to represent purity.
To her it seemed that the film was attempting to depict what people actually wore in the temple. At the end, Sandra asked the guide why no one in the film was wearing distinctive temple clothing like “…the cap or the veil, no robe of the priesthood, no green apron or sash.” “He politely said that the brethren thought it would lead to too many questions from tourists.”
When I read about her experience my thought was that what was missing in the tour were all the things that you really have to believe to be a Mormon. The LDS Church bases its claim to be the restoration of the one true and living church of Jesus Christ on the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith. Those things are missing on purpose. The LDS Church wants to continue to move away from the things that make them different and they want to place themselves within the mainstream of American culture.
There is another reason Mormons have been able to shed the cult label. It has to do with the way that a lot of Mormons live their lives. I know a lot of Mormons, and yes, I have known a lot of latter Day Saints who are kind of different. For the most part, my Mormon friends are not weird. They are nice people. I remember talking to a BYU football coach years ago about recruiting non-LDS football players to BYU. This coach (who was LDS) said that when there was a recruiting competition between BYU and some other school, often the other schools would try to talk the recruit out of going to BYU because of how strange and weird the Mormons at BYU were.
That probably worked with some athletes. But there have been many non-LDS athletes who have come and visited BYU, and what they found were a lot of nice people. Many a recruiting battle was won by BYU because the other school lost credibility as it tried to paint the Mormons they met at BYU in a negative light, while the Mormons they had met were nice people.
We saw something similar back in 2020 during the Amy Coney Barrett Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Senator Mike Lee of Utah responded to some of the criticism of Judge Barrett based on her active Catholic faith. He reflected on his own LDS faith and talked about how, in the mid-19th century, the Mormon people were persecuted and driven out of the U.S. He said Mormons are considered heretics, but they have proven to be “nice heretics.”
Their beliefs put them on the outside of American culture, but their behavior places them right in the mainstream. In this section of the book, we are going to talk about how the LDS Church and culture arrived at this place.