only one true church

There was a Mormon boy in my class this last quarter. I didn't find out until close to the end of the quarter when my teacher mentioned it to me.

On one hand, I was surprised because he had not said anything to me about being Mormon even though I often make references to having be raised Mormon when talking about my work. On the other hand, when I saw him on the first day of class I thought 'that kid looks like a BYU student' so in that sense I wasn't particularly surprised.

After I learned he was Mormon, I approached him one day, curious to talk about it. I said, 'did you know I was raised Mormon?' he said he did. I asked why he had never mentioned having been Mormon to me, and he said something about how it was something I was still dealing with so.... I am not entirely sure what he would have said after the 'so' but I get the jist of what he was saying. I guess I hadn't been as clear as I had thought when discussing my Mormon past to my class that he would think it was something I was still 'going through' rather than something i had gone through.

He then preceded to bare his testimony to me. Which was kind of weird, but also fine and kind of interesting. He spoke about an idea I heard on occasion while still Lds about how there can only be one true church and that it must be either Mormonism or Catholicism. (this comes from something a Catholic Bishop once said to...I think it was a general authority? He said something like: 'You Mormon's don't realize how strong your position is......) Catholicism because it came from the time of Jesus directly, and Mormonism because it claims to be a restoration of what Jesus established.

This is an extremely ethnocentric idea full of many bizarre and false assumptions.

1) Why must there only be one true church? it isn't as if religions are mutually exclusive. I think Mormonism is a good metaphor for how one can see world religions. Mormonism has many prophets, but they all come from the same god teaching the same message.(more or less. I think the differences between what Gordon B Hinckley taught versus what Brigham Young taught are far greater than the differences between the teachings of Jesus and Buddha.) Just like how an Lds person need not only recognize one of their prophets and discard all the others, one doesn't need to only recognize one religious founder(and thus the religion they founded) and discard the others, because they message is the same.

2) Even if there were true that there were only one true church, there is no reason to assume it must be Christian.


3) Even if there could only be one true church, and even if it had to be Christian, Catholicism isn't the only church with lines to the time of Jesus, nor is Mormonism the only church which claims to be a restoration of Jesus' original Church.
There is the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Western Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Church, the Coptic Church etc. etc. etc. All these religions have ties back to the time of Christ equally as valid as the Catholic church's. And the amount of Church's which claim to be a restoration of what Christ originally established number in, if not the hundreds then the thousands. In the United States alone there are several hundred.

I didn't mention any of this to my fellow student at the time. I didn't really care to get into it at that moment and sometimes when people seem so eager and sincere in saying something it is hard to have the heart to explain why what they are saying is dumb.