ABSTRACT: Many American Christians live among Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, but perhaps few understand what distinguishes them from historic Christianity. The origins of these groups in the religious ferment of nineteenth-century America illumines both their trajectories and the doctrines they came to embrace that place them outside the bounds of orthodox Christianity.

Have you ever driven past a pair of young men in white dress shirts and khaki pants, ties flapping in the wind, as they pedal their bikes down the street? Or perhaps you have opened your front door only to encounter a married couple eager to hand you literature heralding the coming apocalypse? If these experiences strike you as American as apple pie, it’s because they are. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Jehovah’s Witnesses represent uniquely American religions, forged in the fires of nineteenth-century revivalism, populism, and millennialism.

But in what ways do Mormons and Witnesses diverge from other Christian groups? Should they be considered Christians at all? To answer these questions, this essay will address three related topics: (1) how Mormonism and the Jehovah’s Witnesses developed; (2) how they differ from historic Christianity; and (3) whether they should be called cults, Christians, or something else.

The Emergence of Mormons and Witnesses

Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses arose out of nineteenth-century America, a period marked by significant spiritual upheaval, religious diversity, freedom of expression, and theological experimentation. Several factors contributed to this environment, including the Second Great Awakening, westward expansion, a growing populace, discontent with traditional Christianity, and the democratization of religious beliefs and practices — perhaps evidenced most acutely in the rise of Christian denominations and new religious movements.

This climate, unmatched in previous generations, created a breeding ground for religious innovators like Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, and Charles Taze Russell, whose teachings laid the groundwork for the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In this context, religious leaders with fresh and compelling revelations or novel and intricate interpretations of the Bible attracted followers by offering alternatives to established Christian traditions like Episcopalianism and Presbyterianism. Nathan Hatch, a historian of American religion, refers to this era as one of religious democratization, going so far as to argue that the religious movements emerging out of the late nineteenth century “did more to Christianize American society than anything before or since.”¹

Joseph Smith and the Origins of Mormonism

Joseph Smith was a fourteen-year-old boy living in upstate New York when he claimed his first divine revelation in 1820. He was experiencing what he referred to as spiritual “anxieties” and “despair,”² and so decided to put James 1:5 to the test by retreating into the woods by himself and praying for God’s wisdom to lead him to the truth. During this First Vision, Smith asserted that God the Father and Jesus Christ physically and personally appeared to him, confirming that current Christian traditions “were all wrong” and that their adherents “were all corrupt.”³ Returning to his house, Smith’s first remark to his mother was, “I have learned for myself that Presbyterianism is not true.”⁴

This was the point of no return. As Smith’s retelling of these events to others unfolded in the days and months to come, the “bitter persecution” he felt from “men of high standing” emboldened him to lean into his revelations and envision himself as a colleague of the apostles whose persecution from religious leaders had, according to Smith, convinced them of the truth of their message and the correctness of their cause.⁵

Three years later, in 1823, Smith described a Second Vision, in which an angel named Moroni revealed to him the existence of hidden scriptures made of golden plates, which he translated into the Book of Mormon. Published in 1830, this text, alongside the Bible, became the scriptural cornerstone of the fledgling movement as well as “Joseph Smith’s calling card to the world.”⁶ Written in King Jamesian English, this book retold the lost history of the Israelites who sailed to the Americas after the Babylonian exile and whose latter-day descendants were visited by no less than Jesus Christ himself after his resurrection from the dead.

It was a bold, fantastical account, but was it true?

From the outset, Smith’s claims were polarizing. On the one hand, Smith’s movement grew quickly and attracted followers who were willing to forsake their bedrock beliefs and family heritage in service of an epic ideal and the faith community it inspired. Smith’s vision of a restored church untainted by corruption resonated with many who felt disenfranchised with and disregarded by mainstream Protestantism, especially varieties steeped in creeds, formality, status, wealth, and tradition. On the other hand, Smith’s movement was controversial, with “a majority of non-Mormon Americans view[ing] the [Mormon] church and its adherents with suspicion and disdain.”⁷ Smith’s theology, particularly his rejection of established Christian doctrines like the Trinity coupled with his belief in ongoing revelation — not to mention the practice of plural marriage (polygamy) — led many to regard Mormonism as heterodox at best and heretical at worst. This polarizing sentiment with regard to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints endured for years, leading to the eventual migration of Mormons to Utah under the leadership of Brigham Young after Smith’s death in 1844.

Charles Russell and the Bible Student Movement

Charles Taze Russell was an eighteen-year-old Christian skeptic living in Pittsburgh when he first encountered the end-times preaching of Jonas Wendell in 1870.⁸ Wendell, an Adventist evangelist, had been a follower of the man who virtually invented the enterprise of predicting the end of the world — William Miller — and so had cut his teeth on publicizing the exact time Jesus would return to earth.

As it turns out, all those predictions proved false, but Russell’s obsession with end-times speculation never fell far from the Adventist tree. His beliefs led him to create the Bible Student Movement (the prototype of the Jehovah’s Witnesses), and he became convinced that Christ had returned invisibly in 1874. Selling his father’s business and thus securing the financial means to become a full-time end-times Bible student, he engrossed himself in biblical chronologies and apocalyptic predictions, producing longwinded publications in a prolific manner. With no formal theological or language training, he managed to pen a definitive six-volume series on biblical interpretation called Studies in the Scriptures in addition to a magazine called Watchtower. Rejecting church creeds, Christian history, and established traditions, Russell concluded that the doctrine of the Trinity was false, arguing that Jesus was not eternally divine but rather God’s first created being.

After Russell’s death in 1916, Joseph Franklin Rutherford, a lawyer who had frequently represented Russell in court, became the leader of the movement.⁹ It was under his tenure that the group adopted the name Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1931. Rutherford’s aggressive proselytizing campaigns, combined with the movement’s eschatological urgency, helped to solidify the Jehovah’s Witnesses as a distinct religious body infamous for condemning virtually all historic Christian practices as pagan and regarding other Christian traditions as human-made rather than Bible-based. And like his predecessor, Rutherford took to the pen, writing the equivalent of a book a year for the rest of his life, regularly predicting, amending, and reframing end-time dates. This habit would become a hallmark feature of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who in their brief history have unsuccessfully predicted that the end of the world would occur in 1874, 1878, 1881, 1910, 1914, 1918, 1920, 1925, and 1975.¹⁰

How Mormons and Witnesses Differ from Historic Christianity

We might summarize the ways Mormons and Witnesses differ from historic Christianity under four heads: revelation, the doctrine of God, salvation, and eschatology.

Revelation

Let’s start with revelation. Traditionally, Christians hold to the closed canon of the Bible, particularly in light of passages like Revelation 22:18–19, which warns against adding additional revelation, as well as passages like Colossians 1:15–23 and Hebrews 1:1–3, which indicate that there is no additional revelation necessary in light of Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.

As is well known, however, Mormons argue that God continues to reveal truth to humanity through prophets, which is why they accept not only the Bible but also the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price as authoritative in what is referred to as the Standard Works. In fact, even today, current prophet-presidents are capable of receiving official revelation on behalf of the church.

By contrast, Witnesses take the opposite direction to the extreme. Although they claim that the Bible alone is the sole source of theology, they maintain that all translations of the Bible have been corrupted and mistranslated. As such, they make use of their own translation of the biblical text, called the New World Translation, which was originally published in 1961. Unlike other professional Bible translations, however, the New World Translation is deeply sectarian. Not only does it misappropriate thousands of verses by calling the God of the Old Testament “Jehovah,” but it reworks all passages in the New Testament that assert or imply the divinity of Jesus Christ. It also changes all references to the Greek word cross to either stake or torture stake in a flagrant attempt to protect Witnesses’ unsubstantiated assertion that Jesus did not die on the cross. What’s more, unlike historic Christianity, which tolerates a variety of biblical translations, only the New World Translation is allowed to be used by the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Doctrine of God

One of the initial reasons both Mormons and Witnesses fall outside of historic Christianity is due to their rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity. For example, classical Christian theology is rooted in the belief that God possesses one nature yet exists eternally as three persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

By contrast, Mormons teach that God the Father used to be a human being, Jehovah is Jesus, and the Holy Ghost is a man with limited power. As Smith taught with regard to God the Father, “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man.”¹¹ Moreover, as Mormon theologian Bruce McConkie explains, “Christ is Jehovah; they are one and the same Person.”¹² These beliefs contradict the classical Christian descriptions of God’s nature as articulated by the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds.

Jehovah’s Witnesses reject the Trinity altogether, labeling it a pagan doctrine introduced into Christianity by Greek philosophy. They espouse a form of Unitarianism, where only Jehovah (God the Father) is to be worshiped, and Jesus is seen as a subordinate, created being identified with the archangel Michael. They base this teaching on a cherry-picked reading of scriptures such as John 1:1, where their New World Translation controversially renders the phrase “the Word was God” as “the Word was a god,” relegating Jesus to a being created by Jehovah. This Arian Christology — a revival of the ancient heresy that denied Christ’s complete divinity — has been consistently rejected by Christians for centuries. In fact, historians such as J.N.D. Kelly, a scholar of early Christian doctrine, note that the early church unequivocally affirmed the full divinity of Christ.¹³

Salvation and Eschatology

Mormon and Witness theology also diverge from classical Christianity in their teachings on salvation and eschatology. Mormons believe in a tiered afterlife, where individuals are assigned to one of three kingdoms of glory based on their faith and works: the celestial, terrestrial, or telestial kingdoms.¹⁴ While Mormons affirm the importance of Christ’s atonement, they also teach that adherence to specific ordinances (such as baptism by proxy, which takes place in a private temple where non-Mormons are prohibited from entering) are essential for exaltation. In contrast, traditional Christianity teaches that salvation is by grace alone, through faith in Christ alone, and that good works are the fruit and confirmation of God’s full acceptance, not the means of earning it (Ephesians 2:8–10).

Jehovah’s Witnesses also affirm a multitiered system of salvation, though it differs from Mormonism. Witnesses believe in two classes of saved individuals. On the one hand, there are the 144,000 “anointed” individuals who rule with Christ in heaven and already possess resurrected spirit bodies; on the other hand, there are the rest of the faithful — the so-called “great crowd” — who will live forever in a restored earthly paradise. This teaching is drawn from a literal reading of Revelation 7:4–9, but it is not consistent with historic Christian eschatology, which sees the 144,000 as symbolic of the totality of God’s people.

Are Mormonism and Jehovah’s Witnesses Unique?

By focusing in this essay on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Mormon Church, it is tempting to think of them as the only religious movements emerging out of nineteenth-century America that did not remain within the bounds of historic Christianity. But that is not the case. Although several theological traditions emerged in that century that more or less adhered to classical Christian beliefs — such as the Adventist Movement (e.g., Seventh-day Adventists), Holiness Movement (e.g., Wesleyan Church), and Restoration Movement (e.g., Disciples of Christ) — many others emerged that did not remain within those bounds. This includes Christian Science, Theosophy, and Spiritualism, all of which arose out of the Northeast around the same time as Mormonism and the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

For instance, founded in the late 1800s by Mary Baker Eddy, Christian Scientists rejected the reality of physical illness and death, viewing them as illusions of the material world. They also denied the divinity of Christ and the traditional understanding of the atonement. What’s more, like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Christian Scientists elevated the writings of their founder to a level on par with the Bible.

More estranged from classical Christian doctrines and practices, however, were Theosophy and Spiritualism. Led by Helena Blavatsky, whose mystical writings provided the seedbed of the movement, Theosophy adopted esoteric beliefs more in keeping with Hinduism and Buddhism than Christianity. “Probably more than any other,” notes scholar Robert Ellwood, “it has been Theosophy that has made several generations of Americans reasonably familiar with such concepts as astrology, karma, and reincarnation, together with the general idea of spiritual masters and inner spiritual initiations.”¹⁵ Likewise, Spiritualism, though born out of a Christian context, asserted that “human beings survive death and that the living can communicate with those who have passed on,” and so focused on the séance, or religious ritual attempting to speak with the dead.¹⁶

Are Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses Cults?

Unlike Theosophists or Spiritualists, it has been an ongoing challenge among both sociologists of religion and practitioners of faith to determine whether Mormons and Witnesses are more accurately described as branches of Christianity or cults. To be sure, it depends on whom is asked. In general, Mormons and Witnesses both regard themselves as true Christians, while members of traditional churches reject them as such. In fact, when it comes to Mormons, they “have not only regarded theirs as a Christian church; they have regarded theirs as the only true Christian church.”¹⁷ And, therefore, they generally “deny the assertion that Mormonism is a cult.”¹⁸ Unfortunately, there is no single agreed-upon definition for the word cult. Instead, scholars of diverse persuasions define it in different ways.

Sociological Definition of Cults

We will start with sociological definitions. In his book Understanding New Religious Movements, John Saliba prefers to abandon use of the term cult altogether, only sparingly employing it. When he does so, he uses it “to refer to the relatively new religious (or quasi-religious) and spiritual groups that have sprung up in the West especially since the 1960s.” Continuing, he states that “in spite of its shortcomings, [the term] points to two undeniable facts, namely, that the new religions stand apart from society and traditional religion and require special attention.”¹⁹ Another scholar, Timothy Miller, describes a cult as “a small, intense religious group whose ties to mainstream religion and culture tend to be less pronounced . . . and often [fall] under the personal direction of a single charismatic leader.”²⁰ This definition is similar to that of Philip Jenkins, who defines cults more narrowly as “small [and culturally] unpopular religious bodies.” Jenkins argues that the term is completely subjective, unmeasurable, and therefore arbitrary, “tell[ing] us as much about the people applying that label as it does about the group that is so described.”²¹ Sociologist Thomas Robbins agrees. He gets to the bottom of the issue when he writes that, “in effect, a ‘cult’ is any group stigmatized as a ‘cult.’”²²

Theological Definition of Cults

When we branch out of sociological definitions, however, the terms take on a more definite shape. For example, as classical Christians, we observe and interpret cults from an explicitly Christian context. This does not necessarily disprove or undermine sociological definitions, but it does mean that we need to explore how a Christian worldview discerns and adjudicates religious movements that diverge from biblical and historic Christian beliefs and practices.

Walter Martin, founder of the Christian Research Institute, dedicated considerable attention to the topic of cults, principally in his book The Kingdom of Cults (1965). This book has undergone several editions and exerts considerable influence over evangelical Protestantism. For instance, Martin developed a definition of cults as differing “significantly in some one or more respects as to belief or practice from those religious groups which are regarded as the normative expressions of religion,” adding that such religious groups tend to be gathered around a specific person’s “misinterpretation of the Bible.”²³ Not surprisingly, the apologetic focus of Martin’s research at the Christian Research Institute was aimed at exposing aberrant forms of religion that distorted and deviated from traditional and historic Christian beliefs and practices.

James Sire, adding another layer onto Martin’s definition, defined a cult as “any religious movement that is organizationally distinct and has doctrines and/or practices that contradict those of the Scriptures as interpreted by traditional Christianity . . . and expressed in such statements as the Apostles’ Creed.”²⁴ Ron Rhodes, framing matters on all these theological definitions, understood the term to represent, at least within historic Christianity, “a group that claims to be Christian but in fact is not Christian because it explicitly or implicitly denies one or more . . . central doctrines of the historic Christian faith.”²⁵ A final classification of cults within theological categories might attribute them to demonic influence or spiritual harm. For example, New Testament scholar Clinton Arnold would argue that rather than merely being biblically or theologically outside of orthodoxy, a cult could be involved in demonic activities or practices that are spiritually dangerous since a malicious spirit, fallen angel, or demon could be the source of their worship.²⁶

The fact of the matter is that both sociological and theological definitions of the term cult offer insight. However, due to the lack of precision and consensus surrounding the term cult (the same is true for the word sect) to describe the thousands of religious movements emerging out of America over the last two centuries in particular, it is no longer used among researchers and academics. Though cult was used commonly in the past, is still preferred by popular culture, and sometimes is sensationalized by media, what has become most dominant and widespread is the term new religious movement. Love it or hate it, this is the favored term among critical scholars.²⁷

Preserving the Church

At the same time, it is important for the identity and preservation of the church to contemplate the cases at hand. In short, should we consider Mormonism and Jehovah’s Witnesses to be cults, and therefore not churches or Christians? Based on the theological characteristics and definitions mentioned above, proponents of traditional Christianity should regard them as such. To be sure, the historic term cult is often controversial, but it is used by theologians to refer to groups who deviate from essential Christian doctrines while purporting to represent true Christianity. Both Mormonism and Jehovah’s Witnesses meet this definition in two ways: first, by rejecting foundational Christian beliefs and practices and, second, by adding new ones.

In the face of ongoing heretical movements, classic Christianity must constantly reaffirm its commitment to the clear doctrinal boundaries established by Scripture and the historic creeds of the church. New religious movements such as Mormonism and Jehovah’s Witnesses serve as poignant examples of how deviations from orthodox Christian teaching eventually produce entirely new religions that add or remove foundational truths. These groups, while professing allegiance to Christ, diverge significantly in their doctrines of God and theologies of salvation, revelation, and eschatology.

We are called to contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 3) and engage the world from a foundation rooted deeply in God’s word. By holding firmly to historic confessions of faith and the authority of the Bible, the church safeguards its identity and preserves the gospel’s integrity for future generations.