Craig Harline and Samuel Brown wrote in On Faith:
The views expressed here, while sincere, aren’t remotely official. But we are both historians and Mormons who wish everyone knew these things about our tradition:
1. Some Mormons want to be called “Latter-day Saints,” but most are fine with “LDS” or “Mormon,” which is a heckuva lot better than “Cultists” or “Satan-worshipers.”
Early Mormons believed they weren’t so much reforming Protestantism as “restoring” pure, New Testament Christianity (with a strong dose of Old Testament Israel thrown in). They called themselves “latter-day” saints to both identify with and distinguish themselves from the “former-day” saints who were the first followers of Christ.
“Mormon” (short for “Mormonite”), was like many other nicknames, once a slur, but most LDS people today are okay with it — as long as you don’t precede it with “damned” or some other nasty adjective.
2. Mormons consider themselves Christians, even if a lot of other Christians consider them big-time heretics.
Mormons don’t love being called heretics any more than most people, but they are absolutely baffled that many don’t even consider them Christian: the name of their church is, after all, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and they talk about Christ constantly.
Mormons do read Christian history differently from traditional Christians: e.g., they see their non-Trinitarian, embodied God in some early Christian writers, and note that early Christianity was more diverse than the creeds suggest. But they also recognize that they have a lot in common with traditional Christians today. Taxonomically, you might say that Mormonism is a Reformation of the Protestant Reformation that adds some very Catholic- and Eastern-Orthodox-sounding ideas, all mixed together with an American pragmatism that is more communal and charismatic than the Protestantism Mormons rebelled against.
See the rest of the article here.
