Terminology and Relationship With The LDS Church
The term "Mormon fundamentalist" appears to have been coined in the 1940s by LDS Church apostle Mark E. Petersen to refer to groups who had left the LDS Church. However, Mormon fundamentalists do not universally embrace this usage and many simply consider themselves to be "Mormon". Today the mainline LDS Church considers the designation "Mormon" to apply only to its own members and not to members of other sects of the Latter Day Saint movement. One LDS leader went as far as claiming that there is no such thing as a "Mormon fundamentalist", and that using the two terms together is a "contradiction." The LDS Church suggests that the correct term to describe Mormon fundamentalist groups is "polygamist sects".
In rebuttal to this nomenclature argument, certain Mormon fundamentalists have argued that they themselves are in fact more correctly designated as "Mormons" in so far as they follow what they consider to be the "true" and/or "original" Mormon teachings as handed down from Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. Within this context, the mainline LDS Church is often regarded by such fundamentalists as having abandoned several foundational aspects of Mormonism as noted above.
Read more about this topic: Mormon Fundamentalism
Famous quotes containing the words relationship and/or church:
“Christianity as an organized religion has not always had a harmonious relationship with the family. Unlike Judaism, it kept almost no rituals that took place in private homes. The esteem that monasticism and priestly celibacy enjoyed implied a denigration of marriage and parenthood.”
—Beatrice Gottlieb, U.S. historian. The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industrial Age, ch. 12, Oxford University Press (1993)
“I believe that in this country the press exerts a greater and a more pernicious influence than the church did in its worst period.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)