Veritate - Christianity "Amish, Mennonites, Puritans" and the Questions

Veritate - Christianity "Church of Christ" and the Questions

In the hills of East Tennessee and Western North Carolina there are communities where two separate traditions both claim to have restored the original church. One has a cappella singing and meets in a plain building on Sunday morning. The other built the world's largest Ten Commandments on the side of a mountain in Murphy, North Carolina. A woman named Mamaw Margie attended one and loved the other without knowing they were different traditions making the same claim. She was not confused. She was looking for God. The Restoration Movement said: strip away every denomination, every creed, every tradition added by men, and follow the New Testament alone. No creed but Christ. No book but the Bible. No name but Christian. The question worth asking is not whether that impulse was sincere. It was. The question is whether a blueprint without an architect holds the building together.

Veritate - Christianity "Amish, Mennonites, Puritans" and the Questions

The most disciplined Christians in America do not have the sacraments. They do not have apostolic succession. Several of them deny things the Church has taught since the first century. And they will outlast most of the parishes you drive past on a Sunday morning. Three traditions, three separate centuries, three different countries of origin. Most people cannot tell them apart. A horse and buggy in Etowah, Tennessee. A tour group at the Lost Sea that was not what they appeared to be. A tourist in an airport calling someone in plain dress a Puritan. Three moments that took years to understand. This episode runs the same test on all three.

Veritate - Christianity "LDS" and the Questions

They are the most likeable people who will ever knock on your door. Young, clean-cut, two by two, name tags straight, genuinely warm. Before I became Catholic I had real conversations with Mormon missionaries and they were some of the most pleasant exchanges I had with anyone representing a religious tradition. Then I told one of their members I was a 32nd degree Freemason and needed the whole story, not just the Book of Mormon but everything. He handed me the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price. I opened them. I recognized what I was looking at. Because I had taken the same obligations, learned the same grips, and worked through the same degrees that Joseph Smith received in March 1842, five weeks before he introduced the temple endowment ceremony. Joseph Smith taught that God was once a man, that men can become gods, and that the entire Christian church apostatized after the apostles, leaving no valid Christianity on earth for 1,800 years. He translated the Book of Mormon by placing a stone in a hat. His Doctrine and Covenants contains Section 132, which commands plural marriage as an everlasting covenant and is still in the canon. It contains Section 84, which promises a temple in Independence, Missouri in that generation. The temple has never been built. Moses said one false prophecy disqualifies a prophet. Paul said the angel who delivered the whole enterprise is accursed. And on June 27, 1844, Joseph Smith died at Carthage Jail raising his hands and beginning the Masonic Grand Hailing Sign of Distress. He never finished it. Nobody came. This episode follows the evidence.

Veritate - Christianity "Jehovah's Witnesses" and the Questions

Before I became Catholic, I could not tell the difference. Two Jehovah's Witnesses would leave my door and I had heard something about Jesus, something about the Bible, something about a better world coming. It sounded like everything I had already heard from the Baptists down the street. That was not an accident. They are fluent in a language most Americans already half-speak, and they have replaced what every word means underneath. They are organized, they are committed, and they are knocking on your door in a country where half the population has already decided they do not need organized religion. The question is not whether they are sincere. They are. The question is whether what they believe is true. Jehovah's Witnesses are not Protestant. They share no historical connection to the Reformation. Their Christology was condemned as heresy at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, twelve hundred years before Luther existed. They use a Bible produced by anonymous translators to support conclusions already reached. They answer to a Governing Body that claims to be God's sole channel of truth on earth, predicted the end of the world in 1925 and again in 1975, and told the members who sold their homes and skipped having children that they had believed too completely. This episode follows the evidence on who they are, where they came from, and what they actually believe when they knock on your door.

Veritate - Christianity "No Name" and the Questions

There are 44,000 of them in the United States. They have no shared name, no common creed, no authority above the local pastor. They call themselves just Christians. When I was an atheist, I could not figure out what they were. I visited a gymnasium, a barn, a community college classroom, and a church in Yuma, Arizona that locked the doors once you were inside. My confusion was not the problem. My confusion was the answer. This week on Veritate, we reach the end of the Reformation arc. Five hundred years of private interpretation did not fail to arrive somewhere. It succeeded. It arrived exactly where the logic was always pointing. We apply the four questions to a movement that refuses to answer them, trace the history it will not teach, and ask what it means that the largest Protestant body in America has no confession it will put on paper.