Evangelical leader says LDS Church is not a cult

A prominent evangelical Christian leader took a strong public position Sunday in opposition to fellow evangelicals who recently have attacked Mitt Romney for his membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which they called a "cult" and "non-Christian."

Writing on CNN's Belief Blog, Richard J. Mouw, president of the Fuller Theological Seminary, an evangelical school in Pasadena, Calif., says he "begs to differ" with those who say that "to cast a vote for (Romney) is to promote the cause of a cult."

For 12 years, Mouw and BYU Professor Robert Millet have co-chaired a private dialogue of about 25 evangelicals and Mormons, exploring a variety of "key theological issues" between the two groups.

"We evangelicals and our Mormon counterparts disagree about some important theological questions," Mouw continued. "But we have also found that on some matters we are not as far apart as we thought we were."

Mouw has studied cults and taught about them. He said their hallmarks include a distaste for engaging in "serious, respectful give-and-take dialogue with people with whom they disagree." They also do not promote scholarship.

"But Brigham Young University is a world-class educational institution, with professors who've earned doctorates from some of the best universities in the world," Mouw continued. "Several of the top leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have PhDs from Ivy League schools. These folks talk admiringly of the evangelical Billy Graham and the Catholic Mother Teresa, and they enjoy reading the evangelical C.S. Lewis and Father Henri Nouwen, a Catholic. That is not the kind of thing you run into in anti-Christian cults."

The question of whether or not Latter-day Saints are Christian is, according to Mouw, "a complicated question."

"My Mormon friends and I disagree on enough subjects that I am not prepared to say that their theology falls within the scope of historic Christian teaching," Mouw wrote.

"While I am not prepared to reclassify Mormonism as possessing undeniably Christian theology," he continued, "I do accept many of my Mormon friends as genuine followers of the Jesus whom I worship as the divine Savior."