Non-Creedal: Two Different Claims

Where the phrase comes from

The "creeds are an abomination" language appears in only one of Joseph Smith's four surviving First Vision accounts: the 1838 version, later canonized as Joseph Smith—History in the Pearl of Great Price. It is absent from the earlier 1832 and 1835 accounts, which give other reasons for rejecting the churches of Smith's day (the world "lieth in sin," professors "corrupt," teaching "the commandments of men") without naming creeds specifically. The 1838 text has the divine personage stating that "all their creeds were an abomination in his sight."

Read on its own terms, the passage condemns the specific creeds of the specific churches Smith encountered, evidence, in the text's framing, that those churches had departed from true doctrine, not creeds as a genre of religious writing. The 1842 account adds that those denominations were "not acknowledged of God as his church and kingdom." That is a claim about legitimacy of authorship, not a general principle that fixed doctrinal statements are inherently corrupting.

The LDS case: seven creed-shaped structures

The LDS Church's own institutional life contains at least seven structures that perform the functions of a creed, a fixed, specific, authoritatively declared, and enforced body of doctrine, while the church continues to describe itself as non-creedal.

Baptism: the clearest single test

No structure demonstrates the exclusive-authorship claim more concretely than baptism recognition, because it is not abstract theology. It is a yes-or-no gate applied to every convert.

LDS doctrine holds that priesthood authority to perform valid baptism was lost entirely after the apostles' deaths and restored solely through Joseph Smith. The consequence: every convert age eight or older is required to be baptized again, "even though they may have been previously baptized in other churches," Catholic, Baptist, Orthodox, or any other. The church does not treat this as a redundant second baptism; theologically, the first was never valid, because the baptizer lacked restored authority.

Community of Christ's 2010 policy, canonized in Doctrine and Covenants Section 164, runs the opposite direction: a baptism from any Christian denomination, LDS included, is recognized without rebaptism, provided it involved water, was performed by an ordained Christian minister, and was a genuine expression of faith in Christ. The church does not require proof of the baptizer's specific credentials. One contemporary commentator described the decision as expanding true priesthood authority beyond the specific line of succession traced back to Joseph Smith, an explicit relinquishment of the same exclusive-authority claim the LDS Church continues to hold.

Community of Christ: the Nine Enduring Principles

Community of Christ's own closest approach to a creed-like summary is its Nine Enduring Principles, also called core values, a set of statements the church itself describes not as a fixed doctrinal test but as a description of the community's "personality." The principles are explicitly framed as subject to evolving expression: "while we believe these principles to be eternal, our expression of them will continue to evolve as our understanding grows."

The structural distinction from LDS doctrine is visible in the language itself: the principles are framed as values and orientations ("we seek," "we celebrate," "we join with") rather than as propositional claims requiring assent ("I know," "I believe"). No principle is stated as a test of membership, and church materials elsewhere state directly that specific belief, including belief in the Book of Mormon's historicity, "is not a test of fellowship." See Who Owns "Mormon" (chronology) for Stephen Veazey's 2007 ruling to that effect.

Faithful disagreement: where the line actually sits

Community of Christ has a formally named policy, "Faithful Disagreement," articulated in a 2013 Herald statement and reinforced through ongoing church education. Its core claim: a member or priesthood holder may personally hold and privately express disagreement with official church positions, including on contested questions like LGBTQ ordination and marriage, without that disagreement affecting standing, eligibility for priesthood office, or participation in the sacraments. Church language states plainly that a differing view "does not lessen in any way a person's participation as a faithful, generous, committed, and responsible disciple."

The policy is explicitly a corrective response to the church's 1984 schism, already documented on this site: leadership concluded it had "handled the disagreement over women's ordination poorly" and "drove a lot of dissenters out of the Church," and built a formal tolerance for internal dissent specifically to avoid repeating that failure. See Restoration Branches and the Remnant Church.

This sharpens rather than erases the comparison. LDS structure enforces orthodoxy of belief: the testimony formula, the temple recommend interview, and excommunication for apostasy all test what a member actually holds to be true, privately as well as publicly. Community of Christ structure enforces orthodoxy of public conduct, not belief. A member may privately reject official positions, including the Book of Mormon's historicity, and remain in full standing, provided they do not organize public opposition to leadership's stated direction. Both churches have a boundary, drawn around different things: one around what you believe, the other around what you organize against.

Reading the two claims together

"Non-creedal" in LDS usage describes the openness of the canon, more revelation can always be added, without describing membership requirements as minimal. Those requirements are specific, enumerated, and enforced through a real interview with real consequences for failure. What the church actually rejects is not creed as a form, but any other institution's authority to write one. It exercises that same authority continuously, under the name of continuing revelation rather than creed-drafting, and its 1838 founding text, "creeds are an abomination," reads, on close inspection, as a claim about whose creeds were illegitimate, not a rejection of creeds as such.

"Non-creedal" in Community of Christ usage is closer to the ordinary sense of the term: propositional belief is genuinely not a test of fellowship, the Nine Enduring Principles are framed as values rather than required assertions, and even a position as central as the Book of Mormon's historicity is formally optional. The boundary Community of Christ does maintain sits around public institutional conduct, not private belief, a materially different kind of boundary than the LDS Church's testimony-and-temple-recommend structure, even though neither church is, in the end, a community without any boundary at all.