A few years ago I sat next to a Sikh man on a flight from Dallas. We talked for three hours. He told me about the langar—the communal meal his gurdwara serves to anyone who walks through the door, no questions asked. "Rich or poor, any caste, any faith—you sit on the floor together and you eat," he said. I sat there thinking of King Benjamin's people, who pitched their tents with the doors facing the temple so every family could hear the prophet's voice. Different architecture. Same impulse: gather people in, feed them, orient them toward God.
That moment has stayed with me because it crystallized something I'd been feeling for a long time—a tension that runs right through the heart of Latter-day Saint life. We believe this is "the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth" (D&C 1:30). We also believe God is actively at work in every nation, tongue, and people. Those two convictions sound like they should collide, but the restored gospel insists they don't. Holding them together—without collapsing one into the other—is the distinctive Latter-day Saint contribution to interfaith thinking. And it's harder, and richer, than most of us realize.
A Theology Bigger Than We Usually Admit
Here is one of the most remarkable verses in all of scripture, and it rarely gets the attention it deserves. Alma, reflecting on missionary work, says this: "The Lord doth grant unto all nations, of their own nation and tongue, to teach his word, yea, in wisdom, all that he seeth fit that they should have" (Alma 29:8).
Read that again slowly. God doesn't just tolerate other religions while waiting for the missionaries to show up. He grants truth to all nations. He does it through their own people, speaking their own language, according to what He "seeth fit that they should have." That is not a grudging concession. That is a deliberate, wise, ongoing act of divine generosity.
Nephi makes the same point from a different angle: "Know ye not that there are more nations than one? Know ye not that I, the Lord your God, have created all men, and that I remember those who are upon the isles of the sea?" (2 Nephi 29:7). The rebuke here is aimed at anyone—including covenant Israel—who assumes God's dealings are limited to their corner of the world.
The doctrine of the Light of Christ makes this even more expansive. Section 88 describes a light that "proceedeth forth from the presence of God to fill the immensity of space" and is "the light which is in all things, which giveth life to all things" (D&C 88:12–13). Section 84 puts it plainly: "The Spirit giveth light to every man that cometh into the world" (D&C 84:46). Every person. Not every baptized person. Every person.
This means the Buddhist monk whose meditation practice has taught him to release anger isn't operating in a vacuum. The Jewish rabbi whose reading of Torah illuminates justice and mercy isn't working outside God's influence. The Muslim woman whose daily prayers anchor her entire life to the divine isn't merely going through motions. Mormon, writing to his son, taught that "the Spirit of Christ is given to every man, that he may know good from evil," and that "every thing which inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ" (Moroni 7:16).
This is not pluralism. We're not saying all paths are identical. But it is a breathtakingly generous theology of God's reach.
Partners, Not Adversaries
In 1928, Elder Orson F. Whitney of the Quorum of the Twelve said something that still surprises people when they hear it for the first time: "Perhaps the Lord needs such men on the outside of His Church to help it along. They are among its auxiliaries, and can do more good for the cause where the Lord has placed them, than anywhere else. … God is using more than one people for the accomplishment of His great and marvelous work. The Latter-day Saints cannot do it all. It is too vast, too arduous for any one people." He then added this striking line: other churches "are our partners in a certain sense" (as cited in Robert L. Millet, "God Grants unto All Nations," Religious Educator, 2020).
That word—partners—is worth sitting with. It doesn't erase distinctiveness. It doesn't pretend there aren't real theological differences. But it reflects a fundamental confidence: God's work is so enormous that He enlists help from everywhere.
The 1978 First Presidency statement under President Spencer W. Kimball made this even more explicit: "The great religious leaders of the world … received a portion of God's light. Moral truths were given to them by God to enlighten whole nations and bring a higher level of understanding to individuals" (Statement of the First Presidency regarding God's Love for All Mankind). Confucius, Muhammad, the Buddha, the great reformers—the First Presidency was saying that God was in the business of illuminating people long before and far beyond the borders of the restored Church.
Joseph Smith himself set the tone. "Have the Presbyterians any truth? Yes. Have the Baptists, Methodists, etc., any truth? Yes," he said in 1843. "They all have a little truth mixed with error. We should gather all the good and true principles in the world and treasure them up, or we shall not come out true 'Mormons'" (History of the Church, 5:517, as quoted in "Viewpoint: Embrace, Honor, and Carry Forth Truth," Church News).
That is not the posture of a people afraid of other faiths. That is the posture of a people who believe truth is truth, wherever it lives.
The Tension We Have to Hold
Here's where it gets honest. Because we also believe in priesthood authority, temple ordinances, and a specific covenant path. We believe Joseph Smith saw the Father and the Son. We believe the Book of Mormon is the word of God. We send tens of thousands of missionaries around the world with a very particular message: the fulness of the gospel has been restored, and the ordinances of salvation are here.
So how do you hold "God gives light to all people" and "the fulness is found here" in the same hand?
I think the eleventh Article of Faith is more radical than we give it credit for: "We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may" (Articles of Faith 1:11). Joseph didn't write "tolerate." He wrote "allow … the same privilege." That's a full-throated endorsement of religious liberty—not as a political tactic, but as a theological conviction rooted in agency itself.
The tension is real, but it's productive. It means a Latter-day Saint can sit in a mosque during an interfaith service and genuinely admire the devotion on display—without pretending there's no difference between that devotion and the covenant path. It means we can learn from a Catholic understanding of grace, or a Jewish understanding of Sabbath, or a Hindu understanding of the divine permeating all things, and find our own faith deepened rather than threatened.
As Joshua M. Sears wrote in a 2023 article for BYU's Religious Educator, some members "may hesitate to be taught by people from other religions"—they're comfortable loving their neighbors of other faiths, but less comfortable being instructed by them. Sears argues this hesitation sells short the very doctrine we claim to believe: that God gives light to all His children.
BYU religion professor Andrew Reed put it well: "If I can learn to sit with someone who sees the world radically different than me and be patient and learn from them, that's where I think growth happens" (quoted in "Friendship Among Faiths," BYU Magazine, 2024).
What This Looks Like in Practice
Interfaith engagement for Latter-day Saints isn't primarily an academic exercise. It's practical. The Church has partnered with Catholic Charities, Islamic Relief, and dozens of other organizations on humanitarian projects for decades. It has joined coalitions to defend religious liberty alongside evangelicals, Jews, Muslims, and Sikhs. President Dallin H. Oaks has spoken repeatedly about the need for people of all faiths to stand together in defense of religious freedom, even when they disagree on doctrine.
But the most important interfaith work doesn't happen at conferences or in press releases. It happens in neighborhoods. It happens when you bring dinner to a Hindu family after a death in their home. When you attend a friend's bar mitzvah and let it move you. When you invite your Muslim coworker to break the Ramadan fast at your table. When you stop treating other people's faith as a problem to be solved and start treating it as a window into how God is working in their life.
Our baptismal covenant includes a promise to "mourn with those that mourn" and "comfort those that stand in need of comfort" (Mosiah 18:8–9). Alma didn't add a footnote that says "only if they're members." The scope of that covenant is as wide as the human family.
One Thing to Carry This Week
There's a phrase from Section 88 that haunts me: "Intelligence cleaveth unto intelligence; wisdom receiveth wisdom; truth embraceth truth; virtue loveth virtue; light cleaveth unto light" (D&C 88:40).
Truth doesn't ask for a denominational ID before it embraces other truth. Light doesn't check membership records before it cleaves to light. When you encounter something true and beautiful in another tradition, the doctrine says you should feel a pull toward it—because the same Spirit animates it.
So here's what I'd ask you to do this week. Find something. A Jewish prayer. A Rumi poem. A Sikh hymn. A Catholic homily. Something from outside your tradition that speaks to your spirit. Read it. Sit with it. Ask yourself where God is in it. Not where God isn't—where God is.
Because the restored gospel doesn't ask you to shrink your vision of God's work in the world. It asks you to expand it—to see His fingerprints in places you haven't yet looked, to recognize that the light filling the immensity of space is the same light that fills a quiet chapel in Salt Lake City and a candlelit cathedral in Rome and a hilltop shrine in Kyoto. The claim of the Restoration isn't that God started speaking in 1820. It's that He never stopped, and now we have more of the picture than ever before.
That's not a reason for arrogance. It's a reason for breathtaking generosity toward every soul who has ever turned toward the light—whatever they called it, wherever they found it.