Ask a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints what the faith’s founder, Joseph Smith, “restored” as part of his effort to straighten out Christianity and there’s a good chance the first answer will have to do with an understanding of God and his Son as embodied and separate entities.

As Dallin H. Oaks, the church’s president, stated in a 2017 sermon broadcast around the world: “We do not believe in what the Christian world calls the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. In his First Vision, Joseph Smith saw two distinct personages, two beings, thus clarifying that the then-prevailing beliefs concerning God and the Godhead were not true.”

It’s a central Latter-day Saint tenet about the nature of God, one evidenced in paintings depicting Smith’s boyhood encounter with the divine in church meetinghouses around the world.

It’s also the first teaching that would have to go for Pastor Doug Wilson, spiritual adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, to consider Latter-day Saints Christian.

Wilson, co-founder of the denomination Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, isn’t alone. The concept of the Trinity — a belief that God is three eternal beings in one — is central to the understanding many Christians hold about the nature of the Almighty.

But then, most Christians aren’t working as Wilson is to build a Christian republic in the United States.

In a recent interview with The Salt Lake Tribune, Wilson explained that in the theocracy he is working to create from his home in Moscow, Idaho, Latter-day Saints would not be able to hold elected office, be it city council member, senator or president. Whether they would be able to vote in his hypothetical system — one based on granting a single vote per household — is, he said, to be determined.

[Read The Salt Lake Tribune’s story about Doug Wilson.]

“I’d want all officeholders to be orthodox Christians,” he said, clarifying he did not mean Eastern Orthodox but “Trinitarian” Christians. “I’m not convinced that you would need to protect that by having only Christians voting.”

The self-identified Christian nationalist has seen his profile soar under President Donald Trump’s second term. His denomination, which numbers around 25,000 adherents globally, recently opened shop in Washington. And, in February, he gave a 15-minute sermon at the White House at Hegseth’s invitation.

“His proximity to power is,” Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a scholar of white evangelicalism, told The Tribune, “more impressive than it ever has been.”

And Latter-day Saints dropping their concept of God isn’t the only adjustment he would require before considering them part of the Christian club and thus fully equal members of his dream society.

“The LDS position is that God … is someone who used to not be God,” he said, gesturing at a defining and controversial statement from early church President Lorenzo Snow declaring that “as man now is, God once was. As God now is, man may be.”

Shortly before his death, Joseph Smith also taught that God was an exalted man and the belief — paired with the teaching that humans have the potential to become gods — has remained.

Although top Latter-day Saint leaders have largely avoided the topic in public sermons in recent years, an official church essay concludes by saying that the “doctrine of humans’ eternal potential to become like their Heavenly Father is central to the gospel of Jesus Christ and inspires love, hope, and gratitude in the hearts of faithful Latter-day Saints.”

This theology, Wilson said, would also need trimming in any kind of “reformation in the LDS Church.”

“The Christian faith, as I understand it, is monotheistic,” the pastor said. “There’s only one true God, and the LDS don’t hold to that.”

The Book of Mormon, the faith’s foundational text, also presents a problem for Wilson, who said he has read it multiple times.

“That’s one of the next things that would go,” he said, calling it “not inspired scripture.”

In particular, he singled out 2 Nephi 25:23, which states “for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do.”

For Wilson, the idea of “after all we can do” puts unbiblical limits on God’s grace.

“We don’t do anything,” he said, “to earn it.”

However, Wilson said, temple rituals and garments, the sacred underclothing Latter-day Saints wear after participating in temple ordinances, could possibly remain. It all comes down to belief and intent for the pastor.

“I can easily envision an orthodox denomination of fundamentalist Christians in Arkansas,” he theorized, “where all the men wear white shirts and skinny neckties … and they are dubious about your salvation if you wear anything else. That’s maybe sectarian, but it’s not unorthodox.”

For Joseph DuWors, a Latter-day Saint convert and a doctoral candidate in Mormon studies at Claremont Graduate University, arguments like Wilson’s aren’t new.

“Latter-day Saints need to be very honest with themselves,” he said in a recent episode of The Tribune’s “Mormon Land” podcast. At the time, the retired Army chaplain was responding to the backlash after the Defense Department released a “Christian list” that did not include Latter-day Saints (Wilson has denied any involvement in compiling that tally).

“We’re not trying to fit in with other Christian traditions that have emerged from early Christianity,” DuWors said. “We are distinctive. I think that’s very clear. I just think we need to be comfortable with that and not be offended when somebody uses their definition of Christianity to push us to the side.”