Where the traditions land

Population figures are each tradition's own most recent published count. Eligibility is set against the World Christian Database, the standard reference for global denominational data.

Why the disagreement

This question's answer buckets land almost exactly where the "Is Jesus God?" buckets did, because they're testing the same fault line — just aimed at group membership instead of a specific claim about Christ. The ten traditions in the majority bucket all treat the ecumenical creeds (Nicene, Apostles', and for some, Athanasian) as the functional boundary of Christian identity, even though they disagree sharply with each other on nearly every other question in this format: full deity of Christ, the Trinity, the virgin birth, the atoning death, the bodily resurrection. Catholic teaching makes this concrete rather than abstract — canon law recognizes as validly baptized anyone baptized with water in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, with the intention of doing what the Church does. In 2001, the Vatican's doctrinal office specifically ruled LDS baptism doesn't meet that bar, stating plainly that it "is not a Christian baptism," on the grounds that LDS theology doesn't hold the same understanding of the Trinity the formula presupposes.

LDS and Jehovah's Witnesses both reject that creedal formula as the right test in the first place, and both consider themselves fully, unambiguously Christian by their own criteria. LDS teaching centers its definition on faith in Jesus Christ as the literal divine Son and Savior, sealed by priesthood-authorized baptism — a test the Nicene Creed's specific philosophical language about "one substance" isn't part of, and that LDS theology holds developed after, not during, the apostolic era. Jehovah's Witnesses go a step further: their own definition centers on recognizing Jehovah, by name, as the only true God, with Jesus as his Son and ransom sacrifice — explicitly excluding the Trinity as a post-biblical corruption, which puts them at odds with the majority test from the opposite direction LDS is.

Solving the disagreement

This is the same underlying dispute as the Christology question, run through a more practical filter: not just what's true about Jesus, but which specific formula gets to define who counts as a member of the category at all. Settling it would require the same thing settling the Christology question would — agreement on whether the Nicene Creed's specific philosophical language is a legitimate, binding development of apostolic teaching, or a later imposition that changed what the earliest Christians actually believed. LDS and Jehovah's Witnesses both hold the second view, for their own distinct reasons; the ten-tradition majority holds the first.

What's different here is that this dispute has a real institutional mechanism attached to it, not just a theological one. Catholic canon law's 2001 ruling on LDS baptism wasn't a hypothetical judgment — it has a concrete practical effect on how converts are received into the Catholic Church. That doesn't make the underlying theological question any more resolvable, but it does mean this fork isn't purely academic: a tradition's answer to "what's the minimum to be Christian" produces real consequences for how it treats people who answer differently, independent of whether the deeper dispute ever gets settled.

Sources

Same standing source per tradition on every post, not hunted per question.

• Catholic — Catechism of the Catholic Church
• Eastern Orthodox — Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (binding across all jurisdictions); The Longer Catechism of St. Philaret of Moscow (widely used, not binding on every jurisdiction)
• Oriental Orthodox — Catechism of the Coptic Orthodox Church, Fr. Tadros Y. Malaty (Amazon — no full free text found)
• Anglican — Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion
• Lutheran — Book of Concord
• Reformed/Presbyterian — Westminster Confession of Faith
• Methodist/Wesleyan — Articles of Religion
• Southern Baptist Convention — Baptist Faith & Message 2000
• Pentecostal (Trinitarian) — Assemblies of God Statement of Fundamental Truths
• Seventh-day Adventist — 28 Fundamental Beliefs
• LDS — Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants
• Jehovah's Witnesses — What Does the Bible Really Teach?