Can you explain the Mormonism/Catholicism comparison? I think I missed that one, and I never want to miss a chance to shit on the church of LDS
Key part in the post is the “Americanized remake” part but when I watched Murder Among the Mormons I was struck at how Mormons have a culture about relics and finding obscure paraphernalia relating to important figures so they can bring it to the church and this kind of veneration of relics is something you hardly ever see in other post-Reformation sects of Christianity
Plus the whole structured centralized hierarchy with the Americanized part being adding some nods towards republicanism. Like the spiritual head is picked in an election amongst senior clergyman who always elect one of their own and this spiritual head has the ability to say things and claim they came directly from God (granted papal infallibility hasn’t yet been used for a sudden 180 in teachings but it potentially can be used that way). Mormons call their guy “president” rather than using titles which come from the Roman Empire but this reflects the wider political context of the state they emerged in.
Also there’s an old stereotype of Catholics always having large families that is kinda outdated now in the US but that’s def an overlap
Oh yeah also Mormons like statues of religious figures. The marble statue Christus is the most popular artistic depiction of Jesus in Mormonism from what I gather and it should be noted that the original creator was the 19th century Danish Lutheran Bertel Thorvaldsen.
Thorvaldsen is notable however for his neoclassical style that he mastered while studying in Rome and religious sculptures which might seem quite Romanesque to some (to the point where he actually designed the tomb for Pope Pius VII and thus is the sole non-Catholic artist to have a work on display in St Peter’s Basilica) though it should be noted that Continental Lutheranism would probably strike some other Protestants as surprisingly Catholic with certain things (like the original Christus state is displayed in a church called “Church of Our Lady” which would reek of Catholicism to most American Protestants).
This is a bit of a more circuitous connection but Mormons seem to have really loved the work of a guy who was notable because he was a Protestant that incorporated Catholic-ish aesthetics into his works so there’s that