The church enforces general doctrinal uniformity, and congregations on all continents teach the same doctrines, and international Mormons tend to absorb a good deal of Mormon culture, possibly because of the church's top-down hierarchy and a missionary presence.
And it has certainly served to highlight Stephen's humanist beliefs and values – beliefs which, though widely shared by millions of people around the world, rarely get the same airtime as religious or doctrinal beliefs.
Equally problematic is the same issue in reverse: Without some doctrinal shift there does not seem to be any way that beings born into formless realms, with no bodies, could be reborn among those with physical form.
Given the speed with which electrons travel cross-country, that Massachusetts decision gave Judge Walker a powerful signal that there was no obvious doctrinal obstacle in taking the same path.
At the same time, the officials' reluctance to defrock a sex abuser shows that on a doctrinal level, the Vatican has tended to view the matter in terms of sin and repentance more than crime and punishment.
The same man who has charged so many politicians with "inciting enmity and hatred through religious and doctrinal differences" unashamedly denounces Virtue as a "tumour" run by "blood-sucking vampires".
By the time he died in 1546, at the age of 62, Luther had set in motion a doctrinal and liturgical revolution that swept all before it; Europe would never be the same again.
