About two weeks after the publication of the Book of Mormon, Joseph and five of his associates founded a new church on April 6, 1830, calling it simply “The Church of Christ.” Over the next few years the growing movement established two communities out west, first in Kirtland, Ohio, and then in Jackson County (Independence), Missouri. Joseph’s intention was to build a new “Zion” in Independence from which to evangelize the Indians, whom the Book of Mormon identified as descendants of the Lamanites. Joseph even prophesied in 1832 that before his generation passed away a temple would be built on the lot the LDS Church had purchased in Independence (D&C 84:1-5). No temple was ever built there because the Mormons were forced out of the area. Today the empty lot is owned by a splinter LDS group called, appropriately, the Church of Christ (Temple Lot), which refuses to part with the land.
From 1831 to 1838 there were in effect two semi-independent communities of the Saints, one in Ohio and the other in Missouri. In 1834 Joseph renamed the religion “The Church of the Latter Day Saints” to distinguish it from other denominations using the name “Church of Christ.” That same year he led a group of Mormons to Missouri, where he appointed David Whitmer as the church’s President there. Two years later, regretting the omission of any reference to Christ in the church’s name, Joseph changed it again to The Church of Christ of Latter Day Saints. He also announced a revelation establishing two “priesthood” orders in the church. The lower priesthood was the Aaronic, while the higher priesthood was the Melchizedek (D&C 107). During this period, the community in Kirtland fell apart due to financial troubles, Martin Harris and others who faulted Joseph were excommunicated, and many members quit the movement.
Meanwhile, the Missouri community suffered largely undeserved opposition, in part from fears of their growing numbers, in part from the Mormons’ tendency to support the abolition of slavery. Conflicts with non-Mormons turned violent, and the Saints abandoned Independence and relocated north, first in Clay County and later further north where they established a new town called Far West. Joseph and most of the Ohio Mormons relocated to Far West in 1838, where his disagreements with the Missouri leaders led to the excommunication of both Whitmer and Cowdery. Joseph issued a revelation claiming that God had directed the church to have the name The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (D&C 115:3-4; the hyphenated form “Latter-day” came much later). One wonders why, if Joseph had been receiving revelation as a prophet throughout the 1830s, he had to change the religion’s name three times in a span of four years.
The violent conflict with non-Mormons in Missouri escalated after Joseph’s arrival, and in late 1838 Lilburn Boggs, the governor of Missouri, ordered that the Mormons be forced out of the state altogether and exterminated if they refused to leave. Joseph was arrested and jailed for about six months, and the Mormons fled to Illinois. After Joseph escaped prison and joined the Saints, they bought up property in Commerce, Illinois, which they renamed “Nauvoo” (meaning “beautiful”). This is where Joseph began secretly practicing polygamy, eventually being “sealed” to over thirty women, and where Joseph introduced his most radical doctrinal ideas.
In 1844 Joseph announced that he was running as a candidate for U.S. President. A group of Mormons, upset by Joseph’s activities and alarmed by his political ambitions, published a dissident paper called the Nauvoo Expositor. The town council had the press destroyed, the state militia was mobilized against Nauvoo, and Joseph and his brother Hyrum were charged with
treason and jailed in the nearby town of Carthage. Regrettably, an angry mob stormed the jail on June 27, 1844, and shot and killed Joseph and Hyrum, thus making them martyrs for the cause of Mormonism.
Following Joseph’s death, the LDS movement splintered. One group of Saints that rejected polygamy eventually formed the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS), with Joseph’s son Joseph Smith III as its president. In an interesting twist, the RLDS movement, which does not build temples, grew in Independence, Missouri, and eventually made its headquarters there, essentially next door to the empty temple lot. RLDS presidents were all direct descendants of Joseph until 1996, when W. Grant McMurray became the group’s president. In 2000 the church, which had already been evolving into a socially progressive sect more in line with liberal Protestantism, changed its name to the Community of Christ. Other LDS sects include the previously mentioned Church of Christ (Temple Lot) as well as the Church of Jesus Christ (Cutlerite), both also based in Independence.
Most of the Saints, however, accepted Brigham Young as the true successor of Joseph Smith. They followed Young on a perilous trek west, eventually stopping in in the Salt Lake Valley of Utah in July 1847, where he famously announced, “This is the place!” Young led the LDS Church as its President until his death in 1877, and he also held office as the first governor of the territory of Utah in the 1850s. He encouraged the open practice of polygamy and took 55 wives for himself, having 56 children by sixteen of those wives. Young also imposed as a formal rule that black men could not hold the LDS priesthood, based on statements in the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham.
Young’s authoritarian rule in Utah led to tensions with the U.S. federal government, resulting in a short, armed conflict known as the Utah War. During this war, on September 11, 1857, Mormons massacred 120 Arkansans at Mountain Meadows as they were traveling to California and attempted to make it appear as though Indians had committed the atrocity. Young’s role in the massacre has been a matter of dispute among historians.
Following Young’s death in 1877, the U.S. Congress passed an act disincorporating the LDS Church and threatening to imprison its leaders and confiscate its properties because of the church’s open practice of polygamy. Facing prison as well as the practical dissolution of the LDS Church as an organization, in 1890 its President, Wilford Woodruff, issued a “Manifesto” disavowing polygamy (later appended to D&C as Official Declaration 1). The federal government permitted Utah to become a State in 1896 on the understanding that polygamy was banned there, but it was not until a second Manifesto in 1904 by President Joseph F. Smith that the LDS Church genuinely repudiated polygamy. In the wake of this policy change, various polygamous LDS sects emerged over the next several decades. Most notorious among these groups is the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), whose leader Warren Jeffs was imprisoned for life in 2011.
This resource is an excerpt from Mormonism (Latter-day Saints), by Robert M. Bowman Jr. A high-quality booklet of 50 pages with full-color images, it is part of the new Reflections on Religions series being published by Trinity House Publishers. Kenneth D. Boa is the series editor. Copies of this booklet are now available from IRR for our newsletter subscribers for $18 including shipping (a savings of $6).