Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is portrayed as both a religious institution and a community bound together by claims of restored revelation, a distinctive account of sacred history, and the authority of its leaders. Its development is marked by a recurring tension: members found unity and purpose in obedience to a divinely appointed church, while the church’s efforts to govern its own people brought it into conflict with neighbors, federal power, and dissenters. Across the book, the institution changes substantially, but it continues to negotiate the legacy of its founding prophet and the demands of collective faith.

Founding Beliefs and Shared Identity

Joseph Smith presented the church as a restoration of the true Christian faith after what he called the Great Apostasy. The Book of Mormon supplied a new sacred history centered largely in the Americas: it told of Jesus Christ visiting the New World after his resurrection and situated the arrival of the Son of Man in the same American setting. Its moral structure made the stakes clear by dividing religious belonging between the church of the Lamb of God and the church of the devil. The book’s appeal also lay in the promise of personal revelation: followers were encouraged to seek direct communication from God, making revelation a foundation of religious life rather than solely a prerogative of distant authorities.

That shared identity gained force through physical gathering and common ritual. Joseph’s followers moved first to Kirtland, then toward Jackson County, where they sought to build a New Jerusalem. The newcomers’ claims that they were God’s chosen people, their coordinated voting, their purchases of land, and their preference for trading among fellow Saints heightened the suspicion of existing residents. Religious belonging therefore operated as more than a private conviction: it formed a social boundary, a political bloc, and a claim to a particular place.

The book also depicts the church’s cohesion in recurring ceremonies and large gatherings. At the annual Hill Cumorah Pageant, more than ten thousand people gathered for a free outdoor production, with a stage spanning much of the hillside and 627 performers. Although nonmembers were welcome, more than 95 percent of the audience already belonged to the church. For many attendees, the pageant functioned less as an appeal to strangers than as a reunion at a site associated with the movement’s beginnings, where shared testimony and participation reaffirmed their membership in the religious community.

Gathering, Government, and Conflict

After the Missouri expulsion, Joseph chose Nauvoo as the site for a new center of the faith. The settlement grew from a malarial riverside tract into a city of more than fifteen thousand people within five years. Its unusual charter gave it extensive local powers. Joseph stood at the head of this theocratic city, was formally titled King, Priest, and Ruler over Israel on Earth, and commanded the Nauvoo Legion, a disciplined militia nearly half the size of the entire American Army at the time. His unsuccessful request to Congress for a force of one hundred thousand men reflected the scale of his political and military ambitions; in 1844 he also announced his candidacy for president of the United States.

Migration westward further bound the Saints to their leaders. The journey from Nauvoo involved deaths and severe hardship, and the book describes the trials as a process that left the surviving emigrants more devoted and less willing to dissent. In the snowbound camp at Sugar Creek, Iowa, in February 1846, plural marriage was disclosed more openly to ordinary members, although church leaders continued denying the practice to the outside world. After the Saints reached the Great Salt Lake Valley, the United States’ acquisition of the region and the establishment of Utah Territory limited the autonomy they had sought. Brigham Young, appointed territorial governor, nevertheless used local institutions to advance the church’s interests.

The conflict over jurisdiction was especially visible in the handling of law. Brigham Young maintained that divine law took precedence over human law. The Mormon-dominated Utah Territorial Legislature expanded the jurisdiction of local probate courts, which were controlled by Young; many judges were Mormon bishops, and juries were composed largely of church members. This arrangement displaced federal authority in practice and led federal officials to describe the territory as a theocratic dictatorship. The church’s claim to religious independence thus coexisted with an organized effort to make local governance conform to its own religious priorities.

Polygamy and Institutional Change

Plural marriage became one of the most consequential points of conflict between the church and the wider country. In 1851, Young publicly acknowledged that he had many wives. The following year, he announced the doctrine to a churchwide assembly in Salt Lake City, presenting it as a teaching received by Joseph Smith. The announcement damaged the church’s standing abroad: converts in France and England reacted with dismay, and a missionary reported that 1,776 British Saints left during the six months that followed. Young defended plural marriage as a religious practice and argued that federal authorities had no right to interfere with it.

The church’s official 1890 Manifesto did not immediately end the practice. For about two decades, senior leaders privately advised members to continue plural marriages discreetly, and church leaders themselves performed marriages in secret. In 1910, the Salt Lake Tribune published the names of roughly two hundred Saints who had entered plural marriages after the Manifesto, including six members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. The disclosure provoked anger among non-Mormons and prominent members of the church. By the 1920s, most Saints and their leaders were supporting enforcement of the Manifesto and the prosecution of people who continued to cohabit in plural marriages.

Some members rejected that turn, arguing that the Manifesto had suspended plural marriage under temporary pressure but had not revoked the revelation preserved in Section 132 of The Doctrine and Covenants. The resulting break between the main church and fundamentalist communities shows how official policy could change without settling the underlying dispute over revelation. The book presents this history as a source of continuing tension: efforts to make the institution more acceptable to the broader public also strengthened the appeal of groups that claimed to preserve Joseph Smith’s original vision.

Authority, Governance, and Modernization

The church’s governing structure concentrates authority in fifteen men: the president, his two counselors in the First Presidency, and the twelve members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. The president is regarded as God’s direct mouthpiece on earth. Leaders serve for life, and after a president’s death the longest-serving apostle becomes the next president. This system makes prophetic succession a matter of institutional procedure as well as religious legitimacy, a combination that has helped the church maintain continuity while preserving a highly centralized hierarchy.

The book contrasts Joseph Smith’s personal, expansive revelatory authority with the institution’s later organization. Brigham Young, Joseph’s successor, was a practical organizer whose loyalty to the founding prophet was strong, but whose style was more managerial and demanding. Under Young, collective loyalty was reinforced by the memory of expulsion and migration. At the same time, the church’s insistence on obedience and its efforts to control local legal arrangements show how religious authority could extend beyond doctrine into public life.

In the modern period, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is described as increasingly wealthy, professionally managed, and oriented toward the social mainstream. Its annual revenue is estimated in the book at more than six billion dollars, and it is identified as Utah’s largest employer. It sends more than sixty thousand missionaries around the world at any given time, while its leaders urge members to prepare for hardship by storing a year’s supply of food and survival necessities. These features place a global institution of substantial economic reach alongside an enduring expectation of the Second Coming, though its leaders are presented as cautious about predicting when the Apocalypse will occur.

Race, Historical Memory, and Significance

The book also identifies racial exclusion as part of the church’s institutional legacy. Joseph Smith opposed slavery on moral grounds and ordained Elijah Abel, an African American, as a Mormon priesthood elder in 1836. Under Brigham Young, by contrast, racist interpretations of scripture became institutional policy: Utah became a slave territory, the church supported the Confederacy’s aims during the Civil War, and Black men were barred from the priesthood for much of the twentieth century. Black-white marriage was also condemned. In 1978, Spencer W. Kimball announced a revelation opening the priesthood to men of all races, beginning a gradual change in church attitudes. The election of Rob Foster, a Black student, as president of Brigham Young University in 2002 carried particular symbolic weight because African Americans made up only 0.7 percent of the student body.

The church’s relationship to its own past is another continuing test. In a 1981 address at Brigham Young University, historian D. Michael Quinn criticized church histories that concealed controversy or offered half-truths and omissions. He argued that hiding past difficulties could undermine faith when members later encountered those facts elsewhere, and connected the history of covert plural marriage after the 1890 Manifesto to the growth of fundamentalism. Quinn’s case illustrates a tension within institutional memory: the effort to protect belief by managing historical disclosure may instead weaken trust and drive some members toward rival claims of religious continuity.

Taken together, these episodes portray an institution that has repeatedly adapted under pressure without simply shedding its founding commitments. Migration and persecution helped make communal loyalty powerful; prophetic authority provided a source of unity and a basis for conflict; and changes in policy reshaped the church while leaving contested questions about revelation and legitimacy unresolved. Its movement toward mainstream respectability has expanded its reach, but the persistence of fundamentalist alternatives and disputes over the past show that the founding vision remains an active force in defining what the church is.