Persecution of the Latter-day Saints

Persecution of the Latter-day Saints becomes more than a record of attacks and forced migrations: in the book, it is a test of faith, a source of collective identity, and a memory with consequences for how religious communities define loyalty and dissent. The account follows violence against Mormons in Missouri, the displacement that followed, and the way the experience of being targeted could help an embattled church endure. It also sets that history beside later systems of religious control, where the language of chosen people and exclusion can be turned against those who leave.

Persecution and communal identity

The narrative describes bearing persecution as a distinctive badge of church membership, a test of faith, and evidence of being among the chosen. That interpretation gave suffering a collective meaning: opposition could reinforce members’ confidence in their cause and strengthen the bonds of a community that understood itself as besieged. The account presents this process as consequential to the church’s survival, not simply as a story of harm inflicted from outside. Persecution could help an infant religious movement prosper by giving struggle a shared significance and making endurance part of belonging.

That account of communal resilience does not erase the violence or make it inevitable. It shows instead how memory can work in two directions: it preserves the fact of injury, while also shaping a people’s understanding of who they are. The Saints’ claim to be God’s chosen people intensified that understanding, but their sense of divine entitlement also heightened the hostility of their neighbors. The book therefore presents conflict as an interaction between persecution and the beliefs through which each side interpreted the other, rather than as a simple contest between an innocent community and a wholly separate world.

Missouri: conflict and expulsion

The Saints’ arrival in Jackson County, near Independence, brought religious claims into collision with local fears. Many Mormon immigrants came from the Northeast and favored abolition; many Missourians had Southern roots, and some enslaved people. Local residents also objected to the Saints’ close-knit social and economic life, their coordinated voting, their growing numbers, and their conviction that the area was divinely appointed as Zion. To those already living there, the Saints’ gathering and political influence appeared to threaten local control. The Mormons’ own language of chosenness and inheritance sharpened the divide.

Violence escalated in 1833. In July, an armed mob of about five hundred Missourians tarred and feathered two Latter-day Saints and destroyed a printing office after an LDS newspaper published material considered too sympathetic to abolition. Three days later, the mob forced nine Mormon leaders, under threat of death, to promise to leave Jackson County within a year. That autumn, attackers razed ten homes, killed one Saint, and stoned others. In November, vigilantes struck settlements across the region. After beating the men, they drove about twelve hundred Saints from their homes into the night; most fled north across the Missouri River and did not return to Jackson County.

The displacement did not end the conflict. Missouri had designated Caldwell County for Mormon settlement, and many Saints moved there from less welcoming neighboring counties. By 1838, they had bought roughly 250,000 acres in the county and established Far West. As the number of Saints in Missouri rose to about ten thousand, tension again reached a crisis. After the Saints surrendered on November 1, Joseph Smith, Hyrum Smith, and other leaders were taken into custody, hastily court-martialed, and found guilty of treason. General Alexander Doniphan refused an order to execute them, arguing that the military had no legal authority to summarily kill American civilians. His refusal spared Joseph Smith, but did not protect the wider community from the consequences of surrender.

Aftermath and the power of memory

Once disarmed, the Saints were vulnerable to further abuses. Their possessions were plundered, cabins were torn down and burned, livestock were shot, and Mormon men were beaten; reports also described sexual violence against women and girls. The community was ordered to leave Missouri by the spring of 1839. During the winter, Joseph Smith and other leaders remained imprisoned while the Saints faced famine, cold, and the prospect of expulsion. In his letters from jail, Joseph denounced the Haun’s Mill Massacre, the governor’s extermination order, and the state’s proceedings against the church.

Reports of the Haun’s Mill Massacre and sympathetic coverage shifted public opinion during that winter. Calls for an investigation grew, and the continued imprisonment of the Mormon leaders became an embarrassment to state and local officials. In April 1839, Joseph Smith and his nine cellmates escaped and crossed into Illinois, where many Saints had already gone. A month later, Joseph selected the site of Nauvoo beside the Mississippi River as the location for a new city. Nauvoo grew rapidly, and its unusual charter gave the community extensive powers. The sequence links forced expulsion to the creation of a new center of religious life, while also showing how the desire for security and self-government could concentrate authority in the hands of a religious leader.

Belonging, dissent, and the reversal of roles

The historical experience of persecution appears alongside later examples of communities policing their own boundaries. In Colorado City, followers of Rulon Jeffs were forbidden to watch television or read newspapers and magazines, and residents were not to have contact with outsiders or people who had left the United Effort Plan community. DeLoy Bateman, himself an apostate, described how forbidden television sets were sometimes secretly installed and then discarded after sermons warned their owners that they were endangering their souls. The pattern reveals both the reach and the limits of the prohibition: public denunciation could produce a temporary retreat into compliance, but concealed viewing gradually returned.

For DeLoy, exclusion became an immediate family crisis. After he stopped attending the weekly priesthood meeting, Rulon Jeffs sent someone to take his wives and children and decree that they should be given to another man. Both wives refused to leave, and they and most of the children became apostates with him. The episode places the language of religious belonging beside a system in which family ties could be overridden by priesthood authority. The contrast is not that these later circumstances duplicate the earlier violence in Missouri; rather, the book shows how a community formed around memories of being persecuted may still direct coercive exclusion inward, toward dissenters and those who depart.

That reversal gives persecution an enduring but unsettled significance. The memory of attacks on the Saints could sustain solidarity and preserve the history of real displacement and violence. At the same time, the division between the chosen and their enemies could be reproduced as a boundary against outsiders, or recast as condemnation of apostates. In the book’s broader account, persecution is therefore both a historical injury and a powerful framework for religious identity—one that can explain endurance, justify separation, and shape who is heard as faithful or condemned as a traitor.