the only true and living church

The only true and living church is an expression of exclusive religious authority: it identifies one community as the sole bearer of religious truth and places rival churches outside that claim. In the book, it first belongs to the restoration message associated with Joseph Smith, then echoes in the manifesto of Brian David Mitchell, showing how a claim of singular authority could be repeated by later religious movements claiming a divinely sanctioned lineage.

Restoration and Exclusive Authority

Converts to Joseph Smith’s new religion were taught that it was “the only true and living church upon the face of the earth.” The claim went beyond asserting that the church offered a valuable interpretation of Christianity. It presented the institution as the restoration of the authentic Church of Christ, with The Book of Mormon serving as an additional testament and a more complete account of sacred history.

This assertion rested on a narrative of religious rupture and repair. Joseph Smith described the development of Christian leadership after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ as the Great Apostasy, a departure that had led Catholic and Protestant traditions away from the truth. The new church’s authority followed from its promised correction of that history: if earlier churches had gone astray, the restored church alone could claim to have recovered the original faith.

A Boundary Between Communities

The book connects this exclusive claim to a stark moral division. The Book of Mormon declares, “There are two churches only; the one is the church of the Lamb of God, and the other is the church of the devil; wherefore, whoso belongeth not to the church of the Lamb of God belongeth to that great church, which is the mother of abominations.” In this framework, religious difference is not simply disagreement. Belonging identifies a person with righteousness, while standing outside the chosen community carries a spiritual condemnation.

That boundary shaped the Saints’ relationship with their neighbors in Jackson County. They considered themselves God’s chosen people and believed they had a divine right to establish Zion in northwestern Missouri. Their settlement, collective political activity, and preference for conducting business among fellow Saints intensified local suspicion. Joseph Smith’s teaching of free agency allowed people to choose whether to join the Saints, but the book describes that choice as morally absolute: those who knowingly rejected the faith were not owed sympathy or mercy. The expression’s force therefore lay not only in what it affirmed about the church, but also in how it classified those who remained outside it.

Repetition and Successor Claims

The language appears again in a later, independent claim to religious authority. After Elizabeth Smart was rescued and Brian David Mitchell was arrested, FBI agents found a booklet he had written before the abduction. The Book of Immanuel David Isaiah presented Mitchell as a divinely appointed leader and described his new church as the “true and living Church of Jesus Christ in its purified and exalted state.” The booklet traced a chain of priesthood authority from biblical figures through Joseph Smith to Mitchell, placing his claim within a lineage of revelation and succession.

The recurrence does not mean that the two claims were institutionally identical. Rather, the book shows how the language of exclusive truth could be taken up by a new claimant: a restored church’s assertion of singular authority becomes a model for declaring another community purified and uniquely legitimate. The phrase thus marks a recurring contest over who may speak for God and who possesses the authority to define the true church.