Mormon Reformation

The Mormon Reformation was a burst of religious fervor in 1856 and 1857, led by Brigham Young’s counselor Jedediah M. Grant. It intensified the pressure to accept plural marriage while giving renewed force to teachings about blood atonement. The period matters not only for its particular sermons and campaigns, but for the way the book connects religious discipline to political authority: the community’s claim to obey God could set it against both dissent within the church and law imposed from outside.

Setting and religious aims

The Reformation’s campaign for plural marriage built on a doctrine already being urged as a lofty ideal. By the mid-1850s, the practice was open, though it was followed by a minority; the book describes broad expectations that righteous men and women should aspire to it. Brigham Young made the stakes explicit, warning that those who continued to deny plural marriage would be damned. Religious teaching thus became a direct test of allegiance, not simply a private marital choice.

That campaign unfolded against the memory of migration and expulsion. The Mormon Exodus and earlier violence in Missouri and Illinois had, in the book’s account, bound the first arrivals in Utah closely to one another and to Brigham Young. This loyalty was strengthened by a shared sense of having survived persecution. The earlier concealment of plural marriage also mattered: its practice had been disclosed to ordinary emigrants at Sugar Creek, Iowa, in 1846, even while church leaders continued to deny it to the wider public. When the church announced the doctrine publicly in 1852, the disclosure shocked many converts in Europe and contributed to a sharp decline in new arrivals from there. By the Reformation, the issue had become a forceful marker of religious commitment at home and a source of condemnation beyond Utah.

Marriage and blood atonement

Grant, whom the Saints called Jeddy, was the Reformation’s leading advocate. He preached both the duty to marry profusely and the idea that some sins could not be atoned for through Christ’s sacrifice alone. In such cases, he argued, the sinner’s own blood had to be shed. The book presents this as part of the doctrine of Blood Atonement, rooted in Joseph Smith’s teaching that certain grave sins placed their perpetrators beyond the reach of Christ’s atoning blood.

These teachings gave the period a disturbing double emphasis: spiritual standing was linked both to acceptance of plural marriage and to an uncompromising response to sin. Grant argued that killing a sinner could save him when his crimes demanded blood atonement, and in September 1856 he preached that some sinners among the Saints needed to have their blood shed. The account identifies no particular killing as the outcome of these sermons; their significance here lies in the moral permission the rhetoric appeared to offer and in the place it occupied within a larger culture of religious discipline and violence.

The marriage campaign produced an observable change in behavior. Wilford Woodruff noted in 1856 that men were seeking wives so urgently that he believed scarcely any girl of fourteen in Utah was unmarried or not about to marry. His observation conveys the pace of the campaign and the pressure surrounding it, without suggesting that every Saint practiced plural marriage. The book stresses that participation remained a minority practice even as the ideal was being promoted with exceptional force.

Authority, law, and collective loyalty

The Reformation’s demands belonged to a broader contest over which authority should govern the Saints. In Deseret, Brigham Young held that God’s law took precedence over the laws of men. The Mormon-dominated territorial legislature expanded local probate courts, which Brigham controlled, in a way that displaced federal jurisdiction. Mormon bishops commonly served as judges, and church members made up most juries; the resulting system gave church leadership substantial influence over how law was administered. The Reformation’s religious directives therefore arose in a community where ecclesiastical allegiance and local legal power were closely intertwined, though they were not the same thing.

The book also places the Reformation against an earlier legacy of anger and vengeance. After the acquittal of those charged in the killings of Joseph Smith and Hyrum Smith, Brigham Young called for the blood of the church’s murdered leaders to be avenged. Church authorities instituted the Oath of Vengeance as part of the temple endowment ceremony. It required participants to pray for vengeance and to teach that obligation to their descendants; it remained in the ritual until 1927. The oath preceded the Reformation by years, but it illustrates how memories of persecution could be carried forward as sacred obligations within the community.

Later echoes and historical significance

The Reformation belongs to a longer history in which collective commitments were renewed through religious gatherings and solemn pledges. Decades later, John Taylor convened trusted members after affirming plural marriage, placed those present under covenant to defend it, and authorized five men to perform such marriages and ordain others. This later meeting was not part of the 1856–57 Reformation, but it shows that plural marriage remained a contested principle around which leaders could organize enduring commitments.

The book’s account does not reduce the Reformation to a single doctrine or a single leader. Its force came from the convergence of pressure to accept plural marriage, sermons on blood atonement, loyalty formed through exile, and institutional efforts to make divine authority prevail in local life. The episode is presented as a revealing moment in that convergence: a religious community seeking to restore what it regarded as sacred order, while intensifying the demands that order placed on its members and its relationship with the wider republic.