Mormon Restorationism

Mormon Restorationism is the belief that Christianity’s original church was lost and must be restored through new scripture and divine revelation. In the account presented here, restoration is both a promise of recovered truth and a recurring contest over authority: Joseph Smith’s claim to restore the one true church helped define a chosen community, while the continuing possibility of revelation could also give rise to rival prophets and new religious movements.

Restoring the Original Church

Joseph Smith taught that the Christian church had gone astray after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, a departure described as the Great Apostasy. In this account, the problem was not confined to one denomination: Catholic and Protestant doctrine alike were treated as evidence that the original church had been lost. The Book of Mormon offered a corrective, presented as a newer testament that completed and clarified sacred history and helped restore the true Church of Christ.

The claim to restoration carried a sharp boundary between belonging and exclusion. The Book of Mormon framed humanity as divided between the church of the Lamb of God and the church of the devil. In that scheme, religious affiliation was not merely a difference in doctrine; it located people on opposing moral sides. The book’s American setting reinforced the distinctive character of the claim: Jesus Christ appeared to people in the New World after his resurrection, and the restored church’s history and future were closely tied to the American continent.

Scripture, Revelation, and Prophetic Authority

Restoration also meant that scripture was not closed. The book describes a faith founded on the possibility of direct communication from God, with Joseph Smith teaching followers to seek personal impressions that could guide their lives. Revelations continued to disclose principles and commandments, sometimes revising or replacing earlier direction. They were collected in The Doctrine and Covenants, a text that the account describes as becoming, in some respects, more consequential than The Book of Mormon.

This openness created an authority problem. If individual believers could receive revelations, a revelation at odds with Joseph Smith’s could compete with his authority. In 1830, the same year the church was incorporated, he announced that no one else was appointed to receive commandments and revelations for the church. Yet the appeal of direct communion with God persisted: some followers continued to trust personal revelation, including when it concerned doctrine. The conflict was structural. Restoration promised access to divine truth, but institutional unity depended on deciding whose revelation counted.

A Chosen People and Its Boundaries

The restored church’s message was also a collective mission. Joseph Smith taught that the Saints were God’s elect, descendants of Israel, charged with a crucial role in the Last Days and the preparation of the earth for the Second Coming. This identity could bind believers together, but it also set them apart from people who did not accept their claims. In Jackson County, Missouri, the Saints’ conviction that the land was divinely appointed as Zion met local suspicion and resistance. Their growing numbers, land purchases, commerce within the community, and bloc voting intensified fears among existing residents; their sense of divine entitlement sharpened the divide.

The same stark division could turn dissent into a moral category. Joseph Smith’s teaching of free agency presented people as choosing between the Lord and wickedness, but the account emphasizes that those who chose against the Saints were not thereby owed sympathy. In later fundamentalist settings, apostates could be portrayed as more wicked than outsiders. Colorado City residents, for example, were prohibited from watching television or reading newspapers and from contacting people outside the United Effort Plan, including relatives who had left the religion. DeLoy Bateman’s account of satellite dishes secretly installed, dumped after sermons against television, and gradually installed again shows how prohibition and everyday temptation repeatedly collided.

Authority in Community and Family Life

The restorationist ideal could take institutional form as well as scriptural form. Nauvoo, established under Joseph Smith’s leadership, is described as a theocratic principality with unusual sovereign powers. Its charter gave the city distinctive rights, while Smith headed its government and commanded the Nauvoo Legion. The example shows how a claim to restored divine authority could shape civic and military power, not only worship.

The book also distinguishes the broader patriarchal order it describes in Mormonism from the more extreme controls practiced in fundamentalist communities. Men alone held priesthood and ecclesiastical authority, including the office of prophet, and prophets were treated as the authorized recipients of revelations governing the faithful. In Colorado City, that control reached into family relationships: after Bateman stopped attending priesthood meetings, Rulon Jeffs ordered that his wives and children be transferred to another man. Both wives refused to leave, and they and most of the children joined Bateman in leaving the community. The episode makes the stakes of religious dissent concrete: a dispute over prophetic authority could become a struggle over family membership and control.

Schism and the Continuing Claim to Restoration

Restricting revelation did not end the possibility of new claims to prophetic authority. The account links the persistence of individual revelation to the emergence of roughly two hundred Mormon splinter groups since 1830, including the United Effort Plan communities and the followers of Robert Crossfield, known as the Prophet Onias. Dan Lafferty became associated with the latter. The pattern suggests that schism was not simply a departure from restorationism; it could arise from the conviction that the existing church had itself departed from divine truth.

Dan’s arguments illustrate how restorationist ideas could be joined to resistance against the state. Drawing on scripture, he argued that government had no right to require licenses, taxes, or Social Security numbers, treating such demands as illegitimate control over individual life. In another setting, the idea of an original and corrupted church likewise animated his rejection of the modern institution. The book’s account of his later beliefs retains a sharp division between people understood as children of God and those understood as children of the devil. At trial, Dr. Gardner distinguished the shared religious context of Ron Lafferty’s revelations from psychosis while also describing symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder. That distinction does not make shared belief an explanation for violence; it underscores the book’s concern with how religious claims, personal psychology, and communal validation must be considered without collapsing them into one cause.

Mormon Restorationism thus appears not as a single doctrine with a settled institutional outcome, but as a recurring effort to recover divine authority in the present. Its promises of restored scripture, a chosen people, and continuing revelation could sustain a powerful religious identity. The same claims could also produce conflicts over who speaks for God, where the boundary of the community lies, and whether an individual or institution may refuse a prophet’s command.