The Great Apostasy

The Great Apostasy is Joseph Smith’s account of how Christianity lost its way and why a restored church was necessary. By presenting post-apostolic Christian doctrine as a profound departure from truth, the claim positioned The Book of Mormon and the church Smith founded not as one Christian option among many, but as the recovery of the original faith. Its importance in the book lies both in this claim of restoration and in the hard boundary it draws between those inside the restored church and those outside it.

The Claim of a Lost Church

Smith taught that Christian leaders in the first century after the crucifixion of Jesus had taken a wrong theological turn and led the church astray. He called this departure the Great Apostasy. In his account, the error did not end with one historical change: virtually all Christian doctrine developed afterward, Catholic and Protestant alike, was false. The premise therefore discredited the inherited authority of the broader Christian tradition and made restoration, rather than reform, the answer.

The Book of Mormon was presented as the means of setting the record straight and restoring the true Church of Christ. Converts were taught to regard it as a newer testament that completed and corrected the Old Testament and New Testament. The Great Apostasy thus connected a story about early Christian history to a present claim of religious authority: if the original church had been lost, a new revelation and a restored church were required.

A Boundary Between Two Churches

The doctrine’s moral force came from the stark division it offered. The Book of Mormon framed existence as a contest between the church of the Lamb of God and the church of the devil, leaving no neutral religious position in between. Belonging to the restored church meant belonging to the righteous side of that division; failing to belong placed a person on the opposing side. The simplicity of this scheme made religious identity legible as a choice with ultimate consequences.

That boundary shaped the Saints’ view of their place in the world. They understood themselves as God’s chosen people, while those who remained outside the faith could be treated not merely as mistaken but as opposed to God’s plan. Smith’s teaching of free agency preserved the idea that each person chose a side, but it also attached a severe judgment to choosing wrongly: those who knowingly rejected the Saints’ God were considered undeserving of sympathy or mercy.

From Doctrine to Conflict

When the Saints gathered in Jackson County, Missouri, their claim to be God’s chosen people was bound up with a claim to a divinely appointed homeland. They regarded northwestern Missouri as Zion, while local residents saw a growing, close-knit population with a sense of entitlement to the region. Differences over slavery and the Saints’ political and economic practices intensified the conflict, but the dispute also carried a religious division: the newcomers believed they had been directed to a sacred inheritance among people they regarded as enemies.

The resulting outlook was not simply that the Saints possessed the truth. It divided the world into allies and opponents, and gave rejection of their religious claims a moral significance beyond ordinary disagreement. In the book’s account, that certainty helped turn a restoration doctrine into a social boundary with practical consequences for how the Saints understood outsiders and their own right to gather.

The Doctrine’s Continuing Pattern

The book later presents a related division in Dan Lafferty’s religious worldview. Even after finding contradictions in fundamentalism, Dan continued to describe humanity as divided between the children of God and the children of the devil, with love belonging to one group and greed, hatred, envy, and jealousy to the other. This is not presented as the same doctrine as Joseph Smith’s Great Apostasy, but it echoes the earlier framework’s insistence on an absolute division between the righteous and the wicked.

That recurrence makes the Great Apostasy more than a claim about early Christian history. It is part of a way of organizing religious identity: the restored community possesses truth, while those outside it risk being assigned to a morally opposed camp. The book traces how such divisions can sustain belonging and certainty, even as they deepen the distance between a religious group and the people around it.