U.S. Second Great Awakening

The U.S. Second Great Awakening is the historical frame the book assigns to its account of Mormonism’s emergence and religious culture. Rather than offering a general survey of revival activity, the narrative approaches the period through Joseph Smith’s claims to revelation, the community those claims gathered, and the inherited practices through which members renewed their sense of belonging. It also traces how sharp religious boundaries could organize conflict, and how such patterns remained consequential long after the movement’s beginnings.

Religious Authority and a New Sacred History

The book presents Joseph Smith’s movement as a claim to restore Christian truth. The Book of Mormon supplied a sacred history centered on the American continent, including the appearance of Jesus Christ to its people after the Resurrection. Its moral universe was sharply divided between the church of God and the church of the devil, a scheme that made religious belonging a decisive distinction rather than one affiliation among many.

The promise of personal revelation gave this religious authority an intimate dimension. Followers were encouraged to seek communication from God themselves, while Joseph’s own revelations directed the community’s movements. In 1830, amid hostility in New York, a revelation commanded the Saints to move to Ohio. The following year, another designated northwestern Missouri as their gathering place, identified Jackson County as sacred ground, and linked it to the expected return of Christ. The narrative thus connects religious belief not only to doctrine but also to where people were to live and what kind of community they were to build.

Chosen Community and Its Boundaries

The migration into Jackson County brought the Saints’ claims into collision with established residents. Mormon newcomers were generally from the Northeast and favored abolition; many Missourians had Southern roots and owned enslaved people. The book also emphasizes the social and political sources of local suspicion: the Saints described themselves as God’s chosen people, bought extensive tracts of land with church funds, conducted commerce preferentially within their own community, and voted as a bloc in accordance with Joseph Smith’s direction. As their numbers grew, neighbors feared that they would gain control of county government.

The religious boundary between believers and outsiders could become a judgment about who merited sympathy. Joseph Smith’s teaching of free agency treated the choice to accept or reject the Saints’ understanding of God as personal, but the narrative stresses the harsh consequence attached to choosing against it. In this setting, revelation about gathering in a land understood as both inheritance and enemy territory sounded to local residents like a threat. The book’s account makes the point concrete: a community’s sacred geography and identity could be experienced by its neighbors as a claim to possession and power.

Ritual, Commitment, and Continuity

The narrative follows religious commitment beyond the movement’s first gathering places. In Nauvoo, Joseph Smith introduced proxy baptism for the dead and the temple endowment, and taught that human beings could become gods. He also formally codified plural marriage in 1843, though the revelation remained secret and was not acknowledged until 1852. These developments show the movement’s capacity to establish practices that reached into salvation, family life, and the future of the community.

After Joseph Smith’s murder and the acquittal of the defendants, Brigham Young directed church authorities to incorporate an Oath of Vengeance into the temple endowment. Participants pledged to pray for vengeance for the murdered prophets and to teach that obligation to succeeding generations. The oath remained part of the standard temple ritual until 1927, when its exposure in the non-Mormon press prompted public criticism. Its long use illustrates how ritual could carry a historical grievance forward, turning collective memory into a repeated obligation.

Other scenes show commitment being renewed through gatherings and shared judgment. In the School of the Prophets, a revelation was ordinarily presented to other members for evaluation; when Ron Lafferty brought his removal revelation to Bernard Brady, Brady rejected it, and neither man disclosed it to the wider meeting. In a different setting, trusted followers gathered around John Taylor after his revelation, pledged their lives, liberty, and property to the continuation of plural marriage, and received authority to perform and authorize such marriages. These contrasting episodes show communal discernment as a real practice, but not a guarantee of agreement: a group could refuse a claimed revelation, while another gathering could bind its members to preserve a contested principle.

Historical Memory and Later Echoes

The book links the hardships of migration to unusually strong loyalty among the Saints who reached Utah. Violence in Missouri and Illinois, followed by the difficult emigration from Nauvoo, had left a community whose surviving members were described as more devoted and closely bound to their leader. That account places collective identity in both belief and shared ordeal: hardship strengthened the ties through which authority could be exercised.

The narrative also returns to the sacred geography of the movement in its account of the Hill Cumorah Pageant. At the site associated with Joseph Smith’s recovery of the gold plates, more than ten thousand Saints gather for a free summer production that has been staged since 1937. Although nonmembers are welcome, the book reports that more than 95 percent of the audience already belong to the church; the pageant functions largely as a gathering in which members celebrate shared testimony. Its modern spectacle gives public form to the founding story, joining place, memory, and communal identity.

The book’s later treatment of Ron and Dan Lafferty shows the persistence of a stark division between the righteous and the wicked, but it does not make that later violence a simple consequence of the Second Great Awakening. Ron’s revelation was considered within a small religious circle, and Dr. Gardner distinguished that shared practice from psychosis while also describing Ron as exhibiting symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder. Dan, later, continued to understand humanity through an absolute division between God’s children and the devil’s children. Read alongside the earlier history, these episodes show how inherited religious categories could endure and be reinterpreted; they do not erase the differences between communal ritual, contested revelation, and criminal action.