A Living Tradition of the Americas
In the spring of 1820, a fourteen-year-old farm boy in the burned-over district of western New York — the region so named because it had been swept by so many waves of religious revival that there was nothing left to burn — walked into a grove of trees behind his family's cabin and knelt to pray. He wanted to know which church to join. What happened next, according to the account he would publish years later, was not an answer to that question but the annihilation of it. Two personages appeared — God the Father and Jesus Christ — and told him that none of the existing churches were correct, that the fullness of the gospel had been lost, and that he was to be the instrument of its restoration.
The tradition that grew from Joseph Smith Jr.'s report of this "First Vision" became the most consequential new religion born on American soil. From a handful of believers in a Palmyra farmhouse in 1830, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has grown to approximately seventeen million members on every inhabited continent. It produced new scripture — the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price — alongside the Bible. It built a temple tradition whose complexity and ritual depth rival anything in historical Christianity. It sent its people across a continent in one of the great mass migrations of the nineteenth century. And it generated controversies — over polygamy, over race, over the historical claims of its founding documents, over the relationship between theocratic authority and individual conscience — that have never fully subsided. The story of Mormonism is the story of a religion that asks to be taken on its own terms, and of a world that has never quite been able to do so.
I. Joseph Smith and the First Vision
Joseph Smith Jr. (1805–1844) was born in Sharon, Vermont, the fifth of eleven children of Joseph Smith Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith — a farming family who moved frequently in search of better land and who carried with them the folk-magical and visionary traditions common to rural New England in the early republic. The family settled in the Palmyra area of western New York in 1816, a region convulsed by competitive revivals — Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, each claiming exclusive possession of the truth and each denouncing the others.
The First Vision — Smith's report of seeing God the Father and Jesus Christ in the grove — exists in multiple accounts, the earliest written in 1832, twelve years after the event. The accounts differ in details: the 1832 account mentions only one divine personage; the canonical 1838 account (published in the Pearl of Great Price) names two. These discrepancies have been scrutinized by both believers and critics for over a century. For Latter-day Saints, the First Vision is the founding event of the Restoration — the moment when the heavens reopened after a "Great Apostasy" that had begun with the death of the original apostles. For historians, it is one among many visionary experiences reported in the burned-over district, and its significance lies not in its uniqueness but in what Smith built from it.
In 1823, Smith reported that an angel named Moroni visited him and revealed the location of golden plates buried in a hill near Palmyra — the Hill Cumorah. The plates, Smith said, were written in "reformed Egyptian" and contained the history of ancient peoples who had migrated from the Near East to the Americas. Between 1827 and 1829, Smith translated the plates "by the gift and power of God," using instruments he called the Urim and Thummim (and, according to some witnesses, a seer stone placed in a hat). The result was the Book of Mormon, published in March 1830 by E. B. Grandin in Palmyra — 588 pages of narrative covering a thousand years of history, theology, warfare, and prophecy on the American continent.
The Church of Christ was formally organized on April 6, 1830, at Fayette, New York, with six founding members. It would undergo several name changes before settling on "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" in 1838.
II. The Book of Mormon
The Book of Mormon is the tradition's defining text and its most controversial claim.
The book narrates the history of two primary groups who migrated from the ancient Near East to the Americas. The Jaredites departed at the time of the Tower of Babel and established a civilization that eventually destroyed itself through internal warfare. The Lehites — a family led by a prophet named Lehi — departed Jerusalem around 600 BCE, shortly before the Babylonian conquest, sailed to the Americas, and divided into two nations: the Nephites (who kept the faith) and the Lamanites (who fell away). The central theological event of the book is the appearance of the resurrected Jesus Christ to the Nephite people in the Americas, shortly after his crucifixion in Jerusalem — a visit during which he delivers teachings parallel to the Sermon on the Mount, establishes his church, and ordains twelve disciples.
The book ends in catastrophe. The Nephites are destroyed by the Lamanites around 400 CE. The final prophet, Moroni — the same being who would appear to Smith as an angel — buries the record in the Hill Cumorah and seals it for a future dispensation.
The Book of Mormon is a complex and internally coherent text. Its narrative spans over a thousand years and includes multiple narrators, flashbacks, embedded documents, doctrinal sermons, and prophetic visions. It addresses theological questions — the nature of the atonement, the relationship between grace and works, the justice of God — with a depth that rewards serious reading regardless of one's position on its historicity.
The historicity question is unavoidable. The Book of Mormon's claims about pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas — including the use of steel, horses, wheat, and elephants by ancient peoples — find no support in the archaeological, linguistic, or genetic record. DNA studies of Indigenous American populations show ancestry from eastern Asia, not the ancient Near East. No artifact, inscription, or settlement attributable to the peoples described in the Book of Mormon has been identified by mainstream archaeology. The church's own essay on "Book of Mormon and DNA Studies" (published on churchofjesuschrist.org in 2014) acknowledges the complexity of the question while maintaining that the absence of evidence does not constitute evidence of absence.
For believing Latter-day Saints, the Book of Mormon is scripture — "another testament of Jesus Christ," as the subtitle added in 1982 declares. Its truth is established not by archaeology but by personal revelation: a promise in Moroni 10:4 invites readers to pray and ask God directly whether the book is true, with the assurance that the answer will come through the Holy Ghost. This epistemological method — "ask God and trust the feeling" — is the foundation of Latter-day Saint spiritual practice and the reason the historical controversies, however well-documented, have not emptied the pews.
III. The Gathering and the Persecutions
The history of early Mormonism is a story of gathering — the repeated attempt to build a holy city — and of the violent opposition that each attempt provoked.
Smith moved the church from New York to Kirtland, Ohio, in 1831, where the first temple was built and dedicated in 1836. Simultaneously, he directed followers to gather in Independence, Missouri, which he identified by revelation as the site of the New Jerusalem — the city of Zion, where Christ would return. The Missouri saints were driven from Jackson County in 1833 by local settlers who viewed them as a threat to the social order — they were Yankees, they were abolitionists (or were suspected of being so), and they claimed divine authority over the land.
What followed was a decade of escalating violence. In 1838, Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs issued Executive Order 44 — the "Extermination Order" — declaring that "the Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State." This is the only extermination order issued against a religious group by a U.S. state governor. Three days after the order, a militia attacked the settlement at Haun's Mill, killing seventeen men and boys. Smith was arrested, imprisoned through the winter, and escaped (or was allowed to escape) in the spring of 1839.
The saints regrouped in Nauvoo, Illinois — a swampy bend of the Mississippi River that Smith transformed into a city of twelve thousand, one of the largest in the state. Nauvoo was the laboratory of Smith's most ambitious innovations: the temple endowment ceremony (a ritual of instruction, covenant, and clothing with sacred garments), baptism for the dead (the practice of performing proxy baptisms on behalf of deceased ancestors), the Council of Fifty (a political body that Smith envisioned as the governing body of the Kingdom of God on earth), and the practice of plural marriage.
Plural marriage — polygamy — was the most divisive innovation. Smith began taking plural wives as early as 1841, and possibly earlier. The practice was kept secret from most members and was vehemently denied in public. When William Law, a member of the church's First Presidency, learned the full scope of the practice and objected, he was excommunicated. Law and other dissenters founded the Nauvoo Expositor, a newspaper that published a single issue on June 7, 1844, exposing polygamy. Smith, in his capacity as Nauvoo's mayor, ordered the press destroyed.
The destruction of the press triggered a legal crisis. Smith surrendered to authorities at Carthage, Illinois, and was held in the county jail with his brother Hyrum and two other men. On June 27, 1844, a mob of approximately 150 men — their faces blackened with mud and gunpowder — stormed the jail. Hyrum was killed instantly. Joseph returned fire with a smuggled pepperbox pistol, wounding three attackers, and then fell from a second-story window, dying on the ground below. He was thirty-eight years old.
IV. Brigham Young and the Trek West
The assassination created a succession crisis. Several leaders claimed authority — Sidney Rigdon (Smith's surviving counselor), James Strang (who produced a letter he said was from Smith), and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, led by Brigham Young (1801–1877). Young won the allegiance of the majority, and in 1846 he led the largest organized migration in American history.
The trek from Nauvoo to the Great Salt Lake Valley took eighteen months. Approximately seventy thousand Latter-day Saints made the journey between 1846 and 1869 — by wagon, by handcart, and on foot. Hundreds died on the trail. The most devastating episode was the Martin and Willie handcart companies of 1856, in which late-starting companies of poor European converts, pushing and pulling their belongings in handcarts, were caught by early winter storms in Wyoming. Between 150 and 210 people died of exposure and starvation.
Young established the Territory of Utah as a theocratic community in which the church governed every aspect of life — from land distribution to irrigation to education to the courts. He was simultaneously territorial governor and church president. He supervised the colonization of hundreds of settlements across the Intermountain West — from southern Alberta to northern Mexico — in a coordinated program of expansion that built the Mormon Corridor.
The darkest moment of Young's leadership was the Mountain Meadows Massacre of September 11, 1857, in which a group of Mormon militiamen and Paiute allies attacked a California-bound wagon train — the Fancher-Baker party — in southern Utah, killing approximately 120 men, women, and children. Only seventeen young children were spared. The massacre occurred in the context of the "Utah War" — a federal military expedition sent to enforce U.S. authority in the territory — and the siege mentality it generated. The sole person executed for the crime was John D. Lee, a local militia leader, who was shot at the massacre site in 1877. The degree of Brigham Young's knowledge and responsibility has been debated for over a century; the church acknowledged in a 2007 monument dedication that local church leaders "directed a series of attacks" on the wagon train.
V. The Temple and Its Ordinances
The Latter-day Saint temple is not a church building where Sunday worship takes place. It is a sacred space set apart for specific ritual ordinances — ceremonies that Latter-day Saints believe are essential for exaltation (the highest degree of salvation) and that connect the living to the dead across all generations.
The Endowment is the central temple ceremony — a ritual of instruction lasting several hours in which the participant receives sacred knowledge, makes covenants with God (including covenants of obedience, sacrifice, chastity, and consecration), and is clothed in sacred garments. The ceremony draws on symbolism from Masonry (Smith became a Mason in 1842, shortly before introducing the endowment), from the biblical tabernacle, and from Smith's own revelatory vision. The ritual has been revised multiple times — most recently in 2019, when changes were made to remove certain elements that women had found problematic.
Sealing is the ordinance by which marriages and families are made eternal — "sealed" not just for this life but for all eternity. The sealing ordinance is the theological center of Latter-day Saint family theology: it is why the family is not merely a social unit but a unit of salvation, and why the temple — the only place where sealings are performed — is the most sacred building in the tradition.
Baptism for the dead is the practice of performing proxy baptisms on behalf of deceased persons. Living members stand in for the dead, receive baptism by immersion on their behalf, and — according to Latter-day Saint theology — the dead are then free to accept or reject the ordinance in the spirit world. The practice is rooted in 1 Corinthians 15:29 ("what shall they do which are baptized for the dead?") and drives the church's extraordinary investment in genealogical research. FamilySearch, the church's genealogical database, is the largest in the world — containing over twelve billion records — and is freely available to the public.
The practice of baptism for the dead has generated controversy when performed on behalf of individuals whose living relatives object — most notably Holocaust victims. The church has repeatedly promised to stop the practice with respect to Holocaust victims, and has repeatedly been found to have continued it. The issue illustrates the tension between a universal theology (all the dead deserve the opportunity to receive ordinances) and the sensitivities of communities whose dead are being claimed by a religion they did not belong to.
VI. Polygamy and Its Aftermath
Plural marriage is the issue that most profoundly shaped the public perception of Mormonism and the trajectory of the church's relationship with American society.
Joseph Smith introduced the practice privately, drawing on biblical precedent (Abraham, Jacob, David) and, he said, on divine commandment (Doctrine and Covenants 132). He married at least thirty-three women during his lifetime — some already married to other men (a practice scholars call "polyandry"), some as young as fourteen. The practice was not publicly acknowledged by the church until 1852, when Brigham Young announced it in Utah, where it became a defining feature of the community.
In Utah, polygamy was practiced by a minority of Latter-day Saint men — estimates range from 20 to 30 percent at its peak — but it was disproportionately concentrated among church leadership. Young himself married fifty-five women. The practice served theological, demographic, and social functions: it was understood as restoring an Abrahamic order, it provided economic security for women in a frontier society with a gender imbalance, and it reinforced the patriarchal authority structure of the church.
The U.S. government waged a decades-long campaign against polygamy. The Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act (1862), the Poland Act (1874), the Edmunds Act (1882), and the Edmunds-Tucker Act (1887) progressively criminalized plural marriage, disenfranchised polygamists, dissolved the church as a legal entity, and seized its property. Over a thousand Latter-day Saint men were imprisoned. The church went underground — the president and other leaders lived in hiding for years.
In 1890, church president Wilford Woodruff issued the Manifesto — Official Declaration 1 — advising members to refrain from entering into new plural marriages. The Manifesto was understood by the federal government as a renunciation of polygamy and cleared the way for Utah statehood in 1896. In practice, new plural marriages continued to be authorized by individual church leaders until 1904, when a Second Manifesto explicitly prohibited them. Members who continued to practice polygamy were excommunicated.
Fundamentalist groups who rejected the Manifesto — including the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), led most notoriously by Warren Jeffs (convicted in 2011 of child sexual assault) — continue to practice polygamy. The mainstream church has no association with these groups and excommunicates members who enter into plural marriages.
VII. Race and the Priesthood
The most painful chapter in Latter-day Saint history for many contemporary members is the priesthood and temple restriction that barred Black men from holding the priesthood and Black men and women from receiving temple ordinances.
The restriction has no clear origin in Smith's lifetime. Smith ordained at least two Black men — Elijah Abel and Walker Lewis — and made no recorded statements establishing a racial restriction on the priesthood. The restriction appears to have been instituted by Brigham Young in 1852, accompanied by theological justifications drawn from the "curse of Cain" and "curse of Ham" narratives in Genesis — interpretations that were common in American pro-slavery theology but that Young extended further than most, teaching that Black people had been "less valiant" in the pre-mortal existence and were therefore born into a lineage that was denied the priesthood until all other lineages had received it.
These teachings were elaborated and reinforced by subsequent church leaders for over a century. They were not peripheral; they were stated in official church publications, taught in seminaries, and used to justify the exclusion of Black Latter-day Saints from the most sacred aspects of the tradition. The restriction was applied consistently across the global church — creating particular difficulties as Mormonism expanded into Brazil, where racial categories were fluid, and into Africa, where converts were denied the priesthood their conversion had led them to expect.
On June 8, 1978, church president Spencer W. Kimball announced Official Declaration 2 — a revelation extending the priesthood to "all worthy male members of the Church without regard for race or color." The announcement was received with tears of joy by many members and with relief by church leaders who had been aware for years that the restriction was morally and practically unsustainable.
The church has since published a Gospel Topics essay on "Race and the Priesthood" (2013) that disavows the racial theories that were used to justify the restriction, stating: "Today, the Church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, or that it reflects unrighteous actions in a premortal life." The essay does not explain why the restriction existed, attributing it only to the racial assumptions of the era. For many Latter-day Saints — and for many observers — the disavowal of the theories without an acknowledgment of institutional responsibility remains incomplete.
VIII. Contemporary Mormonism
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints today is a global institution of extraordinary organizational capacity.
Membership is approximately seventeen million, with congregations in over 170 countries. Growth has been driven primarily by a missionary program that deploys over sixty thousand full-time missionaries — mostly young adults aged eighteen to twenty-five — who serve for eighteen to twenty-four months, typically in a country or region far from home, at their own expense (or their family's). The missionary program is one of the most distinctive features of the tradition and one of the most effective proselytizing systems in the history of religion.
The church is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, where the Salt Lake Temple, the Church Office Building, and Temple Square form the administrative and spiritual center of the tradition. The church is governed by a hierarchical structure: the President of the Church (regarded as a prophet, seer, and revelator), two counselors in the First Presidency, a Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, and successive layers of leadership extending to the local ward (congregation). The current president, as of 2025, is Russell M. Nelson, a former cardiac surgeon who assumed the presidency in 2018 at the age of ninety-three.
Church finances are substantial and largely opaque. A 2019 whistleblower complaint by David Nielsen revealed the existence of Ensign Peak Advisors, an investment arm of the church with assets exceeding $100 billion — accumulated from tithing (the requirement that members contribute ten percent of their income). The church subsequently paid a $5 million fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2023 for using shell companies to obscure the size of its investment portfolio. The disparity between the wealth of the institutional church and the financial sacrifice required of its members — particularly in developing countries — has become a significant source of criticism.
The church's relationship with LGBTQ+ members has been particularly fraught. In November 2015, the church announced a policy characterizing same-sex marriage as "apostasy" and barring the children of same-sex couples from baptism. The policy was reversed in April 2019 — an extraordinarily rapid reversal for an institution that presents its policies as divinely directed. The reversal was welcomed but did not resolve the underlying tension between a theology that defines marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman and the lives of LGBTQ+ members who seek full participation in the community.
IX. The Community of Christ — The Other Branch
The succession crisis of 1844 did not produce a single outcome. While Brigham Young led the majority to Utah, a significant minority — eventually organized as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS), now the Community of Christ — followed Joseph Smith III, the founding prophet's eldest son, who assumed leadership in 1860.
The Community of Christ rejected polygamy from the beginning (arguing that it was a corruption introduced by Brigham Young, not a genuine revelation of Joseph Smith), adopted a more liberal theological trajectory over the following century and a half, and today is a denomination of approximately 250,000 members headquartered in Independence, Missouri — the site that Joseph Smith had identified as the future Zion.
The Community of Christ ordains women (since 1984), has an open communion, welcomes LGBTQ+ members to full participation (since 2013 in some jurisdictions), and has developed a theology that treats the Book of Mormon as an inspired text rather than a literal historical record. Its trajectory illustrates an alternative path for the Restoration tradition — one that has moved toward mainstream liberal Protestantism rather than toward the conservative institutional identity of the Utah church.
X. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Aquarian Phenomenon
Joseph Smith is an Aquarian figure — perhaps the most consequential one born in America.
The Aquarian pattern, as this archive documents it, involves a person who receives a direct, unmediated encounter with the divine and who builds from that encounter a tradition that challenges or replaces the existing religious order. Emerson heard the soul. Fox found the Light. Nakayama Miki received Tenri-O-no-Mikoto. Smith saw God and his Son in a grove of trees and was told that everything that existed was wrong.
What makes Smith distinctive — and what makes Mormonism the most ambitious expression of the Aquarian impulse on American soil — is that he did not merely crack the container. He built a new one. Most Aquarian figures reject institutional religion; Smith created one. Most insist that the divine can be found in all traditions; Smith insisted that all traditions had fallen away and that only the Restoration was complete. Most dissolve hierarchy; Smith constructed one of the most elaborate religious hierarchies since Catholicism — prophet, apostles, seventies, high priests, elders, teachers, deacons — and claimed for it the same authority as the apostles of the New Testament.
This is the paradox of Mormonism within the Aquarian frame: it is simultaneously the most radical American expression of the Aquarian impulse (a man receives direct revelation, produces new scripture, claims prophetic authority) and the most conservative (the revelation produces a hierarchical, creedal, authoritarian institution that claims exclusive possession of divine authority). Smith is both Fox and the Pope he replaced.
The tradition's most enduring contribution to the Aquarian conversation may be its theology of continuing revelation — the teaching that God has not stopped speaking, that the canon is not closed, that new scripture can emerge in any age. This is the principle that makes Mormonism genuinely new rather than merely a variant of Protestantism. And it is the principle that creates the tradition's deepest internal tension: if God continues to reveal, then every current teaching is provisional, subject to revision by the next revelation. The Manifesto on polygamy was such a revision. The 1978 revelation on race was another. The tradition's capacity to change — slowly, painfully, but actually — is built into its theological structure in a way that distinguishes it from traditions that claim their revelation is final.
Whether the capacity for change can keep pace with the moral demands of the present is the question that Mormonism is currently answering, in real time, one revelation at a time.
Colophon
This ethnographic profile was researched and composed for the Good Work Library's Living Traditions series in March 2026. Sources consulted include Richard Lyman Bushman's Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (Knopf, 2005), Leonard J. Arrington's Brigham Young: American Moses (Knopf, 1985), Terryl L. Givens and Matthew J. Grow's Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul of Mormonism (Oxford University Press, 2011), the church's own Gospel Topics Essays (churchofjesuschrist.org, 2013–2015), Kathleen Flake's The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), the Community of Christ's official publications (cofchrist.org), and the scholarly literature on the Latter-day Saint movement including the work of Jan Shipps, Claudia L. Bushman, Patrick Q. Mason, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.
Compiled and formatted for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
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