Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) | Description, History, & Beliefs (2024)

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), church that traces its origins to a religion founded by Joseph Smith in the United States in 1830. The term Mormon, often used to refer to members of this church, comes from the Book of Mormon, which was published by Smith in 1830; use of the term is discouraged by the church. Now an international movement, the church is characterized by a unique understanding of the Godhead, emphasis on family life, belief in continuing revelation, desire for order, respect for authority, and missionary work. Its members obey strict prohibitions on alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and tea and promote education and a vigorous work ethic.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, and had more than 16 million members by the early 21st century. A significant portion of the church’s members live in the United States and the rest in Latin America, Canada, Europe, Africa, the Philippines, and parts of Oceania.

Another Mormon denomination, the Community of Christ (until 2001 the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints), is headquartered in Independence, Missouri, and had a membership of approximately 250,000 in the early 21st century.

History

In western New York state in 1823, Joseph Smith had a vision in which an angel named Moroni told him about engraved golden plates buried in a nearby hill. According to Smith, he received subsequent instruction from Moroni and, four years later, excavated the plates and translated them into English. The resultant Book of Mormon—so called after an ancient American prophet who, according to Smith, had compiled the text recorded on the plates—recounts the history of a family of Israelites that migrated to America centuries before Jesus Christ and were taught by prophets similar to those in the Old Testament. The religion Smith founded originated amid the great fervour of competing Christian revivalist movements in early 19th-century America but departed from them in its proclamation of a new dispensation. Through Smith, God had restored the “true church”—i.e., the primitive Christian church—and had reasserted the true faith from which the various Christian churches had strayed.

The new church was millennialist, believing in the imminent Second Coming of Christ and his establishment of a 1,000-year reign of peace. This belief inspired Smith’s desire to establish Zion, the kingdom of God, which was to be built somewhere in the western United States. He received revelations not only of theological truth but also providing day-to-day practical guidance. The early members of the church devised new secular institutions, including collective ownership (later changed to a system of tithing) and polygamy, which was practiced by Smith himself and by most leading Mormons in the church’s early years.

Soon after the church’s founding, Smith and the bulk of the members moved to Kirtland, Ohio, where a prominent preacher, Sidney Rigdon, and his following had embraced the faith. In Jackson county, Missouri, where it was revealed that Zion was to be established, Smith instituted a communalistic United Order of Enoch. But strife with non-Mormons in the area led to killings and the burning of Mormon property. Tensions between church members and local slave-owning Missourians, who viewed the Mormons as religious fanatics and possible abolitionists, escalated to armed skirmishes that forced 15,000 of the faithful to leave Missouri for Illinois in 1839, where Smith built a new city, Nauvoo. There the commercial success and growing political power of the newcomers once again provoked renewed hostility from their non-Mormon neighbours. Smith’s suppression of some dissidents among the Nauvoo Mormons in 1844 intensified non-Mormon resentment and furnished grounds for his arrest. Smith and his brother Hyrum were murdered by a mob while both were in jail in Carthage, near Nauvoo, on June 27, 1844.

After Smith’s unexpected death, the government of the church was left in the hands of the Council of the Twelve Apostles, whose senior member was Brigham Young. Ignoring several claimants to the church leadership, the majority of its members supported Young, who became the church’s second president. Increasing mob violence, however, made their continued presence in Nauvoo untenable, and Young thus led a mass 1,100-mile (1,800-km) migration to Utah in 1846–47. There they hoped to establish a commonwealth where they could practice their religion without persecution. Envisioning a new state that he called Deseret, Young helped to establish more than 300 communities in Utah and neighbouring territories. To build the population, he sent missionaries across North America and into Europe. Converts were urged to migrate to the new land, and it is estimated that about 80,000 Mormon pioneers traveling by wagon, by handcart, or on foot had reached Salt Lake City by 1869, when the arrival of the railroads made the journey much easier.

Despite the obstacles presented by the desert area of the Great Basin, the pioneers made steady progress in farming, partly through their innovative methods of irrigation. Their petition for statehood in 1849 was denied by the U.S. government, which instead organized the area as a territory, with Young as its first governor. Future efforts to gain statehood were blocked by the announcement in 1852 of the church’s belief in polygamy, a practice that had begun quietly among its leaders during the Nauvoo period. Conflicts between Young and federal officials over this practice and over Mormon attempts to establish a theocratic government continued during the 1850s. Tensions increased following the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which a group of Mormons killed members of a wagon train passing through the region. In response to the conflicts with federal officials, U.S. Pres. James Buchanan dispatched a military expedition to Utah to suppress the Mormon “rebellion” and to impose a non-Mormon governor, Alfred Cummings, on the territory. Fearing that the purpose of the expedition was to persecute their faith, Young called on the Utah militia to prepare to defend the territory. A negotiated settlement was reached in 1858, and Cummings eventually became popular with members of the church. Although the abortive military episode, later known as “Buchanan’s blunder,” aroused widespread public sympathy for the Mormons, it succeeded in ending direct religious control of Utah’s territorial government.

After his death in 1877, Young was succeeded as church president by John Taylor, the senior member of the Council of the Twelve Apostles. During Taylor’s presidency, the U.S. government intensified its campaign against polygamy. In 1890 Taylor’s successor, Wilford Woodruff, announced the church’s abandonment of the practice in order to conform to U.S. law, and in 1896 the territory of Utah was admitted into the union as the 45th state. However, Woodruff’s pronouncement, the “Manifesto,” forbade polygamy only in the United States, and for a decade or so it continued in Mexico and other places outside the U.S. government’s jurisdiction.

In the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more than 150 different independent groups have formed to follow new prophets, to defend polygamy, or to continue other practices that were discarded by the mainstream church. An important minority, for example, rejected Young’s leadership and remained in the Midwest. The largest of these groups, which gained the cooperation of Smith’s widow Emma and his son Joseph Smith III, formed the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (now known as the Community of Christ) in 1852–60. The Reorganized Church eventually settled in Independence, Missouri, which Smith had designated as the location of Zion.

Many smaller splinter groups also arose after Smith’s death. One faction moved to Independence and purchased the so-called Temple Lot, the site chosen by Smith for the new temple. The possession of this valued property embittered relations with the Reorganized Church, whose headquarters were on land immediately to the south. Other factions that rejected Young’s leadership included one led by Sidney Rigdon and another that Apostle Lyman Wight took to Texas. David Whitmer and Martin Harris, two early converts who, along with Joseph Smith, testified that they saw the golden plates and the angel Moroni, eventually set up a church in Kirtland, Ohio. In 1847 James Jesse Strang established a polygamous community of about 3,000 people on Beaver Island in Lake Michigan, whose members became known as Strangites.

Among the most significant of Latter-day Saints factions to emerge in the 20th century were groups that practiced polygamy. The first such colony was established at Short Creek (now Colorado City), just south of the Utah border in northwestern Arizona, in 1902, shortly after the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints imposed excommunication as the penalty for entering into or officiating over a plural marriage; additional colonies were later founded in Mexico and Salt Lake City. Church and federal authorities have attempted to stamp out the polygamy-practicing groups, which nevertheless claim a membership of more than 30,000.