Mormonism: The Basics

John Charles Duffy, David J Howlett, David Howlett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315453958
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Although often regarded as marginal or obscure, Mormonism is a significant American religious minority, numerically and politically. The successes and struggles of this U.S. born religion reveal much about how religion operates in U.S. society. Mormonism: The Basics introduces the teachings, practices, evolution, and internal diversity of this movement, whose cultural icons range from Mitt Romney to the Twilight saga, from young male missionaries in white shirts and ties to polygamous women in pastel prairie dresses.

This is the first introductory text on Mormonism that tracks not only the mainstream LDS but also two other streams within the movement—the liberalized RLDS and the polygamous Fundamentalists—thus showing how Mormons have pursued different approaches to defining their identity and their place in society. The book addresses these questions.

• Are Mormons Christian, and why does it matter?
• How have Mormons worked out their relationship to the state?
• How have Mormons diverged in their thinking about gender and sexuality?
• How do rituals and regulations shape Mormon lives?
• What types of sacred spaces have Mormons created?
• What strategies have Mormons pursued to establish a global presence?

Mormonism: The Basics is an ideal introduction for anyone wanting to understand this religion within its primarily American but increasingly globalized contexts.

1
A Brief History of Mormons

Let’s begin your introduction to Mormonism with the basic story: a condensed account of nearly two centuries of Mormon history. Think of this chapter as your map of the general terrain. In later chapters, we’ll zoom in to reexamine some portions of the map – some aspects of the story – in greater detail. But this first chapter gives you a picture of how everything fits together.

Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Mormonism grew from a handful of families living in the United States to a family of denominations whose members could be found around the globe. Mormonism was transformed repeatedly as Mormons grappled with changing circumstances: new conflicts within the movement, new sources of opposition from outside, new trends in the larger American society, and new cultural contexts as the movement expanded internationally.

As we move in this chapter from one historical period to the next, we will keep revisiting the following questions:

• How have Mormons gone about forming their religious communities?
• In what ways have Mormons disagreed about what their movement should look like?
• What kind of opposition has Mormonism faced from outsiders?
• How has Mormonism expanded beyond its birthplace in the United States?
• How do major developments in the history of Mormonism relate to larger social trends?

1830–1860: Tumultuous Origins

Mormonism formally began in 1830. Two events mark that beginning. First, a 24-year-old farmer in upstate New York named Joseph Smith Jr. published a Bible-like volume called The Book of Mormon. From his teenage years, Smith had experienced visions. Now he claimed that the Book of Mormon was a lost work of ancient scripture, which he had miraculously translated from golden plates that an angel had shown him were buried near his home. The ancient record was supposed to have been written by Israelites who sailed across the ocean in Old Testament times to settle in the Americas; the book contained their prophecies of Jesus’s then-future life, death, and resurrection, as well as teachings that Jesus himself gave during a visit he made to the Americas after he rose from the dead.

Smith hadn’t worked alone at translating and publishing the Book of Mormon. He had been aided by family and friends who believed that God was inaugurating an important work among them. A few days after the book’s publication, a small group of believers gathered for the second event that marks the formal beginning of Mormonism: launching a tiny organization called the Church of Christ, later renamed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Joseph Smith Jr.’s First Vision

Smith experienced his first religious vision as a teenager, in the woods near his Palmyra, New York, home. For the earliest Mormons, this vision was less important than Smith’s later visions of the angel who led him to the golden plates from which he translated the Book of Mormon. But all Mormon groups today see “the First Vision” as a foundational part of their story. Of several accounts Smith left of that vision, this is the earliest:

… I cried unto the Lord for mercy for there was none else to whom I could go and obtain mercy and the Lord heard my cry in the wilderness and while in the attitude of calling upon the Lord a piller of light above the brightness of the sun at noon day come down from above and rested upon me and I was filled with the spirit of god and the Lord opened the heavens upon me and I saw the Lord and he spake unto me saying Joseph my son thy sins are forgiven thee. go thy way walk in my statutes and keep my commandments behold I am the Lord of glory I was crucifyed for the world that all those who believe on my name may have Eternal life behold the world lieth in sin at this time and none doeth good no not one they have turned asside from the gospel and keep not my commandments they draw near to me with their lips while their hearts are far from me and mine anger is kindling against the inhabitants of the earth to visit them according to thir ungodliness and to bring to pass that which hath been spoken by the mouth of the prophets and Apostles behold and lo I come quickly as it written of me in the cloud clothed in the glory of my Father and my soul was filled with love and for many days I could rejoice with great Joy and the Lord was with me but could find none that would believe the hevnly vision…

Source: “History, circa Summer 1832,” The Joseph Smith Papers, josephsmithpapers.org. Spelling, capitalization, and punctuation are reproduced as found in the original manuscript.

Outsiders gave adherents of this new religious movement the nickname Mormons, in reference to the Book of Mormon (which was named, in turn, for one of the ancient prophets whose writings the book was supposed to contain). Adherents called themselves Latter Day Saints – or Latter-day Saints, to use more modern punctuation and capitalization. In calling themselves “Saints,” they meant that God had saved them from sin and that they aspired to lead holy lives. The term “latter-day” referred to their belief that they were living in the last days before Jesus’s second coming, when evil would be destroyed and God’s purposes would be fulfilled.

“Latter-day” had another meaning, too. Mormons regarded their movement as a latter-day, or modern, restoration of the religion founded by Jesus. Jesus’s teachings, Mormons believed, had become corrupted over time; but now through new revelations, such as the Book of Mormon, God was restoring Christianity in its purity. Through Mormonism, human beings once again had access to divine powers that had not been fully available on earth for centuries, including the power to properly administer rites that enable people to enter heaven after they die. Mormons understood themselves as called by God to take a message of warning to everyone on earth: people needed to join Christ’s true church and form holy communities, where they would be sheltered from the destruction soon to be poured out on the wicked world.

Although Mormonism presented itself as unique, it attracted converts precisely because it reflected wider trends in people’s religious tastes. Mormonism appeared at a time when many Americans were looking for religion – and looking for something new in religion. Hence, for example, in the early 1800s hundreds of thousands of Americans joined the Methodists, a young Protestant movement whose members formed tight-knit fellowships supporting one another in the pursuit of holy lives. A variety of smaller, unconventional religious movements flourished in the United States during this period as well. Some predicted the imminent end of the world. Some sought to recover the pure, original Christianity of Jesus. Some created experiments in communal living. Some claimed special powers of healing or communication with spirits. Some produced new scriptures. Some embraced unusual sexual norms, ranging from celibacy to free love.

Mormonism offered its own variation on all of these trends in religious innovation. By 1860, tens of thousands of people had chosen a Mormon variation as their preferred religion. Most of these converts were white Americans, but ambitious Mormon missionaries were already working to carry the new religion around the globe: to Britain, Europe, Palestine, South Africa, India, Australia, the Pacific islands, and South America.

Mormon communities grew rapidly during the movement’s first three decades; but they did so under severe stress, caused by repeated migrations, internal struggles, and violent conflict with neighbors. When the first Mormons set out to create holy communities, they did so by “gathering” – relocating together to form their own settlements and cities. During the 1830s, Mormons established several communities in Ohio and Missouri. The most important of these, symbolically at least, was located at Independence, Missouri. Joseph Smith Jr. announced a revelation declaring Independence to be the “center place” where Mormons would build Zion, an ideal city from which Jesus would rule when he returned to earth. Part of what would make Zion an ideal city was that its inhabitants would live the “law of consecration,” a communitarian system in which they would pool and then redistribute their property to ensure that everyone had enough. In Zion, there would be no poor. Thousands of Mormons migrated to Missouri with plans to implement the law of consecration.

The Mormons’ first efforts to build communities in Ohio and Missouri collapsed into crisis. These crises had two causes. The first was internal conflict. Mormonism was constantly changing during the 1830s and early 1840s as Smith kept announcing new visions and revelations, leading to new scriptures, doctrines, rites, and institutions; the Book of Mormon had been just the beginning. (We’ll describe the evolution of early Mormonism more fully in chapter 2.) While some Mormons were thrilled by this continual outpouring of new revelations, others became alienated when the movement they had joined evolved into something different. Some Mormons became convinced that Smith had become a “fallen prophet”; some came to regard him as dictatorial; others lost faith in his leadership because of material setbacks that befell the communities. Some of Mormonism’s earliest devotees and leaders turned into bitter enemies of the movement. Internal dissension led to the collapse of the Mormons’ communities in Ohio after just a few years. Smith and those still loyal to him moved to Missouri to join the Mormon communities there.

The second source of crisis was opposition from outsiders. Some of this opposition came from Protestants who regarded Mormonism as unorthodox and therefore saw its growth as threatening the establishment of a properly Christian America. Protestants opposed various other groups for the same reason, including Catholics, Unitarians, Deists, and Adventists. As soon as Mormonism appeared, Protestant writers denounced it: Smith was a fraud and a tyrant, while his followers were fanatical, superstitious dupes. Additionally, Mormons were perceived as a political threat. As Mormons gathered into a region, the influx of so many newcomers led to friction with neighbors who feared that Mormons would gain political dominance. Such friction turned bloody in Missouri, which in the 1830s was a battleground state in the nation’s escalating conflict over slavery. Fearing that Mormons moving in from northern states would vote to restrict slavery, pro-slavery Missourians tried to drive Mormons out by mob violence. When Mormons held their ground, a small-scale civil war ensued. Finally the governor of Missouri authorized the state militia to “exterminate” the thousands of Mormons living in the state, at which point Mormons fled for their lives. The trauma of the Mormons’ expulsion from Missouri was intensified by the fact that they were being driven from Zion, their sacred center place.

Regrouping in Illinois in the 1840s, Mormons founded a new city, Nauvoo, which soon approached the size of Chicago, thanks partly to the immigration of 5,000 converts from Britain. In Nauvoo, Mormons did not attempt to implement the law of consecration, which in Ohio and Missouri had been plagued with difficulties. But the community that Mormons organized in Nauvoo was unusual for a different reason: Nauvoo was a theocracy, where religious and secular government were fused. This was a new development in Mormon community-building. In his capacity as God’s prophet and ruler of a city, Smith directed all areas of Nauvoo’s social life.

As in Ohio and Missouri, so also in Nauvoo, Mormon community collapsed in the face of internal struggle and external violence. Smith’s theocratic leadership led to yet another round of alienation and defection among his followers, especially when rumors circulated that Smith and an inner circle were secretly practicing polygamy on the authority of a new revelation. Meanwhile, outsiders feared what they saw as Mormons’ fanatical obedience to Smith, Mormons’ voting power, and their militia. As the conflict intensified, Smith ordered the destruction of a newspaper produced in Nauvoo by Mormons hostile to his leadership. This action allowed Smith’s opponents to bring legal charges against him. He was arrested, then shot to death by a mob.

Following Joseph Smith Jr.’s death in 1844, Mormons were divided not only over the question of who should now lead their movement but what their movement should look like. Some wanted to build on innovations introduced shortly before Smith’s death, such as polygamous marriages and secretive rites being performed in the Mormons’ newly completed temple at Nauvoo. Other members of the movement wanted to return to earlier, simpler versions of Mormonism. Mormons quickly splintered into competing groups.

About three-fourths of Mormons followed Brigham Young, one of the movement’s most prominent missionaries. Young’s followers migrated to what is today Utah. We will refer to this stream of Mormonism as the LDS, a standard abbreviation for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the name that Young’s followers retained. In Utah and surrounding western territories, the LDS greatly extended the impulse to build holy communities: they set out to build not just a holy city but an entire theocratic state, a literal kingdom of God on earth, governed by Young acting as church president and God’s prophet.

Almost immediately, however, the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848 turned Utah, which had been a remote part of Mexico, into U.S. territory. As the United States established control over its new territories, the LDS lost their brief independence and chafed under the rule of unwanted outsiders. In 1857, with the rest of the nation moving rapidly toward civil war, federal troops were ordered to Utah out of fear that the LDS might revolt. The LDS, fearing that the U.S. government sought to exterminate them as Missouri had threatened to do, prepared for a fight to the death. In the end, the army negotiated a peaceful stand-down. But before that happened, an LDS militia slaughtered a wagon train of civilian settlers passing through LDS-held territory. This atrocity, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, inflamed public sentiment against Mormonism.

Back east, Mormons who had not followed Young established new communities of their own in places including Iowa, Texas, and Pennsylvania. At first, the largest of these rival Mormon movements was led by James Strang, whose followers gathered to communities in Wisconsin and Michigan. But in a familiar pattern, the Strangite communities soon struggled with internal dissension and external opposition. By the mid-1850s, Strang was trying to rule as a polygamous king. Alienated followers shot him, and his movement collapsed.

Many Strangites then shifted their allegiance to yet another Mormon movement that was coming into being at this time. This new movement was the work of Mormons who had scattered through the Midwest following Joseph Smith Jr.’s death. After several years, these Mormons decided that God was inspiring them to form the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, known more simply as the Reorganization or RLDS Church. They asked Smith’s oldest son, Joseph Smith III, to head the organization as prophet-president; in 1860, he accepted. The second largest Mormon denomination after the LDS Church, the Reorganization set about charting a different kind of Mormonism than that practiced by the LDS farther west.

The first thirty years of Mormon history were highly eventful and tumultuous. Mormons built and abandoned multiple settlements, including Independence, the movement’s sacred center place. Mormons and non-Mormons clashed violently, and the Mormon movement split into different streams with diverging visions for what Mormonism should be. Although the LDS stream fled U.S. territory following Joseph Smith Jr.’s death, the westward expansion of the United States left them with nowhere else to run. By 1860, it was clear that both the LDS and the Reorganization needed to negotiate a peaceful coexistence with other Americans.

Mormonism and Black Africans

White racism has shaped the history of every American Christian group. But racist policies persisted unusually long in some streams of Mormonism partly due to teachings written into Mormonism’s unique scriptures. The Book of Mormon states that God caused “a skin of blackness” to come upon a people called Lamanites, supposed to be ancestors of today’s Native Americans, as a curse for their having rejected God’s commands. ¹ Joseph Smith Jr. similarly taught that “a blackness” had come upon another ancient people, the people of Canaan, perhaps intended as a reference to descendants of Cain. ² Yet another text produced by Smith, the Book of Abraham, states that Noah’s son Ham married a Canaanite woman and that their descendants “could not have the right of Priesthood.” ³

Among the LDS, these texts lent support to a policy, implemented under Brigham Young, that barred people of black African ancestry from being ordained to the priest-hood or participating in temple rites (which bestowed blessings connected to the priesthood). The ordination ban meant that black males could not serve in church leadership or bless and baptize their family members as other LDS males could do. The temple ban meant that black individuals could not receive rites, including eternal marriage, that LDS believed were necessary to attain the highest level of salvation. These policies in turn discouraged LDS members of other races from marrying black individuals. These restrictions did not apply, however, to people whom LDS understood as descended from Lamanites – including Native Americans and Pacific Islanders – perhaps because the Book of Mormon promised that if Lamanites returned to God’s ways, they would become “white” (later revised to say “pure”).

As a result of the new black priesthood ban, an African American named Elijah Abel, who had been ordained during Joseph Smith Jr.’s lifetime, was no longer allowed to officiate in most priesthood roles. Another African American, Jane Manning James, repeatedly petitioned LDS leaders to let her receive temple rites that she claimed Smith had promised her.

The Reorganization did not implement a black priesthood ban. (Since the Reorganization didn’t practice temple rites, there was never any question of a black temple ban.) At the end of the Civil War, as RLDS leaders contemplated launching missions among newly freed African Americans, Joseph Smith III produced a revelation in which God commanded the RLDS to “ordain Priests unto me, of every race.” ⁴ Lacking a black priesthood ban, the Reorganization was able to start building congregations in parts of the world, such as Haiti and Africa, where the LDS didn’t send missionaries since they wouldn’t have been able to ordain local leaders. In 2000, a Zambian named Bunda Chibwe was appointed to the RLDS Church’s Council of Twelve Apostles, the first black individual to fill so hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• Introduction
• A suggestion for teachers
• 1 A brief history of Mormons
• 2 Are Mormons Christian? Why does it matter? Mormonism and religious pluralism
• 3 Building God’s kingdom: Mormons and church–state relations
• 4 Mormons and sex: gender, sexuality, and family
• 5 The shape of a Mormon life: ritual and regulation
• 6 Making holy places: sacred space in Mormonism
• 7 Going global: Mormonism’s international expansion
• Glossary
• Index