The Missionary Era · 1830-1906 · N. America
Latter-day Saints (LDS)
An open theological question
Historians and Christians themselves are divided on whether this group's core beliefs fall inside the historic Christian creeds.
About This Movement
In 1830 a young man in western New York named Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon — which he said he had translated from golden plates shown to him by an angel — and on 6 April that year organized a church around it. Its members were driven out of Ohio, then Missouri, then Illinois, where a mob killed Smith in the Carthage jail in 1844. Under Brigham Young most of them crossed the plains from 1847 and settled the Salt Lake valley, laying out towns, irrigation systems and eventually a territory largely of their own making. The nineteenth-century church practised plural marriage openly from 1852, which brought decades of federal prosecution before its president formally renounced the practice in 1890 and Utah entered the Union six years later. Its members documented themselves relentlessly: the Relief Society's minute book, Eliza R. Snow's poems and trail diaries, and Emmeline B. Wells's newspaper make up one of the fullest records any nineteenth-century American religious community left behind.
Sources
- The founding texts: the Book of Mormon (1830), Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price (primary) — The founding texts, in the movement's own words — a factual description of its confession, not a value judgment on it.
- Joseph Smith's own record: the Joseph Smith Papers (church-published critical edition, 2008-); the First Vision accounts (1832/1835/1838 versions); History of the Church (primary) — The First Vision accounts vary across their 1832, 1835 and 1838 versions.
- The members' record, women's voices leading: the Nauvoo Relief Society Minute Book (1842); Eliza R. Snow's poems, discourses, and trail diaries; Emmeline B. Wells's Woman's Exponent (1872-); pioneer trail diaries (primary) — The movement's ordinary and women's self-record at depth. Relief Society minutes published in the church's own critical edition.
- E. D. Howe, Mormonism Unvailed (1834, with the Hurlbut affidavits); John C. Bennett's expose (1842); anti-polygamy literature and federal prosecution records (1870s-80s) (primary) — A hostile, ex-member source; its affidavits were collected under legally coercive circumstances.
- Richard Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (Knopf, 2005), with Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Illinois, 1985) (secondary) — A believing scholar's account, paired with a sympathetic outside view.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 8, ch. 22 'Christian America' and 'Christian Canada' (Noll) (reference)