Mormonism

Mormonism was perhaps the most successful new American religious movement of the 19th century, a small and persecuted sect that became a massive global church. Its early westward migrations were a singular religious expression of the larger contemporary story of American geographic expansion.

Mormonism emerged in New York’s burned-over district, when Joseph Smith Jr. (1805–1844) of Palmyra, confused by revivalism and denominational competition in the area, experienced a series of religious visions. In them, the angels Mormon and Moroni revealed to him the existence of golden plates buried in nearby Manchester and containing a scriptural account of ancient America. According to the account—which Smith translated and published as the Book of Mormon (1830)—ancient Hebrews had migrated to America, been visited by Jesus, and fallen into infighting in which the Lamanites, ancestors of the Indians, exterminated the Nephites, leaving only Mormon and Moroni to record the events. Smith’s uniquely “American” vision gave the nation a biblical past and promised to restore early Christianity there.

Smith and five followers formed a “Church of Jesus Christ” in Fayette, New York, in 1830, soon adding “of Latter-Day Saints” in anticipation of Christ’s imminent Second Coming. It quickly expanded to several hundred, who regarded Smith as a prophet. Harassed in New York, Smith called for a “gathering” into a new Zion—making religious migration a central aspect of early Mormon experience—and in 1831 began Mormonism’s series of westward treks. The group moved to Kirtland, Ohio, where they instituted a communal economy, dedicated a temple in 1836, arranged male church members into “Aaronic” and “Melchezedik” priesthoods based on ancient Hebrew models, attracted converts from among Campbellites and other restorationists, and began organizing missionary excursions to northwestern Europe.

Another group gathered in western Missouri after Smith announced that the biblical Eden lay there, and the Ohio group joined them after Kirtland’s economy collapsed during the Panic of 1837. In Missouri, the Mormons, their numbers augmented by the immigration of European converts, dominated Caldwell, Daviess, Carroll, and Ray counties politically and economically. Religious differences and Mormon political power provoked area non-Mormons, resulting in a “Mormon War” in 1838 that drove perhaps 15,000 Mormons to Commerce, Illinois, in 1839. There they established the theocratic community of Nauvoo and built a new temple. At Nauvoo, Smith elaborated a systematic theology—including ongoing revelation, a corporeal and once-human god, and the development of human beings into gods—and developed such temple rituals as vicarious baptism of the dead. He also introduced “plural marriage,” or polygamy. Religious, political, and economic tensions again arose between Mormons and their neighbors, culminating in Smith’s murder in 1844. By this time Nauvoo’s population had grown to about 40,000.

Smith’s death splintered the movement. His widow, Emma, and others rejected polygamy and the temple rituals, formed independent congregations across the Midwest, held an organizing conference in Wisconsin in 1853, and in 1860 formed the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints under Joseph Smith III. James Jesse Strang (1813–56) founded the theocratic “City of James” on Beaver Island in Lake Michigan in 1847 and led it until his murder in 1856. (A small remnant of his church still exists in Wisconsin.) Another group followed Lyman Wight to the Texas hill country, establishing the short-lived polygamous and communal colony of Zodiac in Burnet County. A contingent under Sam Brannan (1819–89) sailed to San Francisco and founded another short-lived colony, New Hope, in California’s San Joaquin Valley.

This illustration depicts the persecution of early Mormons. Such hostility drove Mormons on a series of westward treks, eventually to Utah.

About three-quarters of Smith’s followers followed Brigham Young (1801–77) westward across the Plains to the Great Salt Lake Basin in a move they likened to the Hebrew exodus. They arrived in 1847 seeking to preserve Mormonism as Smith had developed it at Nauvoo. Envisioning a New Zion modeled on ancient Israel and a Mormon empire in the West, Young established the theocratic state of Deseret in 1849, constructed a massive irrigation system, erected railroad and telegraph lines, oversaw Mormon expansion northward into Idaho and southward into Arizona, and attempted to set up colonies at San Bernardino (to facilitate immigration by way of San Diego) and on the Hawaiian island of Lanai. A regional religious counterculture developed, characterized by polygamy, a cooperative economy, a separate political party, and, some scholars argue, a distinct ethnic identity.

Fueled economically by transcontinental gold-rush migrations and numerically by an influx of converts from England, Germany, and Scandinavia, the region contained ninety communities by the late 1850s. By 1870 it was home to 86,000 people—perhaps 95 percent of them Mormon—and 160 of the nation’s 189 Mormon churches. But tensions mounted between Mormons and federal authorities, especially after Young publicly announced the doctrine of plural marriage in 1852, and a “Utah War” ensued in 1857. The Utah territory, established in 1850 by a federal government mistrustful of Deseret, became a state in 1896 only after intensifying public and federal pressure against polygamy moved the Mormon church to abandon the practice in 1890.

Some disapproving Mormons formed underground polygamist groups, some of which survive in Utah, the Southwest, and Mexico. But most of them increasingly conformed to the wider culture in the 20th century. Mormon distinctiveness persisted in such behaviors as tithing and abstaining from tobacco, coffee, and alcohol, and a discernible Mormon “culture region”—in which some counties contain only Mormon churches—endures in the intermontane West. But Mormons have abandoned economic communalism. They also jettisoned the doctrine of gathering in favor of geographic dispersion and, indeed, global missionary outreach. Salt Lake City remains Mormonism’s spiritual center and home to church headquarters, but Mormon “stakes” (parishes) have spread worldwide. With 4.7 million adherents in the United States alone, Mormonism has been an American success story.