Latter Day Saint Movement - History

History

The driving force behind and founder of the Latter Day Saint movement was Joseph Smith, Jr., and to a lesser extent, during the movement's first two years, Oliver Cowdery. Throughout his life, Smith told of an experience he had as a boy having seen God the Father and Jesus Christ as two separate beings, who told him that the true church had been lost and would be restored through him, and that he would be given the authority to organize and lead the true Church of Christ. Smith and Cowdery also explained that the angels John the Baptist, Peter, James and John visited them in 1829 and gave them authority to reestablish the Church of Christ.

The first Latter Day Saint church was formed in April 1830, consisting of a community of believers in the western New York towns of Fayette, Manchester, and Colesville. They called themselves the Church of Christ, and on April 6, 1830, the church formally organized into a legal institution under that name. By 1834, the church was being referred to as the Church of the Latter Day Saints in early church publications, and in 1838 Joseph Smith announced that he had received a revelation from God that officially changed the name to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

In 1844, William Law and several other Latter Day Saints in church leadership positions publicly denounced Smith's secret practice of polygamy in the controversial Nauvoo Expositor, and formed their own church. The city council of Nauvoo, Illinois subsequently had the printing press of the Expositor destroyed. In spite of Smith's later offer to pay damages for destroyed property, critics of Smith and the church considered the destruction heavy-handed. Some called for the Latter Day Saints to be either expelled or destroyed.

Following Smith's assassination by a mob in Carthage, Illinois, several prominent members of the church claimed to be Smith's legitimate successor. These various claims resulted in a succession crisis, in which the majority of church members followed Brigham Young, he being the senior Apostle of the church; others followed Sidney Rigdon or James Strang. The crisis resulted in several permanent schisms as well as the formation of splinter groups, some of which no longer exist. These various groups are sometimes referred to under two geographical headings: "Prairie Saints" (those that remained in the Midwest United States) and "Rocky Mountain Saints" (those who followed Brigham Young to what would later become the state of Utah).

Today, there are many small schism organizations who regard themselves as a part of the Latter Day Saint movement, though in most cases they do not acknowledge the other branches as valid and regard their own tradition as the only correct and authorized version of the church Smith originally founded. The vast majority (over 98 percent) of Latter Day Saints belong to the largest denomination, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) which reports 14 million members worldwide. The second-largest denomination is the Community of Christ, which reports over 250,000 members. There are also tens of thousands of adherents within small sects of Mormon fundamentalism. These sects separated from the LDS Church because they continue to practice plural marriage, which the LDS Church officially abandoned in 1890.