The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as the Mormon or LDS Church, was still very much an American institution in 1960. At that time a diaspora was getting underway that would lead to LDS congregational units being established all across the nation and around the world. Within 40 years, the ensuing spatial diffusion would lead to this form of Mormonism’s becoming a significant national and even worldwide religious force. But the possibilities and implications of diaspora were by no means obvious back then. Consequently, most insiders and nearly all outsiders regarded this formidable ecclesiastical body not simply as a uniquely American institution. They saw it as a Utah church.
By and large, they were correct. The church’s membership was concentrated in Utah and the surrounding areas of the intermountain region of the western United States, an area where the Mormon presence was so pervasive that anthropologists called it the “Mormon culture region.” Long-standing organizational units existed in Southern California and in a few other areas in the Pacific coastal region, and the church was strong in Hawaii. It also had well-established congregational units in New York, Washington, D.C., and several other metropolitan areas in the U.S. Besides that, nearly 10 percent of the church’s members resided outside the United States with most of that number living in such English-speaking countries as Canada, England, Australia and New Zealand, or they lived in Mexico and Northern Europe. For the most part, however, Mormons were American and they lived in the West. If they lived anywhere else, they tended to think of the Great Basin, and most especially Utah, as their homeland. Thus, it comes as no surprise that many non-Mormons thought this religion was a Western phenomenon--somewhat akin, in the secular realm, to cowboys and Indians.
Mormons, of course, did not share this popular perception. The members of the church whose headquarters were in Salt Lake City were generally aware that another form of Mormonism was headquartered in Independence, Missouri. Although it was a much smaller ecclesiastical body, the mountain Saints realized--at least vaguely--that there were prairie Saints as well. Moreover, in early years of Sunday School lessons, both sorts of Saints learned that their churches evolved out of a movement of Christian Restoration that started in western New York State in the late 1820s. So Saints of every stripe were conscious of the fact that Mormonism did not begin in the West.
Besides thinking that the movement was distinctively Western, many Gentiles (for that was what non-Mormons were called in those days) weren’t sure whether, and if so, exactly how Mormonism fit into Christianity. Actually, it is likely that most of the Mormons knew very little about the structure of the Christian tradition. But their experience told them they were as surely Christian as they were Mormon. It also told them that their church was distinctly different from other Christian churches.
It always has been different, even though its first adherents had much in common with the members of many other indigenous Christian movements that came into being in the United States during the early national period. Yet by the time Mormonism took institutional shape as the Church of Christ in Fayette, New York in 1830, this particular group advanced three distinctive beliefs that separated Mormonism not only from all other versions of primitive and millennial Christianity then present in New England and the Middle Atlantic region of the nation, but also from all other existing forms of Protestantism, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy on the earth.
The first in this trio of beliefs (that quickly emerged as fundamental tenets of doctrine) was that a living prophet led their church. The other two truly distinctive beliefs were that they had the priesthoods of Aaron and Melchizedek which were legitimate because they had been restored to them by none other than John the Baptist. In addition, besides the Old and New Testaments, they had a complementary work of scripture.
[As everyone in this audience knows] the members of the first Mormon group followed a 24 year-old visionary farm lad, Joseph Smith, Jr., whose words and actions persuaded them that he was a modern “seer, translator, and prophet.” They believed that the restoration of the ancient priesthoods came through Smith’s prophetic agency and that, through the same agency, the Church of Jesus Christ was restored to the earth after being absent ever since a “Great Apostasy” occurred at the end of the Apostolic era. Of even greater significance, Smith’s followers accepted the claim that, with divine assistance manifested in the form of seer stones known as the “Urim and Thummim,” Smith had translated the Book of Mormon from etchings engraved on a set of golden plates that he found buried in a hill not far from his home in Manchester, New York.
To believers, this was modern scripture, a marvelous work and a wonder that signified the nearness of the end of time. Unbelievers, however, facetiously and dismissively described this work as Smith’s “golden bible.” They also called Smith’s followers “Mormonites.” The members of the new church rejected that nickname, taking instead the name early Christians had used in addressing each other. They called themselves Saints, but recognizing the passage of time since the apostolic age, they described themselves as Latter-day Saints.
Indeed, notwithstanding their possession of a new work of scripture, these Restorationalists shared a great deal with other Christian bodies. In fact, a substantial portion of the Mormon pattern of belief came from the Bible—the Old Testament as well as the New Testament. But the Saints concern for going into the world to preach the gospel to every creature seems not to have come from the “Great Commission” the disciples received at the end of the Gospel of Matthew. Although the text of the Book of Mormon included a similar “go ye into all the world and preach the gospel” charge (Mormon 9: 22), the Saints’ fervent and powerful missionary impulse came not from that charge so much as from the title page of the new scripture.
Overstating the critical importance to Mormonism of this New Testament of Jesus Christ, as it is now sub-titled, would be difficult. But as this is a movement that has undergone dramatic development across its nearly 175-year history, the place and function of the Book of Mormon within the movement has varied considerably. The book’s very existence has always set Smith’s followers apart from all other Christian groups, but its internal function has been far more complex. While reading it often convinced people of the truth of Mormonism, its content seems not to have been much used as the basis for sermon texts in the early years. But in those same years, the book’s miraculous coming forth was always read as a sign that the end was near. Therefore, those who accepted its historical claim that certain Hebrew peoples living in the western hemisphere between the end of the fifth century B.C.E. and 600 C.E. heard the Christian message from Jesus himself believed that they were living in the “winding-up scene.”
With regard to the story of Mormonism in global perspective, the Book of Mormon was singularly important because, as indicated, the agenda for Mormon missions was set by the declaration on its title page about the dual purpose for the book’s coming forth. That unambiguous message was that the book was written for Native Americans (here called “Lamanites”) to tell them they were a remnant of the House of Israel. It was also written “to the convincing of the Jew and Gentile that JESUS IS THE CHRIST, the ETERNAL GOD, manifesting himself to all nations.” Accepting responsibility for delivering that information to these particular target audiences, the new church faced a dual task: carrying the message to the Indians and going into all nations in the world to convince both Jews and Gentiles that Jesus is the Christ.
Since they believed that time was short, soon after the church was organized in April 1830, revelation underscored the immediacy of the need to carry this message to the Indian nations and to people everywhere. In September 1830, the Mormon prophet received a revelation that four members of his fledgling flock should undertake a mission to the Indians. They were charged with preaching the gospel and establishing the church among those who received it.
Few, if any, Native Americans were thoroughly converted to Mormonism as a result of this first Lamanite mission. But this undertaking was terribly important because it resulted in the establishing of a “stake in the tent of Zion” in Independence, Missouri, a settlement that stood on the border of “Indian country” where Native Americans at that time were being forced to go in response to the nation’s Indian Removal Policy.
This initial Indian mission was exceedingly significant to the history of the Latter-day Saints for another reason. As they wended their way west, the missionaries not only preached to the Indians, but also to anyone else who would listen. In Ohio, the missionaries converted an unconventional Campbellite minister and his entire congregation to the new faith, and not long after the prophet heard of this mass conversion of a whole congregation, he announced that he had received a revelation that he, too, should go to Ohio and that the New York Saints should go with him. This led to the organization of a second stake in Zion’s tent.
This was the not the first revelatory mention of the concept of the assembling of the Lord’s elect in one place—that came back in the summer of 1828, almost two years before the church was organized—but it was the first time the Saints made this critically important gathering concept operative. From that point in time forward, the command that converts to Mormonism should leave their homes and go to live in close proximity with other Saints took precedence over the revelation that said missionaries should preach the gospel and establish the church among those who received it. This “gathering” principle would further separate Mormonism from most other forms of Christianity. In addition, it would have a profound effect on how long it took for Mormonism to become a global movement.
Exactly why this was the case takes some explaining. More Saints gathered to Missouri than to Ohio, probably because the prophet identified that state’s Jackson County as the center of Zion, the location of the New Jerusalem where Christ would return to launch the new millennial age. Unfortunately, the resulting rapid influx of Mormon settlers into the frontier town of Independence appears to have frightened the old settlers so much that, in 1834, they drove the Saints away. For a time the LDS refugees settled in nearby Clay County, but when the state set aside a place for them in the northwestern Missouri, that became the place for a new gathering.
For much of the 1830s the Saints in Ohio were more fortunate than the church members in Missouri. The town of Kirtland was both the administrative headquarters of the church and its principal base for missionary activities. In 1838, however, for a variety of reasons, secular as well as sacred, the hostile actions of northeastern Ohio mobs of old settlers caused Joseph Smith and other church leaders as well as most of the church’s members to flee to the new Missouri gathering place.
Before that terrible “driving” as the Saints call it, two events of immense importance to the story of global Mormonism occurred. The first was the construction of the Kirtland Temple and its dedication in 1836, a Pentecost-like occasion in which the temple built by the Saints received divine warrant as the place of the restoration of ancient ordinances that were once performed in the temple at Jerusalem. The Saints came to believe that these ancient ordinances, which had been absent from the earth even longer than the church organization, were integrally related to their possession of the ancient priesthoods of Aaron and Melchizedek, therefore equal in importance to the Restoration as any of their other distinctive doctrines. This temple was the first in a series of LDS temples that would become the sacramental centers of the church. They would become places of pilgrimage, beacons signaling a Saintly presence in particular geographical areas.
The other occurrence critical to the globalization of Mormonism was the revelation on priesthood which included the organization of the Council of the Twelve, a body that would serve as a “Traveling High Council” that could preside over the church in regions where Saints were not gathered into organized administrative units (stakes). Aside from the Lamanite Mission described above, most of the missionaries who were sent out from Kirtland were assigned to go to areas within the United States or eastern Canada. But in 1837, soon after the dedication of the Kirtland Temple, a key member of the Council of the Twelve was called to initiate missionary work outside North America. Despite the horrific suffering the Saints had to face in the next decade--arrest of the prophet and several other church leaders, dissension and apostasy among the Twelve, and a Mormon War in Missouri, the flight of the entire body of Saints back across the Mississippi River to Illinois, the building of a kingdom on the Mississippi at Nauvoo, and the prophet’s murder--successful missionary work went forward in Great Britain.
Before the English mission had been in operation for two years, 1500 converts were baptized. Then, between 1839 and 1841, as the Saints were struggling to overcome the trauma of the Missouri Mormon War and beleaguered as they settled into a new gathering place in Nauvoo, nine different members of the Council of the Twelve served missions in Great Britain. Their efforts paid off handsomely in numbers of converts, with 4,000 more being baptized during those two years.
Rather than establishing the church among those who accepted the gospel in Britain, however, the missionaries preached the gathering doctrine as a central element of the millennialist Restoration message. As a result, one dimension of the missionary task was arranging ocean passage so that converts could gather with the Saints in their American Zion. And gather they did. By 1841, more than a fourth of the total membership of the church was made up of English converts, many of whom sacrificed virtually everything to travel to the land of Zion where they could join their co-religionists in preparing for the Second Coming.
Instead of experiencing millennial bliss, the new converts were tested and tried as they labored to find places to live and means to sustain themselves in Nauvoo and the surrounding areas on both sides of the Mississippi River. The murder of the Mormon prophet was an additional stumbling block. But the tribulations of the ocean crossing and the difficulties the new Saints faced in the U.S. had little effect on the convert stream. In point of fact, the momentum of convert arrivals increased as the gathering continued after members of the LDS community were forced to abandon the city-state they had fashioned in Illinois.
Many people, including a fair number of scholars, reckon that a huge majority of LDS church members followed Brigham Young to the valley of the Great Salt Lake where they again created a kingdom, this one more fully realized and fleshed out. This estimate may be mistaken. While the Twelve took charge and kept the community together for almost three years before the Saints were compelled to flee, what actually happened after the prophet’s murder is that the movement split apart. Atomized. Henceforward there would be many Mormonisms, not just one.
A few Saints remained in Nauvoo, and a substantial number of Mormons stayed in Illinois and Iowa where, in 1860, they “reorganized” the church under the leadership of the prophet’s eldest son, Joseph Smith III. Earlier other church members established what amounted to Mormon denominational units in Wisconsin, northern Michigan, Texas, Pennsylvania, and even New York. But only the Strangite group in Michigan called for a gathering of Saints, and that movement did not last long. None of the others, even the strongest one that became known as the “Reorganization,” treated the gathering principle as critical to what being Mormon meant.
But this was not the case with the Council of the Twelve and Brigham Young (who became the president and prophet of the church that would become the institutional expression of Mormonism in the Great Basin). Keeping in mind that it was a revealed principle, and perhaps recalling the appeal that gathering to Zion had for British converts, they made coming to live in the kingdom one of the first principles of the Mormon gospel. As a direct consequence of adding the gathering of Saints from Great Britain and other parts of northern Europe (especially Scandinavia and Germany) to the numbers who made the pioneer trek from Nauvoo, the LDS settlement in the inter-mountain West rapidly became the form of Mormonism that had more adherents than any other.
In the long term, the gathering was probably less important than the quartet of distinctive beliefs that first set Mormonism apart from other forms of Christianity. But along with the Saints’ understanding that they were led by a living prophet and that they possessed the Book of Mormon, the legitimate priesthoods of Aaron and Melchizedek, and had access to the ancient temple ordinances that endowed them from on high and gave them entrée to exaltation in the celestial kingdom, the gathering that occurred in the Great Basin made possible a period of fullness if not of time, then of living in the State of Deseret, a literal “Kingdom of God in the tops of the mountains.”
A theocracy at first, Deseret became Utah territory before a decade had passed. Since the principal ecclesiastical officers no longer occupied the civil seats of power, the territory became a political realm with an established church rather than a theocracy. As it turned out, however, this was a fine point that did not much matter as far as the experience of living in Zion was concerned. The Saints controlled the political and economic arenas as well as the social system that, for nearly half a century included the public practice of plural marriage.
But then two things happened to change what many Saints remember as a difficult yet halcyon pioneer period. One was external and the other internal. Backed by legal fiat and political reality, the federal government moved from outside the culture to insist that if Utah wanted to take its place as a sovereign state alongside the other sovereign states in the nation, the territory would have to prove that it could pattern itself after other U.S. political, economic, and social systems. This effort initiated dramatic change in the areas of government, business, and industry, and it brought about the cessation of the practice of plural marriage, thereby making the boundary between Zion and Babylon porous.
The change within the community came some 15 or 20 years later after Utah had gained statehood and after the managing of the former kingdom’s economy was turned over to individuals and corporations, creating a system almost (but not quite) as capitalist as that in other parts of the nation. In taking stock of the new situation, church leaders realized that as long as agriculture and mining were the principal means of earning livelihoods, the mountainous and desert region that had served them so well during the pioneer period could not support an infinite number of gathered Saints. As a result, the church changed its position about the necessity of continuing the gathering.
This change was gradual and came first in the form of de-emphasizing the gathering. In 1910, for example, the Church President Joseph F. Smith told European converts that “at present” they did not need to trouble themselves too much about emigration. The “at present” time frame was extended indefinitely in 1921 when the church’s First Presidency, on the basis of economic rather than religious reasons, issued an official statement urging missionaries to stop preaching immigration. Just prior to World War II, Saints in foreign lands were urged to gather out of “spiritual Babylon, out of the midst of wickedness,” but they did not need to go so far as to gather to Utah. And soon after the war, the reinterpretation of the gathering revelation was complete when President Spencer W. Kimball told the Saints to “[R]emain [in their own lands] and build up a people to the Lord.”
This 20th century reinterpretation of the gathering revelation can be stated in another way: Zion is where the people of God are. Stated in this manner the theological ground shifts, returning Mormonism to its earliest revelation in which Saints were sent on missions. Section 28:8 of the Doctrine and Covenants reports that in September 1830 the Lord instructed the Saints to “Go [unto the unconverted] and preach my gospel unto them; and inasmuch as they receive thy teachings thou shalt cause my church to be established among them.” As long as the missionaries preached the gathering along with the gospel, this was not the way Mormonism worked. For almost an entire century the church’s global perspective was centripetal, so directed toward the center that in the gathering process converts were Christianized, “Mormonized” and Americanized all at the same time.
After the reinterpretation of the various gathering revelations, things started to shift so that gradually the church’s global perspective became centrifugal. The center remains strong, but the church is clearly moving outward through a process in which missionaries, church leaders, and indigenous Saints are working together to create multiple centers.
But note carefully, this is not a move that simply leads to a new definition of Zion as being the place where the people of God are. What is different is that church organization into branches, wards, and stakes follows as soon as a sufficient number of indigenous Saints are ordained to the Melchizedek priesthood to make up a competent leadership cadre. Of greater significance, wherever enough Saints are gathered together in close proximity, a LDS temple is being constructed. Once that happens, Zion is truly there allowing the Saints in the nations of the world to create area and regional gatherings.
But that gets us ahead of the story. While perceptions are amazingly persistent across time, in the past four decades, church growth and geographical expansion have brought so many changes to Mormonism that the notion that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint is a Utah church, or even that is an American church, is being seriously challenged. For that reason, the time has come to dispense with the old idea that if one understands the Mormon situation in Utah and the intermountain West, one understands Mormonism.
Nevertheless, in order to see what actually seems to be going on and to comprehend the problems the LDS Church is facing now that there are more church members outside than inside the United States, it is helpful to recall that Saints “do church” in a particular way. This ecclesiastical institution has always been hierarchal in nature and it has a highly structured system of lay priesthood headed by a president who, by virtue of his position, is also the Mormon prophet. Two counselors who, with him, make up the “First Presidency” assist the prophet/president. Along with them, a body of “General Authorities” that presides over the whole church is made up of the Council of the Twelve and additional priesthood leaders who are called into full-time service as presidents or members of the Quorums of Seventy or as members of the Presiding Bishopric. Because it is headquartered in Salt Lake City, in “the tops of the mountains” as early Mormon leaders put it, thinking of the LDS Church as one that is ruled from the top down has always been easy.
Surely this was the way the Mormon system worked in the nineteenth and well into the last decades of the twentieth century. To some extent, it still works this way, but because of the diaspora, the church often works from the center out rather than the top down. In time, this might cause some dilution of the top down concept. But not yet. The General Authorities still make the important decisions including decisions about materials and programs. Members of the robust church bureaucracy that has come into existence in the past half-century produce the materials, see to their distribution, and assist as needed as the members of the priesthood hierarchy see the church’s doctrines, policies, and programs are carried out.
To guarantee that the programs and materials are consistent with church doctrine and practice and to prevent duplication and keep things running smoothly, the church initiated “Correlation,” a process of oversight that up to now has been crucial to the creation of a successful worldwide church. While this oversight is sometimes experienced as overbearing and repressive, it serves the clear purpose of locating and clarifying where authority rests in the LDS system. This is critical because the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been obviously undergoing dramatic change as church growth and geographical expansion became normal conditions.
Perhaps it makes some difference whether change is the result of positive or negative conditions. No matter what the cause, however, change always causes the ground to shift in unexpected ways. This happened when the prophet Joseph Smith was murdered. In the absence of a clear stream of authority, the church faced dissension, division, and breaking apart, the product of which was a multiplicity of Mormonisms. The dramatic changes the church is currently experiencing as Mormonism goes global could pose a similar loss of clarity about where authority rests, not at the very top of the hierarchy, but at penultimate levels where indigenous leadership and cultural variation often make adapting one-size-fits-all policies and programs exceedingly difficult.
So far, correlation has been a central factor in preventing a repetition of the creation of multiple Mormonisms. Whether it will continue to be effective seems to me to be an open question. The reason I say “it seems to me” is that the current rate of change in Mormonism may be too rapid to permit leaders in Salt Lake City to anticipate the complexity and complicatedness that are imbedded in “Mormonizing en mass.”
In noting the hardship and distress that converts had to face as they traveled to Zion, Brigham Young said that the trek, i.e., the very process of gathering, was for “making Saints.” Now that congregations made up primarily of converts do church in virtually all the nations of the world, will carry out correlated policies and programs turn enough of the baptized initiates into Saints to make the wards and stakes in Nigeria, the Philippines, Venezuela, Korea, Iceland, and thousand other places truly Mormon. Again it seems to me too soon to know for sure.
What we do know is that by the turn of the twenty-first century, it was obvious that the face of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been radically altered. Within the U.S. it has a nationwide geographical reach, and it had increased so much in numbers of members that it ranked as one of the six largest ecclesiastical bodies in the nation. While such internal developments were impressive, more church members resided outside than inside the United States. In the year 2000, these Saints outside the U.S. were gathered into nearly 12,000 wards and branches of small and medium size, with indigenous leadership presiding over the overwhelming majority of these congregations.
At every annual conference, the church generates a new statistical picture revealing the increasing globalization of Mormonism. But for today’s Latter-day Saints that evidence is not needed because the reality of the worldwide reach of Mormonism is everywhere apparent from the pages of the church publications to the student bodies of BYU campuses, and in the hearts and minds not only of church leaders but in the sensibility and consciousness of Latter-day Saints of every age and every station.
What this will mean for the future of the church remains to be seen. There are many problems. Retention of members is an ever-present challenge that is probably more serious in stakes and wards away from the traditional Mormon culture region than in the intermountain West. Training enough lay leaders (both male and female) to carry out the church program is also difficult.
But several things augur success: the priesthood revelation of 1978 universalized the message. Correlation is still working to prevent the formation of many Mormonism rather than one. The translation of the Book of Mormon into a great multiplicity of languages and the construction of temples throughout the world are working together to create a global Mormon identity.
Salt Lake City is likely to remain the center place at least until the Saints return to Jackson County to await the Second Coming. But the likelihood that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will ever again be simply described as an American institution or a Utah church is slowly fading into history.