407 dated events across 13 topics, in one sequence. Filter by topic, by text, or down to the flagged hinges alone.
Joseph Smith's 1832 history says that at about age ten his father moved the family from Vermont to Palmyra, Ontario County, New York, and that being 'in indigent circumstances' they were 'obliged to labour hard for the support of a large Family.' The move places the family in the burned-over district during the years the vision is later said to have occurred.
Latter-day Saint researchers have pointed to a documented Methodist camp meeting near Palmyra in 1818, and to Genesee Conference activity in 1819, as the 'unusual excitement on the subject of religion' Joseph Smith later described. Richard Lloyd Anderson argued that the 1818 camp meeting satisfies the requirements of the 1838 narrative without any conflation of later events.
Palmyra neighbours later swore that the Smith family spent much of its time digging for money, often at night. William Stafford's 1833 affidavit describes Joseph Jr. locating caves of gold by placing 'a stone of singular appearance in his hat.' Joseph Smith Sr. told an interviewer in 1830 that he was a firm believer in witchcraft and had spent time and money searching for buried treasure with divining rods.
The 1838–39 history places the event 'on the morning of a beautiful, clear day, early in the spring of eighteen hundred and twenty,' with Joseph in his fifteenth year. No contemporaneous record of any kind survives from 1820. Every account of the event was written twelve or more years later.
While digging a well for William Chase, Joseph found a smooth stone he thereafter used for seeing. It is the same stone later described in the translation accounts — a point on which Emma Smith, David Whitmer, Martin Harris and Brigham-era church leaders such as George Q. Cannon all agree.
Joseph Smith reported three night visits from a messenger who identified himself as Moroni and told him of a record on gold plates buried in a hill near the family farm. The next day he located the spot but was not permitted to take the plates. He returned each 22 September for four years.
Joseph Smith's accounts of a nighttime angelic visitation revealing the gold plates are earlier, more consistently told, and far more widely circulated in the 1830s than any account of the 1820 vision. The 1832 history dates this visitation to when he was seventeen and says the angel told him 'the Lord had forgiven me my sins.'
Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist records all show a large multi-denominational awakening in Palmyra beginning in the fall of 1824. The Reverend George Lane published his own account of it in the March 1825 Methodist Magazine. Palmer counts 103 people joining the Palmyra Presbyterian church in 1824–25 against fourteen in 1820–21; Baptist records show membership rising from 132 to 219 in the same conference year.
Stowell, a Chenango County farmer, sought out Joseph because of his reputation for finding lost objects with a stone, and put him to work searching for a supposed Spanish silver mine near the Susquehanna. Joseph boarded with the Stowells, worked the farm, and went to school. The dig failed.
Brought before Justice Albert Neely on a complaint sworn by Stowell's nephew, Joseph testified that he had a certain stone which he had occasionally looked at to determine where hidden treasures in the earth were, and that he had told Stowell where to dig. The surviving court record, and bills from Neely and Constable De Zeng, were located by Wesley P. Walters in 1971.
Joseph, accompanied by Emma, went to the hill and returned saying he had the plates and the interpreters. Attempts by neighbours to seize them followed through the autumn, and by December he and Emma had moved to her parents' place in Harmony, Pennsylvania.
Harris travelled to New York City and met Charles Anthon of Columbia and, by some accounts, Samuel Latham Mitchill. Joseph Smith's history has Anthon certifying the translation as correct, then tearing up the certificate on hearing an angel was involved and saying 'I cannot read a sealed book.' Anthon's own 1834 letter to E. D. Howe called the whole story of his endorsement 'perfectly false' and described the paper as 'all kinds of crooked characters, disposed in columns.'
After repeated requests, Joseph let Martin Harris take home the manuscript he had scribed — later called 116 pages, the book of Lehi. It disappeared and has never been recovered. Lucy Mack Smith records Harris crying that he had lost his soul, and Joseph answering 'All is lost! all is lost!' Emma had just given birth to a son who died. Joseph reported that the interpreters were taken from him.
Two revelations followed the loss: one calling Joseph to repentance for having 'feared man more than God,' the other warning that wicked men had altered the stolen pages and directing him not to retranslate them. Translation stopped for roughly nine months.
Cowdery, a schoolteacher who had boarded with Joseph's parents, walked to Harmony with Samuel Smith and began writing on 7 April. Almost the entire present text was dictated between April and late June 1829. Cowdery later wrote that these were 'days never to be forgotten — to sit under the sound of a voice dictated by the inspiration of heaven.'
Facing opposition in Harmony, Joseph and Cowdery accepted David Whitmer's offer of room and board at his father Peter Whitmer Sr.'s log home in Fayette, New York. The translation was finished there. Emma remained behind.
Richard R. Lansing, clerk of the federal district court for the Northern District of New York, entered the copyright, recording that Joseph Smith Jun. 'hath deposited in this office the title of a Book, the right whereof he claims as author.' A printed mock-up of the title page was filed with it.
Following a revelation promising that 'it is by your faith that you shall obtain a view of them,' Joseph, Cowdery, Whitmer and Harris went into the woods near the Whitmer farm to pray. Harris withdrew and was joined by Joseph separately. All three afterward signed a statement that an angel showed them the plates and that they heard the voice of God declare the translation correct.
A day or two later, near the Smith cabin in Manchester, eight men — four Whitmers, Hiram Page, and Joseph's father and two brothers — signed a statement that Joseph showed them the plates and that they hefted and handled them. The statement gives no date, no location and no narrative.
Grandin had refused the job, as had Thurlow Weed of Rochester; he agreed once he learned another Rochester printer would take it and once Martin Harris put up security. The contract was for 5,000 copies at $3,000, and on 25 August Harris mortgaged about 151 acres, payable within eighteen months. John H. Gilbert then set nearly all the type on a hand press on the third storey of Exchange Row, sixteen pages to a form, thirty-seven forms between August 1829 and March 1830, supplying the punctuation the manuscript lacked.
The Wayne Sentinel advertised the book — 'containing about 600 pages, large Duodecimo' — for sale wholesale and retail at the Palmyra Bookstore. The Church of Christ was organised eleven days later.
Jacob 2 declares that no man among the Nephites shall have more than one wife and no concubines, then adds that if God will raise up seed unto himself, he will command his people. The passage is the church's founding scriptural position on the question. Both defenders and critics later read the exception clause as the hinge.
The foundational revelation printed as chapter 24 of the 1833 Book of Commandments and as section 2 of the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants reads: 'After it was truly manifested unto this first elder that he had received a remission of his sins he was entangled again in the vanities of the world: but after repenting and humbling himself, sincerely, through faith in God ministered unto him by an holy angel.' There is no vision of Deity in it.
Revelations given in 1831 established what became known as the law of consecration and stewardship, instructing members to devote their property to the work and to the relief of poverty, and establishing the office of bishop to administer it. The system required members to deed property and receive back a stewardship. The formal system was abandoned in 1834 after persecution, repeated moves, too few workable stewardships and unresolved questions about its legality.
Campbell's essay in the Millennial Harbinger, reissued in Boston in 1832 as Delusions, examined the book's internal evidence rather than its author's reputation. He charged that it addressed 'every error and almost every truth discussed in New York for the last ten years,' and objected that Nephites kept temples and priesthood outside the Levitical order.
Joseph Smith's published history says the French traveller 'Antonio Sebolo' entered the catacombs near ancient Thebes on this date under a licence obtained through Bernardino Drovetti, and obtained eleven mummies. Modern accounts identify the man as the Italian Antonio Lebolo, an agent of Drovetti, and place the excavation somewhat earlier.
W. W. Phelps, writing to Brigham Young thirty years later in 1861, reported that on this date Joseph Smith dictated a revelation before seven elders west of Jackson County, including the words that in time ye should take unto you wives of the Lamanites and Nephites, that their posterity may become white, delightsome and just. Phelps added that about three years afterward he asked how married men could do this, and Joseph answered, in the same manner that Abraham took Hagar and Keturah. The apostate Ezra Booth, writing in the Ohio Star on 8 December 1831, independently reported a revelation about a matrimonial alliance with the natives.
The church's account says Lebolo put in at Trieste en route to Paris, died after ten days' illness, and willed the whole collection to his nephew Michael H. Chandler, then in Philadelphia. Bushman notes that Lebolo's probate papers mention neither Chandler nor mummies, and that Chandler probably bought the artifacts in New York.
In a record book, in alternating hands with Frederick G. Williams, Smith wrote a six-page history that opens with a prospectus of four foundational events and then narrates his religious anxiety from age twelve to fifteen. It is the only narrative of these events that includes his own handwriting. It was never published, never quoted, and never mentioned in any Church publication for 133 years.
A citizens' meeting at Independence demanded that Latter-day Saint printing, storekeeping and mechanical work in the county cease. When the Saints refused, the mob threw down the house of W. W. Phelps that held the printing establishment and destroyed papers and type. Bishop Edward Partridge and Charles Allen were tarred and feathered on the public square.
Doctor Philastus Hurlbut, recently excommunicated, interviewed eight of Solomon Spalding's former Conneaut neighbours, who said they remembered names and episodes from his unpublished romance appearing in the Book of Mormon. Hurlbut wrote the affidavits himself; Fawn Brodie later noted that the style is uniform throughout.
After weeks of house-burnings and beatings, roughly twelve hundred Latter-day Saints were driven out of Jackson County, most crossing the Missouri River into Clay County. Phelps reported the following spring that the mob had burned nearly all Mormon-owned buildings in the county. Attempts at criminal prosecution collapsed.
E. D. Howe published Hurlbut's material along with Charles Anthon's letter, and argued in his final chapter that Sidney Rigdon obtained Spalding's manuscript from a Pittsburgh printing office and worked it into the Book of Mormon. Howe conceded he had no positive proof of the Rigdon connection.
Joseph Smith led an armed expedition of about two hundred men west to restore the Jackson County exiles to their lands. It disbanded without fighting after cholera struck the camp. The militia Smith organized on that march was also called the Armies of Israel, a name later confused with the 1838 Danites.
At a conference in Clay County, Missouri, Joseph Smith ordained David Whitmer 'to be a leader or a prophet to this church.' The ordination was conditional — on Joseph's not living to God himself. In 1847 Martin Harris, Leonard Rich and Calvin Beebe signed a joint statement recalling that Joseph said the time had come to appoint his successor and that 'David Whitmer is the man.' Five months later, on 5 December 1834, Joseph ordained Oliver Cowdery Assistant President of the High Priesthood, an office Cowdery understood to rank him first among the assistants, ahead of Sidney Rigdon and Frederick G. Williams.
In letters printed in the Latter Day Saints' Messenger and Advocate — written with Joseph Smith's approval and constituting the first published history of the church's origins — Oliver Cowdery placed the religious excitement in 1823, when Smith was seventeen, and connected it with the Reverend George Lane. Cowdery's letters describe the angel and the plates but no earlier theophany.
The revelation now printed as Doctrine and Covenants 107 declared the Quorum of the Twelve equal in authority and power to the First Presidency. The same revelation said as much of the First Quorum of the Seventy and of the combined stake high councils, which is why the text supported more than one reading in 1844.
Chandler came to Kirtland to exhibit four human figures and two or more rolls of papyrus covered with hieroglyphic figures and devices. Smith and other church leaders paid a fee to view them. Smith was allowed to take the papyri to his home to study.
Chandler signed a certificate stating that Smith's deciphering of the characters corresponded 'in the most minute matters' with what he had learned from the most learned men in many cities. Latter-day Saint scholars now acknowledge that neither Chandler nor any American of the time could have made such an attestation authoritatively.
Some of the Saints at Kirtland purchased the four mummies and the papyri. The 1856 bill of sale states the price as twenty-four hundred dollars. Joseph Coe later described arranging the purchase in thirds with Simeon Andrews and Smith. The sum was large at a moment when money was desperately needed for the Kirtland temple.
Smith's history records that for the remainder of July he was 'continually engaged in translating an alphabet to the Book of Abraham, and arrangeing a grammar of the Egyptian language as practiced by the ancients.' The passage was composed later by Willard Richards, who was not present.
The 1835 Doctrine and Covenants published as section 101 a statement, probably drafted by Oliver Cowdery, reading: Inasmuch as this church of Christ has been reproached with the crime of fornication, and polygamy: we declare that we believe, that one man should have one wife; and one woman, but one husband, except in case of death, when either is at liberty to marry again. It remained in every edition of the Doctrine and Covenants until 1876, when it was replaced by section 132.
Smith's journal records that he 'labored on the Egyptian alphabet, in company with brsr O. Cowdery and W. W. Phelps: The system of astronomy was unfolded.' Gee dates the three Egyptian Alphabet documents to this session on the strength of the entry and the three handwritings.
A visitor calling himself 'Joshua the Jewish minister' came to Smith's house in Kirtland. Warren Parrish recorded Smith's account: a fruitless first attempt to pray, a tongue that would not move, footsteps behind him, then a pillar of fire, one personage, and 'another personage soon appeard like unto the first.' The second says 'thy sins are forgiven thee' and testifies that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. An interlineation adds 'and I saw many angels in this vision.'
Five days later, and to the same scribe, Smith summarized the same span of his life for a Methodist convert named Erastus Holmes: an account of his experience 'say from 6, years old up to the time I received the first visitation of Angels which was when I was about 14, years old.' Holmes stayed several days, dined with Smith, viewed the Egyptian mummies, and asked for a revelation about his baptism.
Williams and Parrish inscribed Manuscripts A and B, apparently simultaneously and at least partly from dictation; Phelps and Parrish produced the fuller Manuscript–C in a bound volume with prefatory material. Each carries Egyptian characters copied into a ruled left margin beside paragraph-length passages of English.
The 1835 Doctrine and Covenants, whose preface declared it contained 'the leading items of religion which we have professed to believe,' included the Lectures on Faith. As Allen observed, the Lectures teach that the Godhead consists of two personages without any reference to Joseph Smith having seen them, and the vision appears nowhere in the volume.
Oliver Cowdery's letter to William Frye appeared in the Messenger and Advocate as 'Egyptian Mummies—Ancient Records.' It corrects the rumor that the purchasers claimed to hold the bodies of Abraham, Abimelech or Joseph — 'which is utterly false' — and reports that seven of the eleven mummies had already been sold to gentlemen for private museums.
Fanny Alger, a household helper in the Smith home, was joined to Joseph Smith in what Utah-era Latter-day Saints called his first plural marriage. Emma Smith discovered the relationship and expelled her; Fanny stayed briefly with Chauncey Webb's family, left Kirtland with her family in September 1836, and married Solomon Custer, a non-Mormon her own age, in Indiana on 16 November 1836. She never spoke publicly about Joseph Smith.
Baptized in September 1832, Abel was ordained an elder on 3 March 1836 and received a patriarchal blessing from Joseph Smith Sr. On 20 December 1836 he was ordained a Seventy, by Zebedee Coltrin. He participated in washing and anointing ordinances in the Kirtland Temple, and his Seventy's certificate was renewed in 1841 and again in Salt Lake City. Other free Black men — Joseph T. Ball in 1837, Q. Walker Lewis by 1844 — were also ordained.
Joseph Smith, Sidney Rigdon and others ratified a constitution for the Kirtland Safety Society as a community bank, with Rigdon as president and Smith as cashier. Stock had been offered for subscription from October. Orson Hyde travelled to Columbus that winter to seek a bank charter from the Ohio legislature.
After the Saints were pressed out of Clay County in 1836, the legislature carved a county out of thinly settled land in the north for them to occupy. Far West became the church's headquarters. Non-Mormon Missourians later insisted the Saints had promised to confine themselves to Caldwell; Latter-day Saints denied any such binding pledge.
For the second edition Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery corrected the 1830 text against the manuscripts and made editorial changes. Four passages in 1 Nephi were altered: 'the mother of God' became 'the mother of the Son of God,' and 'the Eternal Father' and 'the Everlasting God' became 'the Son of' each. Further changes followed in 1840.
Denied a charter, the organizers reorganized the society as an unincorporated joint-stock company, the Kirtland Safety Society Anti-Banking Company, with Rigdon as secretary and Smith as treasurer. Notes printed from the original bank plates were altered by stamping. The banking office opened for business in early January and notes began circulating on 6 January.
By 1 February 1837 Safety Society notes were circulating at about 12.5 cents on the dollar of face value. On 9 February, Samuel Rounds, acting for the society's local antagonist Grandison Newell, brought charges against Smith, Rigdon and four others for violating an Ohio statute barring unchartered institutions from issuing bank notes. The Ohio senate refused a charter the next day.
Between 8 June and 7 July 1837, Smith and Rigdon resigned as officers; Warren Parrish and Frederick G. Williams replaced them. A nationwide financial panic that spring had made most banks unwilling to accept or redeem the society's notes. The institution had closed by September 1837. Smith and Rigdon were prosecuted for operating an illegal bank.
Writing from Far West to his brother Warren, Cowdery said that a dirty, nasty, filthy affair of his and Fanny Alger's was talked over in which I strictly declared that I had never deserted from the truth in the matter, and as I supposed was admitted by himself. Three months later, on 12 April 1838, Cowdery was excommunicated on charges that included seeking to destroy the character of Pres. Joseph Smith Jr by falsly insinuating that he was guilty of adultery.
Fleeing the collapse of the Kirtland Safety Society and its aftermath, the First Presidency relocated to Missouri. Thousands of converts followed through the spring and summer, and the Saints began expanding beyond Caldwell into Daviess and Carroll Counties.
Oliver Cowdery was tried and excommunicated at Far West; David and John Whitmer and W. W. Phelps were disciplined; Martin Harris was excommunicated in Kirtland. Whitmer said God told him by his own voice in June 1838 to separate himself from the Latter Day Saints. Stephen Burnett's letter that year reports Harris publicly qualifying what he had seen.
Oliver Cowdery was excommunicated on 12 April; David Whitmer and Lyman Johnson were cut off, and John Whitmer and W. W. Phelps had been excommunicated a month earlier. The men remained living in Caldwell County with substantial property, and were known thereafter as the dissenters.
Smith began the multivolume manuscript history in 1838 amid mass excommunications in Kirtland and Missouri. It opens with the revival, the reading of James 1:5, the attack by an unseen power, the pillar of light, two personages, and the instruction to join none of the churches because 'all their Creeds were an abomination.' Volume A-1 and the surviving Draft 2 both preserve the text.
A society first called the Daughter of Zion, later the Danites, was formed under Sampson Avard, organized in companies of tens, fifties and hundreds with officers of military rank. Members swore an oath never to reveal the society's purposes on pain of death and covenanted to stand by one another whether right or wrong. Avard later testified that its first object was to drive the dissenters out of Caldwell County.
Preaching on salt that has lost its savour and is fit only to be cast out and trodden underfoot, Sidney Rigdon attacked the dissenters without naming them. John Corrill wrote that it was plainly understood whom he meant. Reed Peck testified at Richmond that Rigdon said in the same sermon that he would assist to erect a gallows on the square and hang them all.
A long letter, presumably written by Rigdon and signed by eighty-three men, was delivered to Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, John Whitmer, W. W. Phelps and Lyman Johnson the day after the Salt Sermon. It accused them of joining "a band of counterfeiters, thieves, liars, and blacklegs of the deepest dye" and closed: "We will put you from the county of Caldwell, so help us God." The families left, and their property was attached.
At a celebration that laid the temple cornerstones and paraded the Caldwell militia and a company of Danites, Rigdon declared that if a mob came against the Saints "it shall be between us and them a war of extermination, for we will follow them till the last drop of blood is spilled, or else they will have to exterminate us." The oration was printed as a pamphlet on the Far West press and reprinted in Missouri papers.
A revelation dictated at Far West, Missouri — now Doctrine and Covenants 119 — required members first to give their surplus property, and then to 'pay one-tenth of all their interest annually; and this shall be a standing law unto them forever.' A companion revelation, section 120, assigned disposition of those funds to a council of the First Presidency, the bishop and his council, and the high council.
Joseph Smith's editorial in the August 1838 Elders' Journal commended Rigdon's speech and recommended that church members obtain a copy of the pamphlet. Bushman notes Smith underscored the passage saying the Saints would not be mobbed any more without taking vengeance.
At the Daviess County polls, the Whig candidate William Peniston mounted a whiskey barrel and harangued the crowd against letting the Mormons vote, using a racial slur to say they had no more right to vote than Black men. A brawl followed; John L. Butler struck back after a Latter-day Saint was hit, and by one account a Danite distress signal brought others into the fight. No one died, but reports of murdered Mormons and of Mormon retaliation raced across northern Missouri.
An armed force held the Latter-day Saint settlement at DeWitt in Carroll County under siege for days. Joseph Smith reported burying members who died of privation during the evacuation. The refugees fell back on Far West, and state officials declined to intervene.
Companies under David Patten, Lyman Wight and Seymour Brunson struck three Daviess County settlements, emptying Jacob Stollings's store at Gallatin, driving off stock and burning buildings. Goods were carried to the bishop's storehouse at Adam-ondi-Ahman. Judge Austin King reported to Boggs that there was not a citizen left in Daviess except Mormons.
Thomas B. Marsh, president of the Twelve, and Orson Hyde left the church the day after Gallatin burned. On 24 October Marsh swore an affidavit at Richmond describing the Danites, a 'destroying company,' the burning of Gallatin, and Smith's alleged intention to take the state and ultimately the world. Hyde attested it.
Believing a mob had seized three Latter-day Saint prisoners, about sixty men under David Patten rode into Ray County and attacked what proved to be a detachment of state militia under Samuel Bogart. One Missourian and three Mormons died, Patten among them. Rumour carried the news to Jefferson City as a massacre of fifty or sixty Missourians.
Acting on reports of Crooked River and on Marsh's affidavit, Governor Boggs ordered General John B. Clark to hasten to Richmond: "The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State, if necessary, for the publick good. Their outrages are beyond all description." Doniphan and other officers treated the extermination clause as illegal and disregarded it.
Two days after agreeing to a truce with a local militia captain, the settlement on Shoal Creek was attacked by several companies of Missouri militia. Men and boys who took shelter in the blacksmith's shop were shot through the gaps in the logs. Thomas McBride was cut down after surrendering his gun; ten-year-old Sardius Smith was killed at point-blank range. Seventeen or eighteen died and the bodies were put into an unfinished well.
Colonel George M. Hinkle brought Joseph Smith and other leaders into the militia camp, where they were taken prisoner. A militia court-martial sentenced them to be shot the next morning; General Doniphan refused to carry out the order, calling the proceeding illegal. Far West surrendered its arms and the inhabitants signed away property to cover the cost of the campaign.
Judge Austin A. King heard evidence for more than two weeks against some sixty defendants. Sampson Avard, captured and threatened with prosecution, was the state's chief witness; he called Joseph Smith "the prime mover and organizer of this Danite band" and produced a Danite constitution. King found probable cause against thirty-four men. Smith, his brother Hyrum, Rigdon, Wight, McRae and Baldwin were held for treason.
Six prisoners were confined in a two-level limestone jail measuring about fourteen feet square, mostly in the cold lower room lit by two grated openings. They petitioned unsuccessfully for habeas corpus; only Rigdon was released. Meanwhile the body of the church left Missouri for Illinois through the winter.
Smith dictated a long letter to the church at Quincy, written on twenty-nine sheets, addressed to the Saints "taken and held by the power of mobocracy, under the exterminating reign of his excelancy the Governer Lilburn W. Boggs." Portions of it were canonized in 1876 as Doctrine and Covenants 121–123.
Pratt's pamphlet An Interesting Account of Several Remarkable Visions was the first appearance of the story in print anywhere — twenty years after the event and two years after Smith began writing the manuscript history. Editors have noted similarities between Pratt's text and Smith's own 1842 Wentworth letter close enough to suggest Smith used the pamphlet as a model.
The Illinois legislature incorporated Nauvoo with unusually broad powers, including a municipal court that could issue writs of habeas corpus and an independent militia. The Legion was organized in two cohorts, and Joseph Smith received a commission as lieutenant general — outranking, as he liked to note, any officer in the United States Army.
A revelation directed that Hyrum Smith take 'the office of priesthood and patriarch, which was appointed unto him by his father, by blessing and also by right,' and appointed him 'a prophet, and a seer, and a revelator unto my church, as well as my servant Joseph,' crowned with the priesthood and gifts once put upon Oliver Cowdery.
In the evening, in a grove near the Mississippi, Joseph Bates Noble sealed his wife's sister Louisa Beaman to Joseph Smith, with Joseph dictating the words for Noble to repeat. Louisa, then twenty-six, was reportedly dressed in a man's coat and hat. Noble swore an affidavit to the ceremony on 26 June 1869 and repeated the testimony at the 1892 Temple Lot hearings, where he said of the wedding night, I know it, for I saw him in bed with her.
Zina Diantha Huntington had married Henry Bailey Jacobs on 7 March 1841 in a ceremony performed by John C. Bennett, and was carrying Jacobs's child. Her brother Dimick B. Huntington sealed her to Joseph Smith, with Fanny Maria Huntington as witness, according to Zina's own 1869 affidavit. She continued to live with Jacobs, and after Joseph's death was sealed to Joseph for eternity with Brigham Young standing as proxy and married to Young for time. Six weeks later, on 11 December 1841, the same brother sealed Zina's sister Presendia Huntington Buell to Joseph; Presendia had been Norman Buell's wife since 1827 and continued to live with him until 1846.
Mary Elizabeth Rollins, married to the non-Mormon Adam Lightner and pregnant, was sealed to Joseph Smith by Brigham Young in a room over the red brick store. She said Joseph told her he had been commanded to take her as early as 1834, when she was a thousand miles away, and that an angel came to him three times, the last with a drawn sword. She lived with Adam Lightner until his death and bore him eight children.
Two nearly identical unsigned affidavits in the Joseph F. Smith collection give the sealing date as 8 February 1842 and 8 February 1843. Sylvia's husband Windsor Lyon, a Nauvoo merchant, was excommunicated in November 1842 for suing the stake president over a loan, and remained on friendly terms with Joseph Smith.
Smith gave Hedlock instructions concerning 'the cut for the altar and gods in the Records of Abraham' for the Times and Seasons. On 1 March he was correcting the first plate, and on 4 March he exhibited the papyri to Hedlock so the blocks could be sized, giving instructions on the arrangement of the writing on the large astronomical cut.
Written at the request of Chicago Democrat editor John Wentworth for a friend writing a history of New Hampshire, Smith's sketch says he began to reflect on salvation 'when about fourteen years of age,' describes 'two glorious personages who exactly resembled each other in features, and likeness,' and reports being commanded to 'go not after them,' with a promise that the fulness of the gospel would later be made known.
The Times and Seasons carried 'A FAC-SIMILE FROM THE BOOK OF ABRAHAM. NO. 1' with Smith's numbered explanation — the angel of the Lord, Abraham fastened upon an altar, the idolatrous priest of Elkenah — followed by the heading 'A TRANSLATION Of some ancient Records that have fallen into our hands, from the Catecombs of Egypt, purporting to be the writings of Abraham … written by his own hand, upon papyrus.'
The Nauvoo midwife Patty Bartlett Sessions, then forty-seven and married to David Sessions, was sealed to Joseph Smith in Newel K. Whitney's chamber. Her own journal entry of June 1860 records: I was sealed to Joseph Smith by Willard Richards Mar 9, 1842, in Newel K. Whitney's chamber, Nauvoo, for time and all eternity. Her daughter Sylvia, herself sealed to Joseph, was present as a witness.
The next issue printed the hypocephalus as Facsimile 2 in a fold-out plate with explanations naming Kolob, Oliblish, Enish-go-on-dosh, Jah-oh-eh and Raukeeyang, together with Abraham 2:19 through the creation chapters ending at 5:21.
Joseph Smith organised the Relief Society with eighteen women, Emma Smith as president and Elizabeth Ann Whitney, Sarah M. Cleveland and Eliza R. Snow as her counselors and secretary. Membership reached over a thousand by September. Within months every member of that presidency except Elizabeth Ann Whitney had been or would be sealed to Joseph Smith, and Whitney's seventeen-year-old daughter was.
The Times and Seasons carried the manuscript history in installments; the 1 April 1842 issue printed the pillar of light, the two personages, 'This is my beloved Son, hear him,' and the answer that he must join none of them. Twenty-two years after the date it assigns to the event, and nearly twelve years after the church was organized, the full story was finally in print in the church's own paper.
Marinda Johnson, married to the apostle Orson Hyde since 1834, was sealed to Joseph Smith while her husband was on his mission to Palestine. Orson returned to Nauvoo in December 1842 and Marinda resumed living with him; they divorced in 1870. A second sealing date of May 1843 appears on an affidavit she personally signed.
According to Bennett's account, Joseph Smith took Sidney Rigdon's unmarried daughter Nancy into a room, locked the door, and told her he had had an affection for her for several years and wished that she should be his. She refused. A letter followed containing the lines, That which is wrong under one circumstance, may be, and often is, right under another, and, Whatever God requires is right, no matter what it is. Bennett printed the letter in the Sangamo Journal on 19 August 1842; church leaders answered with an affidavit from Stephen Markham impugning Nancy Rigdon's character, Nauvoo citizens published counter-affidavits calling Markham a liar, and on 3 September The Wasp carried a notice, said to be authorised by Joseph Smith, effectively withdrawing it.
The third facsimile appeared with explanations identifying figure 1 as Abraham on Pharaoh's throne, figure 2 as 'King Pharaoh, whose name is given in the characters above his head,' figure 4 as the prince of Pharaoh, figure 5 as Shulem, and figure 6 as 'Olimlah, a slave belonging to the prince.'
Bennett resigned as mayor of Nauvoo amid allegations of illicit intercourse with women and signed an affidavit stating that he never knew Joseph Smith to teach that illicit intercourse with females was justifiable. He was excommunicated and by summer was publishing letters in the Springfield Sangamo Journal naming women he said Joseph had approached, using the term spiritual wifery.
Brigham Young sealed Eliza R. Snow, the thirty-eight-year-old Relief Society secretary, to Joseph Smith at the home of Sarah Cleveland, another of his wives, who stood as witness. Snow's journal entry for the day reads only: This is a day of much interest to my feelings. Sarah Cleveland had been sealed to Joseph the same day.
Joseph Smith dictated a revelation instructing Bishop Newel K. Whitney in the exact language to use in sealing his seventeen-year-old daughter Sarah Ann to Joseph. The ceremony bound the pair to be each other's companion so long as you both shall live, preserving yourselves for each other and from all others, and also throughout eternity, reserving only those rights which have been given to my servant Joseph by revelation and commandment and by legal authority in times past.
The paper reprinted the 1835 Article on Marriage and stated that it was the only rule of marriage practised in the church, in order to show that Dr. J. C. Bennett's secret wife system is a matter of his own manufacture. Attached certificates were signed by Emma Smith as president, Elizabeth Ann Whitney and Sarah M. Cleveland as counselors, and Eliza R. Snow as secretary. Cleveland and Snow had both been sealed to Joseph three months earlier, and Whitney's daughter two months earlier.
Two 1843 records preserve Smith telling the story to others. Richards noted a sermon in which Smith repeated the Lord's message that no church was His. A non-Mormon editor quoted Smith saying he prayed 'O Lord, what church shall I join?' and saw first a light, then 'a glorious personage in the light, and then another personage,' the first saying 'Behold my Beloved Son, hear Him.'
Heber C. Kimball sealed nineteen-year-old Emily Dow Partridge to Joseph Smith on 4 March, and her sister Eliza a few days later. Both were orphaned daughters of the late Bishop Edward Partridge and were living in the Smith household. Emily recorded that neither sister knew of the other's marriage at the time, everything was so secret.
William Clayton wrote that he had seen six brass plates covered with ancient characters and that 'Prest J. has translated a portion and says they contain the history of the person with whom they were found and he was a descendant of Ham through the loins of Pharaoh king of Egypt.' The plates were later shown to be a nineteenth-century forgery made to entrap Smith.
William Clayton officiated while Emma was in St. Louis buying store goods. Walker later recounted that Joseph had told her, I have been commanded of God to take another wife, and you are the woman, and gave her until the next day to decide, adding that if she rejected the message the gate will be closed forever against you. She sought and said she received a revelation of her own.
Emma agreed to two additional wives on condition that she choose them, and chose Emily and Eliza Partridge, not knowing they were already sealed to her husband. Emily wrote that to save family trouble Brother Joseph thought it best to have another ceremony performed, and that from that very hour, however, Emma was our bitter enemy. Emma afterwards also gave Joseph the Lawrence sisters, Maria and Sarah, orphaned Canadian wards for whom Joseph had been appointed legal guardian.
Heber C. Kimball proposed the match to Joseph and then to his daughter, who was two or three months short of her fifteenth birthday. Helen later wrote that her father taught me the principle of Celestial marriage and having a great desire to be connected with the Prophet, Joseph, he offered me to him, and that her mother grieved to see her child, who had scarcely seen her fifteenth summer, following in the same thorny path. Helen continued to live in her parents' home.
Days after Emma took part in four of her husband's plural sealings, the Smiths were sealed to each other in a meeting of the Quorum of the Anointed, the third such sealing performed in the church. James and Harriet Adams were sealed in the same meeting. Emma and Harriet were the first women to witness the quorum's activities; Emma received her endowment on or just before 28 September.
Hyrum Smith urged Joseph to dictate the revelation so he could read it to Emma and persuade her. William Clayton wrote ten pages as Joseph dictated. The text promises exaltation to those sealed by proper authority, states that if any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another, and the first give her consent, he cannot commit adultery, and ends by commanding, Let mine handmaid, Emma Smith, receive all those that have been given unto my servant Joseph, with the warning that if she abide not this commandment she shall be destroyed. Hyrum read it to Emma, who rejected it.
William Clayton records a revelation on the eternity of the marriage covenant, including plurality of wives. It is not published. George A. Smith later said it was known to perhaps one or two hundred persons.
Bishop Newel K. Whitney had a copy made by Joseph C. Kingsbury before the original was destroyed. William Clayton reported that Joseph said Emma had so teased, and urgently entreated him for the privilege of destroying it that he consented to pacify her. William McLellin, who spoke with Emma in 1847, wrote that Joseph himself pulled open the fire with his fingers and burned it after she refused to touch it. Emma denied burning it in an 1856 interview.
A manuscript blessing dated this day, purporting to appoint Joseph Smith III 'my successor to the Presidency of the High Priesthood,' surfaced in 1981 and was traded between the LDS and RLDS archives. It was later established to be a forgery by Mark Hofmann. The date is listed here because scholarship written between 1981 and 1985 treats it as genuine.
Smith's platform, General Smith's Views of the Powers and Policy of the Government of the United States, proposed that Congress buy the freedom of enslaved people with revenue from the sale of public lands, ending slavery by 1850. He had earlier denounced abolitionists, and Nauvoo barred Black men from voting, office and militia service.
Emma Smith opened the Relief Society's first meeting of 1844 by reading a proclamation condemning the Seducer of female chastity, the Slanderer of Female Character, and calling on the whole virtuous female population of the city to shut such people out of their houses and society. The women voted unanimously to uphold the President in putting down iniquity. Relief Society meetings then lapsed.
A secret council recorded by William Clayton as the "Council of Fifty or Kingdom of God" met to consider western settlement, Smith's presidential campaign and petitions to government. Its members later included non-Mormons. Smith was ordained king, priest and ruler over the council; whether the ordination carried any political claim is disputed.
Joseph Smith convened, over his Red Brick Store, the body that became known as the Council of Fifty — a civil and political council concerned with the Kingdom of God, distinct from the church's ecclesiastical structure. William Clayton kept the minutes.
At a Council of Fifty meeting Joseph Smith is remembered to have told the assembled men that his work was nearly done and that he was rolling the burden of the kingdom off his own shoulders onto theirs, telling them to round up their shoulders and bear it. The words are known from later recollections — Orson Hyde's 1869 address, Benjamin F. Johnson, Wilford Woodruff, Dennison Lott Harris — and from a declaration the Twelve drafted in late 1844 or early 1845. Clayton's 1844 minutes record only 'instructions pertaining to the kingdom of God.'
A council of thirty-two leaders excommunicated William and Jane Law and Robert Foster for unchristian conduct without summoning them. Three days later William Law held a public meeting denouncing Joseph as a fallen prophet and organised the True Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Law said he would reconcile only if Joseph would acknowledge publicly that he had taught and practised the doctrine of plurality of wives and own the whole system to be from Hell.
Neibaur, a Jewish convert who was teaching Smith German and Hebrew, wrote in his journal that Smith told him that day of his early religious quest and of going into the woods to pray. It is the last known contemporary record of Smith telling the story; he was killed five weeks later.
Days after a Hancock County grand jury indicted him for adultery and fornication on the Laws' complaint concerning Maria Lawrence, Joseph Smith addressed the Saints in Nauvoo: What a thing it is for a man to be accused of committing adultery, and having seven wives, when I can only find one. I am the same man, and as innocent as I was fourteen years ago; and I can prove them all perjurers. He had by then been sealed to roughly thirty women.
The single issue of the dissenters' paper carried affidavits from Austin Cowles, William Law and Jane Law describing the plural-marriage revelation, including the provision granting a man the privilege of marrying ten virgins. It also charged Joseph with attempting to unite church and state and called him a demon in human shape. Three days later the city council, with Joseph presiding as mayor, declared the press a public nuisance and ordered it destroyed; it was smashed and the papers burned the same evening.
William Law, his brother Wilson, Charles Ivins, the Higbee brothers and the Foster brothers issued a four-page paper carrying a preamble, fifteen resolutions and sworn affidavits. It called for "the UNCONDITIONAL REPEAL OF THE NAUVOO CITY CHARTER," advocated "unmitigated disobedience to Political Revelations," resolved that "we will not acknowledge any man as king or law-giver to the church," and printed Law's affidavit that Hyrum Smith had read him a revelation authorizing plural marriage.
The council sat for hours across two days. Joseph Smith said that if he had a council who felt as he did the establishment would be a nuisance before night, and called it a greater nuisance than a dead carcass; Hyrum Smith said the best way was to smash the press and pi the type. The council passed a libel ordinance and ordered the nuisance abated. About eight o'clock the marshal reported that he had removed the press, type and printed papers into the street and burned them.
Justice of the peace Thomas Morrison wrote out an arrest warrant charging Joseph Smith and others with "unlawfully & with force" destroying the Expositor, treated as the publishers' property. Charles A. Foster, writing aboard a steamer on 12 June, gave the New York Herald the proprietors' account of two or three hundred Legionnaires breaking the office door with a sledgehammer.
The Nauvoo municipal court released Smith on habeas corpus, finding the riot charge unsubstantiated because the abatement had been orderly; the next day Smith, sitting as judge, discharged the others. On 17 June the defendants submitted to a hearing before justice of the peace Daniel H. Wells, who also discharged them. To Hancock County non-Mormons this looked like a man judging his own case.
Citing newspaper threats and reports from the surrounding country, Smith as mayor declared the city under martial law and ordered the Legion and police to let no person or property pass in or out without orders. The proclamation was later cited as evidence of the treason charge.
The Rigdon family boarded the steamer Osprey for Pittsburgh, sent there partly to establish residency for the vice-presidential ticket and partly, according to Joseph Smith's diary, to get Rigdon out of danger. James J. Strang would later publish a letter dated the same day in which Joseph appointed him to plant a stake in Wisconsin and, Strangites held, named him successor. Strang further claimed that on 27 June, the day of the martyrdom, an angel ordained him a prophet, seer, revelator and translator, and that the letter reached him by mail on 9 July.
Joseph and Hyrum Smith and fifteen others surrendered on Governor Ford's guarantee of safety and were arraigned before justice of the peace Robert F. Smith, who was also captain of the Carthage Greys. The riot case was continued and bail posted; Joseph and Hyrum were then served with writs charging treason, a non-bailable offence, and taken to Carthage Jail without a hearing on that charge.
Held in the Carthage jail on charges of riot and treason arising from the Expositor's destruction and the mustering of the Nauvoo Legion, both men were shot by a mob that broke into their cell. Plural marriage was not made public by the church for another eight years, when Orson Pratt announced it in Salt Lake City in August 1852.
Ford discharged the Warsaw militia that morning, left two companies of the Carthage Greys guarding the jail and rode to Nauvoo. In the late afternoon the discharged Warsaw men returned and stormed the jail. Willard Richards's journal records the cry to surrender, three or four shots, and a hundred armed men around the door. Hyrum was shot first; Joseph was hit at the window. John Taylor was severely wounded and Richards unhurt.
A mob drawn largely from the disbanded Warsaw militia stormed Carthage Jail in the late afternoon. Hyrum was shot first; Joseph was killed at the window. John Taylor was badly wounded and Willard Richards was unhurt. They were the only two apostles in Illinois — the rest were in the eastern states campaigning for Joseph's presidential run.
William Clayton recorded that Joseph had said that if he and Hyrum were taken away, his brother Samuel H. Smith should be his successor. Newel K. Whitney used the note to argue against making William Marks trustee-in-trust. Samuel died on 30 July, aged thirty-six, after being chased from Carthage.
Rigdon arrived from Pittsburgh, declined a request from Willard Richards, Parley P. Pratt and George A. Smith to meet with them, and preached at Sunday services instead. He told the Saints it was the Lord's wish that a guardian be appointed to build up the church to Joseph, and asked William Marks to call a special assembly. Marks announced it for the morning of 8 August.
With nine apostles now in Nauvoo, Brigham Young convened the Twelve, the Nauvoo High Council and the high priests and asked Rigdon to state his case. Rigdon described a Pittsburgh manifestation shown to his mind rather than an open vision: no man could be Joseph's successor, and he would continue to speak for the dead prophet until Joseph descended and ordained him. Young replied that he did not care who led the church of God if God said so, but that he must know God said so, and that he had the keys and means of knowing.
Thousands gathered in the grove near the temple. Rigdon stood in a wagon with his back to a steady wind and spoke for more than an hour, arguing that every man would stand in his own place and calling, that Joseph and Hyrum held their authority through eternity, and that authority remained in the church as Joseph had organized it. Thomas Bullock took the sermon down in Taylor shorthand; it was not deciphered until the twenty-first century. Brigham Young then called the congregation back for the afternoon.
The quorums took their places as in a solemn assembly. Brigham Young told the congregation that the Quorum of the Twelve held the keys of the kingdom of God in all the world and that no man could put another between the Twelve and the prophet Joseph. He asked whether the Saints wanted a guardian, a prophet or a spokesman; the church's own report says not a hand was raised. On the motion to sustain the Twelve, Woodruff later wrote, 'At once there was a sea of hands, a universal vote; a contrary vote was called and not a hand was raised in a congregation of about fifteen thousand Saints.'
In an epistle to the Saints Young wrote, 'Let no man presume for a moment that his place will be filled by another; for, remember, he stands in his own place and always will.' He did not, in this or any other 1844 document, refer to a transfiguration.
The Nauvoo paper acknowledged that 'great excitement prevails throughout the world to know who shall be the successor of Joseph Smith,' and reported that the 8 August special conference had carried, without a dissenting voice, that the Twelve should preside over the whole church. The same issue carried a notice cutting off James J. Strang and Aaron Smith for circulating a purported revelation of 18 June 1844 and trying to establish a stake called Voree.
Before a congregation the Nauvoo Neighbor reported at six to seven thousand, Brigham Young laid out what he called Rigdon's secret plan to divide the church, and testified that Rigdon had ordained men prophets, priests and kings at private meetings. Rigdon was in St. Louis and did not attend. Bishop Newel K. Whitney and the high council voted to cut him off; W. W. Phelps moved that he be delivered over to the buffetings of Satan until he repents. About ten hands were raised for Rigdon. Two days later he left for Pittsburgh.
The general conference upheld Brigham Young as president of the Quorum of the Twelve and, in the words of Phelps's motion as printed, as of the first presidency of the church, then sustained each apostle in turn by unanimous vote. The conference also organized high priests and presiding officers over districts across the union under the direction of the Twelve.
Within a month of reaching Pittsburgh, Rigdon had organized a church with himself as First President and launched the Latter Day Saints' Messenger and Advocate, reusing the name of the old Kirtland organ. Its first number carried his signed statement to the public and letters describing conditions in Nauvoo. Over the next two years it argued the succession case in print, branch resolutions and all.
Marks published a notice in the Times and Seasons saying that after mature and candid deliberation he was convinced Rigdon's claims to the presidency were not founded in truth, that he had been deceived by specious pretences, and that the Twelve were the proper persons to lead the church. He warned everyone under his influence against Rigdon's pretended visions and revelations.
Rigdon stopped emphasizing his own guardianship and began accusing Joseph Smith of having been a fallen prophet, principally over plural marriage. About forty per cent of the Philadelphia branch was excommunicated between September 1844 and 1847, most for rejecting apostolic succession; a number of those converts signed for Rigdon, then for Strang, then rejected Strang too.
Wilford Woodruff's address to the officers and members in the British Islands appeared in the Millennial Star. Of the 8 August meeting he wrote: 'It was evident to the Saints that the mantle of Joseph had fallen upon him, the road that he pointed out could be seen so plainly, that none need err therein.' He described no transfiguration, no change of voice and no vision.
A Hancock County grand jury indicted nine men in October 1844 for the murders; four fled and were never arrested. Five went to trial in 1845, including Levi Williams, colonel of the 59th Illinois militia regiment, and the Warsaw Signal editor Thomas Sharp. All were acquitted.
The Twelve ordained William Smith Presiding Patriarch. He spent the summer arguing that the office carried a right to lead, wrote to the Times and Seasons emphasizing that he was the only surviving son of Joseph Smith Sr., and in October published a pamphlet charging that Brigham Young privately conceded 'little Joseph' was the rightful heir but thought it imprudent to say so. He was cut off, and later allied with Strang and then with Lyman Wight.
Four of Strang's followers, digging where he directed under a tree at Voree, Wisconsin, unearthed three small brass plates covered with an alphabetical and pictorial record. Strang translated them within days and published them with witness statements. Martin Harris, three Whitmers, Hiram Page, William Smith and Lucy Mack Smith all followed Strang for a time.
The Twelve opened the attic of the unfinished temple and administered the endowment to about five thousand Saints in a matter of weeks, alongside roughly thirteen hundred sealings. Brigham Young later said the only reason for tarrying in Nauvoo as long as they did was to give the brethren those blessings.
As the Saints prepared to leave Illinois, about thirty women were sealed to the dead Joseph Smith for eternity in the newly finished temple, and to living men, chiefly Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball, for time. Most had been sealed to Joseph during his life; Brodie inferred that the remainder had been too. The register of these ordinances is the closest thing to an official contemporary list.
The first wagons crossed the Mississippi into Iowa Territory and camped at Sugar Creek. Lyman Wight had already taken his pine company toward Texas. Emma Smith stayed. So did most of those who would eventually form the Reorganization.
Speaking at Winter Quarters to William McCary, a Black convert with a white wife who complained of mistreatment, Young said race was not the issue and cited Q. Walker Lewis: “We have one of the best Elders, an African.” Young told McCary it had nothing to do with blood, for of one blood God had made all flesh.
With Young hundreds of miles west, Pratt responded to the McCary controversy by saying McCary had the blood of Ham in him and that those descended from Ham could not hold the priesthood. It is the earliest surviving statement of a restriction — and it names Ham, not Cain, the lineage Young would later insist on.
Returning to Winter Quarters, Young heard from William Appleby, president of the eastern branches, that William Smith had ordained a Black elder in Massachusetts and that Enoch Lewis, that elder's son, had married a white woman and had a child. Young's recorded response was severe. Historians place this alongside the McCary affair as the immediate trigger for the restriction.
At Orson Hyde's home on the Missouri, nine of the Twelve sustained Brigham Young as President of the Church with Heber C. Kimball and Willard Richards as counselors. A log tabernacle was thrown up at Kanesville so a conference could ratify it. Orson Pratt argued systematically against the change; John Taylor and Parley P. Pratt, both in the Salt Lake Valley, were also opposed, as was Lyman Wight. Had the full quorum been present, historians have argued, it might not have happened.
The Twelve had blessed Wight's Texas venture on 12 August 1844 but grew uneasy about his intentions. They disfellowshipped him pending further information; he answered with a pamphlet arguing that Joseph had given him his mission personally and through the Grand Council, and that no one but God or Joseph could revoke it. His colony at Zodiac lasted until 1858.
Cowdery had returned to the church in 1848 at Council Bluffs and wintered with the Whitmers in Richmond, Missouri. David Whitmer, John Whitmer, Philander Page and others said he reaffirmed his testimony on his deathbed. No record of a denial by any of the eleven witnesses has been produced.
In a joint session, Young tied slavery to scripture and priesthood: “I will remark with regard to slavery, inasmuch as we believe in the Bible, inasmuch as we believe in the ordinances of God, in the Priesthood and order and decrees of God, we must believe in slavery.” He added that the colored race had brought severe curses upon themselves and that he was not authorized to remove them.
The same legislative session passed an act regulating service that legalized the holding of Black servants in Utah Territory. Congress abolished slavery in the territories in 1862. Young told Horace Greeley in 1859 that the Church considered slavery of divine institution, not to be abolished until the curse pronounced on Ham was removed.
The day after the servitude bill passed, Young returned to the legislature. Wilford Woodruff recorded him saying: “the Lord told Cain that he should not receive the blessings of the preisthood nor his see[d], until the last of the posterity of Able had received the priesthood, until the redemtion of the earth. If there never was a prophet, or apostle of Jesus Christ spoke it before, I tell you, this people that are commonly called negroes are the children of Cain.” In another 1852 statement he said a man with African blood in him could not hold one jot nor tittle of priesthood.
At a special missionary conference in Salt Lake City, Orson Pratt delivered a prepared discourse defending plural marriage and the 1843 revelation was read publicly for the first time. Pratt argued from modern revelation, the constitution, the promises to Abraham and the claim that monogamy invited immorality.
A territory-wide revival of confession, catechism and rebaptism swept Utah. Jedediah M. Grant of the First Presidency was its chief spokesman. Sermons of the period urged members to renew covenants and warned covenant-breakers in extreme terms, and the whole population, in most settlements, was rebaptized.
Twelve days after Lucy Mack Smith's death, Lewis C. Bidamon, Emma Bidamon and Joseph Smith III signed a bill of sale for 'four Egyptian Mummies with the records of them' to a man known only as A. Combs. Combs sold most of it on; the rest, mounted on backing paper, stayed with his housekeeper's family.
During a preaching campaign to rouse the Utah Saints, Brigham Young said there were transgressors who, if they understood their condition, "would beg of their brethren to shed their blood, that the smoke thereof might ascend to God as an offering." Jedediah M. Grant went further, urging that a place be designated where such blood could be shed. Wilford Woodruff wrote that Young's preaching made the hearts of many tremble.
In a Reformation sermon Young said there are sins for which men 'cannot receive forgiveness in this world, or that which is to come,' and that such a person, seeing his condition, 'would be perfectly willing to have their blood spilt upon the ground, that the smoke thereof might ascend to heaven as an offering for their sins.' In February 1857 he pressed the point again, asking whether a listener would love a sinning brother 'well enough to shed their blood.' Jedediah M. Grant, at the October 1856 conference and after, argued that the people of God had a right 'to kill a sinner to save him.'
Apostle Parley P. Pratt was shot and stabbed near Van Buren, Crawford County, Arkansas, by Hector McLean, the estranged legal husband of Pratt's plural wife Eleanor McComb McLean. Pratt had been arrested on McLean's complaint, discharged by a federal commissioner, and pursued on the road. He lived about two hours. News reached Utah in late June, along with eastern newspaper reports celebrating the killing.
Albert Carrington told a large gathering that he could not tell Brigham Young from Joseph Smith when Young spoke at the stand in Nauvoo. Brigham Young then said that somebody had passed a finger over Carrington's eyes and that he could see no one but Joseph speaking. Wilford Woodruff bore a similar public testimony in April 1872, and dozens of written accounts followed from the 1880s to the 1900s.
With a federal army on the march to Utah, Daniel H. Wells, commander of the Nauvoo Legion, ordered every community readied for war: stockpile provisions, waste nothing, and sell no grain or goods to wagon trains bound for California. Brigham Young recalled missionaries and outlying colonists. The instruction not to sell to outsiders was general and was obeyed in most settlements.
Apostle George A. Smith began a tour of the southern settlements carrying Young's orders. Reporting on the trip from the Salt Lake Bowery on 13 September, he said that at one settlement 'in spite of all I could do, I found myself preaching a military discourse,' and that at Harmony his discourse 'partook of the military more than the religious.' He also camped near the Arkansas company on his return.
The Arkansas company, roughly 120 to 140 people led by John T. Baker and Alexander Fancher and travelling with a large cattle herd, camped near Salt Lake City. Advised to go north around the Great Salt Lake, they turned back at the Bear River and took the southern road instead, through Provo, Springville, Payson and Fillmore.
The company reached Cedar City, the last settlement on the road where grain could be ground and supplies bought. The store had little to sell; Bishop Philip Klingensmith's mill charged an extreme price to grind their wheat. Angry words followed; the town marshal tried to arrest some of the men for intoxication and blasphemy and was faced down. The company left after about an hour.
Haight sent an express to William Dame at Parowan asking permission to call out the militia against the emigrants. Dame convened a council, which judged the company probably harmless, and wrote back: 'Do not notice their threats. Words are but wind—they injure no one; but if they commit acts of violence against citizens inform me by express.' Dissatisfied, Haight sent for John D. Lee.
Local leaders met at Cedar City. Laban Morrill, a member of the stake high council, objected to the plan. The meeting resolved to put the question to Brigham Young and dispatch a fast rider. By then Lee was already on his way to the Meadows with orders to gather Paiutes, and other couriers had been sent to the outlying settlements.
At dawn the emigrants were fired on in their camp at Mountain Meadows. Several were killed and others wounded; the company circled and dug in, banking earth against the wagon wheels, and held out for days with no access to the spring. Attackers had painted themselves; survivors later said they saw the paint washed off in the creek. James Haslam left Cedar City for Salt Lake City between five and six that evening.
Haight rode to Parowan. Dame and his council, still believing the emigrants were victims of an Indian attack, wanted to send the militia to protect them. In a private meeting Haight told Dame that settlers were involved and that the emigrants knew it. Dame set aside his council's decision and authorized the militia to act.
Haslam reached Salt Lake City and interrupted Young in a meeting with Jacob Hamblin. Young replied the same day to Haight: 'In regard to emigration trains passing through our settlements, we must not interfere with them until they are first notified to keep away. You must not meddle with them. The Indians we expect will do as they please but you should try and preserve good feelings with them. There are no other trains going south that I know of. If those that are there will leave, let them go in peace.' Haslam started back within the hour.
William Bateman carried a white flag to the corral. Lee entered and offered terms: give up the weapons, load the wounded into wagons, and walk out under militia escort. The emigrants, out of water and low on ammunition, accepted. The youngest children and wounded went first in two wagons, then the women and children on foot, then the men, each walking beside an armed militiaman. At a prearranged signal the militiamen turned and fired. Roughly 120 people were killed. Seventeen children, all six or under, were spared.
Klingensmith gathered seventeen small children and carried them to Jacob Hamblin's house at the north end of the valley, where Rachel Hamblin took them in; one one-year-old girl had been shot through the arm. Lee wanted to separate the wounded Dunlap girl from her sisters and Rachel persuaded him not to. The next morning Haight and Dame came to the ranch and, at the massacre site, quarrelled over who had ordered what.
Haslam reached Cedar City about eleven on Sunday morning, having ridden roughly 600 miles in six days. The letter he carried told the settlers not to meddle with the train. The massacre was two days old.
Governor Brigham Young issued a proclamation declaring martial law and forbidding armed forces to enter the territory, after Captain Stewart Van Vliet's visit to Salt Lake City. The Nauvoo Legion went on to burn federal supply trains and Forts Bridger and Supply. The Utah War produced no pitched battle between the armies.
Lee reported the massacre to Brigham Young as the work of Indians. Anson and Mary Call swore that Lee stayed at their house in early October 1857 and told them the massacre was perpetrated by Indians exclusively, and that he had told Young the same. George A. Smith's later account to T. B. H. Stenhouse describes Indians attacking, interpreters failing to intervene, and a relief party arriving 'too late to afford any other assistance than to rescue a few children.'
Assistant army surgeon Charles Brewer reported burying remains scattered over the site: skulls, bones and hair unburied at the trench of the first attack, and further concentrations of remains in a ravine and on open ground north of the road. Brevet Major James Henry Carleton's party raised a stone cairn topped with a cedar cross reading 'Vengeance is mine and I will repay saith the Lord.'
Acting on instructions from Washington, Forney collected sixteen surviving children in July 1858 and the seventeenth in April 1859. He reported that none of them had lived among Indians at all: they had been taken from the field the evening of the massacre, driven in a wagon to Hamblin's house by Lee and Daniel Tullis, and distributed the next day among Mormon families at Cedar City, Harmony and Santa Clara.
Congress appropriated funds to locate the survivors and carry them home. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs reported in November 1859 that fifteen of the seventeen had been brought back and restored to relatives in Arkansas, with the remaining two on their way. They reached home shortly before the Civil War began.
At twenty-seven, after fifteen years of refusing, Joseph Smith III travelled with his mother Emma to the April conference of the 'New Organization' at Amboy, Illinois, and was ordained President of the High Priesthood. The body soon dropped 'New Organization' and took the 1838 name, later adding 'Reorganized.' It rejected plural marriage and, over the following two decades, most of the other Nauvoo innovations.
Travelling south, Young's party stopped at the cairn. Wilford Woodruff recorded it in his journal: the pile of stone about twelve feet high and beginning to tumble down, the wooden cross reading 'Vengence is mine and I will repay saith the Lord,' and then — 'President Young said it should be Vengence is mine and I have taken a little.'
Congress made bigamy in the territories punishable by five years and a $500 fine, annulled the Utah legislature's incorporation of the church, and barred it from holding property worth more than $50,000. Enforcement was almost nonexistent during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Sarah M. Kimball chaired a meeting where leading women drafted resolutions against the pending Cullom Bill and adopted a resolution calling for the right to vote. Eliza R. Snow arrived partway through and told them they should rise up in the dignity of their calling and speak for themselves.
Between three and five thousand women filled the old adobe tabernacle to protest the Cragin and Cullom bills. Sarah Kimball presided and no men were present except reporters. Similar meetings followed in dozens of settlements across the territory, and newspapers nationwide reprinted the speeches.
The all-male territorial legislature passed a woman suffrage bill unanimously and acting governor S. A. Mann signed it. About twenty-five women voted in a Salt Lake City municipal election two days later, making Utah women the first in the nation to cast ballots under an equal suffrage law.
Thirteen years after the massacre, John D. Lee, Isaac Haight and George Wood were cut off from the Church for the murders. Lee travelled to St. George in December to ask Young why now — 'If it was wrong now, it certainly was wrong then.' Haight was rebaptized in 1874. The Church had already, in 1859, released Haight and other Cedar City leaders from their callings.
Wyman's St. Louis Museum, which had exhibited two of the mummies since 1856, removed to Chicago in 1863; by January 1864 the collection had passed to the showman Joseph H. Wood. The fire reached Wood's Museum shortly after midnight and reduced it to brick and ash; the Chicago Tribune reported that the only article spared from the collection was a silver-mounted revolver. Joseph Smith III later said he had seen two of the mummies and part of the records there before the fire.
Nine men were indicted for the massacre. Most were eventually arrested. Only Lee was tried, convicted and executed; one indicted man turned state's evidence and others spent years as fugitives. William Dame's case was severed and postponed and never came to trial.
Congress gave federal judges jurisdiction over antipolygamy prosecutions in Utah and the power to select jurors, stripping the Mormon-dominated probate courts of criminal jurisdiction. Church leaders then arranged a test case to challenge the Morrill Act.
Lee was tried at Beaver before Judge Jacob Boreman, with Robert N. Baskin among the prosecutors. Philip Klingensmith testified for the prosecution. The jury deadlocked: the Latter-day Saint jurors and one other voted to acquit, three non-Mormons to convict. The prosecution had used the trial to attack Brigham Young.
Retried under U.S. Attorney Sumner Howard, Lee was convicted of murder in the first degree. Howard wrote to Attorney General Alphonso Taft that the case of John D. Lee 'and that alone was tried,' that it became apparent early on there was no evidence connecting the chief authorities of the church with the massacre, and that documents produced by those authorities showed the orders issuing from Salt Lake City were 'directly and positively contrary to all shedding of blood.'
Lee was taken to the massacre site, seated on his coffin, and shot by a firing squad. James Fennemore photographed the execution and the body on the ground afterward. Lee had refused offers to save his life by charging Brigham Young with ordering the massacre. His confession, edited by his attorney William W. Bishop, was published later that year as Mormonism Unveiled and became a bestseller.
A unanimous Supreme Court upheld George Reynolds's conviction and the constitutionality of the 1862 act. Chief Justice Waite wrote that laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices.
Taylor convened a council after Abel again sought the endowment. Zebedee Coltrin and Abraham Smoot testified to recollections of Joseph Smith barring Black ordination. Abel produced his Seventy's certificates and stated that the Prophet Joseph had told him he was entitled to the priesthood. Joseph F. Smith supported Abel's account. Taylor let the ordination stand as made before the word of the Lord was fully understood, but refused the temple. Taylor called the seventy-three-year-old Abel on a final mission in 1883; he fell ill, returned to Utah, and died on 25 December 1884.
Months before her death Emma told her son Joseph Smith III that she frequently wrote day after day, sitting at the table close by Joseph, 'he sitting with his face buried in his hat, with the stone in it, and dictating hour after hour with nothing between us.' She had written to Emma Pilgrim in 1870 that the interpreters were used for the lost portion and a small dark stone thereafter.
Shortly before her death, Emma Smith was interviewed by her son Joseph Smith III, then president of the RLDS church. Asked whether her husband had other wives, she answered: He had no other wife but me; nor did he to my knowledge ever have. Asked about a revelation on polygamy or spiritual wifery, she said there was none. The interview became the RLDS church's evidentiary foundation, and prompted Joseph F. Smith's collection of affidavits in Utah.
The Book of Abraham, first gathered into Franklin D. Richards's 1851 Pearl of Great Price with the three facsimiles, was canonized as scripture. The phrase 'purporting to be' was dropped from the heading in the 1878 Salt Lake edition and did not return.
On the fiftieth anniversary of the Church's organization, Taylor declared a biblical Jubilee, forgiving half of delinquent tithing and half the debts owed to the Perpetual Emigrating Fund. When the forgiven half failed to bring in the rest, he offered a carrot-and-stick approach in 1881. Non-compliance with tithing was widespread through the century. Brigham Young had told the October 1875 general conference that neither he nor anyone else had ever paid tithing as the revelation actually required, and had in 1861 invited members who wanted to know about Church money 'item by item' to inspect the books.
George Q. Cannon held up the volume before general conference and proposed that it be accepted as scripture, which the conference did. Only after this did references to the vision in general conference begin to multiply. Harper dates the vision's rise to doctrinal centrality from this moment, not from Joseph Smith's lifetime.
Answering a newspaper claim that he had recanted, Whitmer published a proclamation stating that he had 'never at any time denied that testimony or any part thereof,' appending the names of twenty-two Richmond citizens to vouch for him. His 1887 Address repeated it, added that neither Cowdery nor Harris ever denied theirs, and gave his description of the stone in the hat — inside a book that rejects Joseph Smith's church after 1834.
Congress made cohabiting with more than one woman a misdemeanor, requiring no proof of a marriage ceremony. It disqualified polygamists from juries, office and the vote, and vacated Utah's election machinery in favour of five federally appointed commissioners who added a test oath of their own devising.
President John Taylor ended the practice of presenting financial reports to general conference. Quinn dates the resumption to Rudger Clawson's formal report at April 1906 conference, 'the first provided to the public since President Taylor ended them in 1884.'
Clawson told the court he regretted that the laws of his country should come into conflict with the laws of God, but that when they did he would invariably choose the latter. The judge, who had intended leniency, sentenced him to four years and fines totalling $800.
Taylor told the Saints that no man had a right to control his conscience, then went into hiding. Church leaders instituted an organized underground; over the next years nearly every Utah settlement was raided by federal marshals, often at night.
The First Presidency established settlements in Chihuahua and Sonora as a refuge, beginning with Colonia Juarez, Colonia Dublan and Colonia Diaz. Mexican federal statutes since 1884 also prohibited marriage where one partner was already married, a fact church leaders knew from the outset.
About 150 words found after Taylor's death declare that everlasting covenants cannot be abrogated. Lorin C. Woolley, one of Taylor's bodyguards, later claimed that Joseph Smith and Jesus Christ appeared that night and that Taylor ordained five men to keep plural marriage alive whatever the church did.
The act dissolved the church corporation and the Perpetual Emigrating Fund, directed the attorney general to escheat church property above $50,000, abolished spousal privilege so wives could be compelled to testify, required an antipolygamy oath of voters, jurors and officeholders, and revoked the vote from every woman in Utah.
Congress dissolved the corporation of the Church and directed the attorney general to forfeit and escheat to the United States its property held over a $50,000 limit, exempting only buildings used exclusively for worship, parsonages and burial grounds. The proceeds were to fund common schools in the territory. The Supreme Court upheld the confiscation in Late Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints v. United States on 19 May 1890.
Taylor died in hiding, still pursued. Wilford Woodruff, as president of the Twelve, took charge of a church whose property was being escheated and whose leadership was largely in concealment or prison.
The Supreme Court sustained the dissolution of the church corporation and the forfeiture of its property to the United States, with an exception for buildings used exclusively for worship. The temples were now plainly at risk.
Woodruff wrote in his journal that he was under the necessity of acting for the temporal salvation of the church. He drafted the statement in the third person, intending signatures from the Presidency and Twelve; George Q. Cannon edited it down by roughly 150 words and it went out as a personal declaration over Woodruff's name alone.
Lorenzo Snow moved that the conference accept Woodruff's declaration concerning plural marriages as authoritative and binding, recognizing him as the only man on earth holding the keys of the sealing ordinances. The vote was unanimous. Zina D. H. Young wrote that day that the hearts of all were tried but looked to God and submitted.
Asked before the master in chancery whether existing plural relations should also cease, Woodruff answered that that had been the intention. Restoration of the escheated property depended on such assurances. George Q. Cannon testified the same month that he knew of no plural marriage entered into since the Manifesto.
He put a question to the Saints: whether it was wiser to continue attempting plural marriage against the laws of the nation and at the cost of the temples, or to submit. He said the Lord had shown him by vision and revelation exactly what would take place, and that he would have gone to prison himself had God not commanded otherwise.
Church tithing revenue fell from $878,394 in 1890 to $576,584 in 1893 as Utah's speculative bubble burst following the collapse of London's Baring Brothers. The Church borrowed heavily, and lost further sums in failed mining ventures.
Congress invited Utah to apply a seventh time. In April of the same year, at a meeting of the Presidency and Twelve in the Salt Lake Temple, Woodruff told George Q. Cannon that the day was near when there would be no difficulty in the way of good men securing noble wives; that year the Presidency authorized plural marriages in Canada, Mexico and two Utah temples.
Woodruff wrote in his journal that “Black Jane wanted to know if I would not let her have her Endowments in the Temple. This I Could not do as it was against the Law of God.” George Q. Cannon proposed instead a special ceremony attaching her to Joseph Smith's family as a servant. It was performed with Zina D. H. Young standing proxy for Jane, who was not present.
The state constitution guaranteed religious toleration and provided that polygamous or plural marriages are forever prohibited. It also restored the vote to women, an issue that became the constitutional convention's most heated debate, with B. H. Roberts arguing against and Orson F. Whitney and Franklin S. Richards for.
Running as a Democrat against a Republican slate that included her husband Angus M. Cannon, she outpolled him and became the first woman state senator in the United States. Two women were elected to the state house and eleven more to county offices the same day.
Snow was ordained president with the Church seriously in debt. A committee report summarized by Rudger Clawson put the Church's surplus or net worth at $235,482.90 against loans bearing 5 to 10 percent interest, and, in Clawson's words, showed that the Church 'if not bankrupt, was surely upon the verge of bankruptcy.' Apostle Francis M. Lyman recorded telling Snow his special mission was 'to get the Church out of debt.'
Travelling to a stake conference in drought-stricken St. George, Snow reported receiving a revelation on tithing. He declared, in the Church's own retelling, that 'The time has now come for every Latter-day Saint, who calculates to be prepared for the future and to hold his feet strong upon a proper foundation, to do the will of the Lord and pay his tithing in full.' He then carried the reformation to stakes across Utah and Idaho. On 30 May in Salt Lake City he told a startled audience the Church had 'no reserve at all.'
After B. H. Roberts was barred from his seat in Congress over his three wives, Snow declared publicly that the church had positively abandoned plural marriage in this and every other state and that no officer had any authority to perform such a marriage. A small number continued to be performed.
The Utah legislature chose Smoot, an apostle since 1900 and a monogamist, by 46 votes to 16. The Salt Lake Ministerial Association and Protestant and reform groups petitioned that he not be seated, alleging that the church's leaders still connived at plural marriage.
The church president was the first witness, testifying on six separate days. He acknowledged cohabiting with five wives and fathering eleven children since 1890, and said he had taken his chances rather than abandon his children and their mothers. Asked about new plural marriages, he distinguished acts sanctioned by the church from acts of individuals.
Joseph F. Smith read a statement affirming that no plural marriages had been solemnized with the sanction, consent or knowledge of the church, and announcing that all such marriages were prohibited, with excommunication for any officer or member who solemnized or entered one. It was sustained unanimously.
Apostles John W. Taylor and Matthias F. Cowley, who had continued to marry and to solemnize plural marriages, signed resignations to be used if needed. They were formally dropped from the Quorum of the Twelve at the afternoon session of general conference on 8 April 1906.
By 1907, after a decade of questions about marriage and temple access for Black members and for white members previously married to Black spouses, the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve had agreed that no member of Black African descent could receive the priesthood or be admitted to the temple. Baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost remained open.
The Committee on Privileges and Elections had voted 7 to 5 in June 1906 that Smoot was not entitled to his seat. The full Senate rejected the resolution, 28 for expulsion and 42 against, short of the two-thirds required. Smoot served twenty-six more years.
Joseph F. Smith announced to April conference: 'The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints owes not a dollar that it cannot pay at once. At last we are in a position that we can pay as we go. We do not have to borrow any more, and will not have to if the Latter-day Saints continue to live their religion and observe this law of tithing. It is the law of revenue to the Church.' The bond issues floated under Snow were retired by 1903 and 1907.
Recounting Abel's case to the council for at least the fourth time, Smith now said that Abel had been ordained a Seventy by Joseph Young “but this ordination was declared null and void by the Prophet himself.” He had testified to the opposite for nearly thirty years, and the same year he wrote that priesthood once received could not be taken away except by transgression serious enough to forfeit membership.
She died at home in Salt Lake City in her nineties. Joseph F. Smith spoke at her funeral in the Eighth Ward meetinghouse, which was crowded with Black and white friends. Her autobiography, read at the service, ended in a fervent testimony. She had never received the endowment.
Taylor was cut off for insubordination to the government and discipline of the church. Cowley's trial followed in May; he was deprived of all authority in the priesthood but not excommunicated, his fuller acknowledgements being cited as the reason for the difference.
Bishop Franklin S. Spalding published the replies of eight scholars to whom he had sent the facsimiles, reporting that 'in no case did one man know the opinion of another.' Sayce called the work an impudent fraud; Petrie wrote that 'there is not one single word that is true in these explanations.' Latter-day Saint replies in the Improvement Era attacked the survey's method rather than its Egyptology.
Joseph F. Smith, Anthon H. Lund and Charles W. Penrose stated: “So far as we know, there is no revelation, ancient or modern, neither is there any authoritative statement by any of the authorities of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in support of that which many of our elders have advanced as doctrine, in effect that the negroes are those who were neutral in heaven at the time of the great conflict or war.”
For the first time the Auditing Committee's annual report showed how the tithing of the Church had been disbursed. Joseph F. Smith explained that he was 'taking a liberty that has not been indulged in very much: but there have been so many false charges made against me and against my brethren by ignorant and evilly disposed people, that I propose to make a true statement.' Brunson reads the motive as pragmatic — short-circuiting criticism and reinforcing members' trust — rather than as the fulfilment of a commandment. Smith had already acknowledged in February 1904, during the era of the Senate's investigation of apostle-senator Reed Smoot, that tithing was the source of financial support for the general authorities.
Lorin C. Woolley published a detailed account of the 1886 night and called a priesthood council of six men. After a 1933 First Presidency statement rejecting the claim, the church began excommunicating those who continued to support plural marriage, and adherents began gathering at Short Creek on the Utah–Arizona line.
Joseph Fielding Smith's book taught that Cain became the father of an inferior race, that the curse continued through Ham and Egyptus, and that restriction followed from conduct in the pre-mortal world. B. H. Roberts had supplied that pre-mortal rationale as early as 1885 in the Contributor, speculating that some spirits were so indifferent in supporting the Redeemer that they forfeited privileges. The Way to Perfection remained in print, and in Church use, until it was withdrawn around 1990.
By 1923 Heber J. Grant introduced the report as 'customary.' Under J. Reuben Clark in the 1940s the disclosures ran to several printed pages, itemizing budget appropriations against actual expenditures by category, including hospitals, welfare, education and the salaries of headquarters employees. Marion G. Romney called the 1944 report more comprehensive than any he had heard in his life. Revenue, however, was never disclosed in any year of the disclosure era except fast-offering receipts between 1942 and 1950.
No Man Knows My History argued that nothing happened in Palmyra in 1820 that anyone noticed, that Smith's own family confused the vision with the visit of the angel, and that the story may have been 'the elaboration of some half-remembered dream stimulated by the early revival excitement' or 'sheer invention.' Brodie was excommunicated the following year.
Robert Rees reports that when President George Albert Smith learned the Patriarch to the Church had been involved in a homosexual relationship with a young man, the Patriarch was quietly released. The only restriction placed on his membership was that he not function in a Church capacity, and that restriction was later lifted. About the same time a music teacher was released from a Church faculty.
Under George Albert Smith the Presidency wrote: “The attitude of the Church with reference to Negroes remains as it has always stood. It is not a matter of the declaration of a policy but of direct commandment from the Lord, on which is founded the doctrine of the Church from the days of its organization, to the effect that Negroes may become members of the Church but that they are not entitled to the priesthood at the present time.” A 1947 statement had already called it the doctrine of the Church, never questioned by Church leaders. A 1951 statement grounded it in pre-mortal conduct.
Brooks, a southern Utah writer descended from a participant, published the first documented account by a Latter-day Saint. She concluded that Brigham Young and George A. Smith did not order the massacre but preached the sermons and set the conditions that made it possible, and that Young was an accessory after the fact. She also recorded that other Mormon scholars had been counselled off the subject with enough force that they feared for their positions and membership.
President McKay ended Clark's seven consecutive years of reading the financial report; the duty went to the First Presidency's secretary, Joseph Anderson. The disclosure reverted from budgeted-versus-spent tables to bare categories, and detail was progressively collapsed: in 1953 the separate line items for the Office of the Corporation of the President and the Office of the Presiding Bishopric were folded into 'Administrative Expenses.'
Arizona officers and National Guardsmen entered the town, jailed the men and bused women and children away; more than 160 children and their mothers remained in Arizona foster placements for nearly two years. Public revulsion at the operation contributed to a backlash, and nearly all those taken returned.
In an address to seminary and institute teachers titled Race Problems — As They Affect the Church, Apostle Petersen argued for segregation on scriptural grounds. The talk circulated widely; Spencer W. Kimball annotated it, and N. Eldon Tanner called it the Church's position on the negro question. Other Latter-day Saints called it a gross misreading of scripture.
Joseph Anderson read the expenditures of the Church for 1958 — the last year the Church provided any kind of detailed financial transparency. Quinn transcribes the report as an appendix; it opens 'For Missions and Missionary Work . . . $13,034,893,' not including an estimated $4,990,000 paid by missionaries themselves. Quinn computes the total, stated in 2010 dollars, at $548,869,067.20.
Henry D. Moyle, appointed second counselor two months after the last report, set aside the current budget and launched a large increase in expenditure, especially on buildings. Quinn writes that the Church spent $8 million more than it received in 1959, against a $7 million surplus after 1958's expenditures, and that because the last published report had included the building program, Moyle persuaded McKay not to publish even an abbreviated accounting. In April 1962 the Auditing Committee's public reports stopped noting whether the Church carried debt.
The First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve met in joint session and authorized the reinstatement of John D. Lee to membership and former blessings; the ordinances were performed in the Salt Lake Temple on 8 and 9 May.
The Church ran a $32 million deficit in 1962, and by early 1963 its financial officers were worried they would not be able to meet payroll for Church employees. McKay reassigned N. Eldon Tanner to Church finances; within two decades Tanner had established headquarters as a financial power with significant annual income from investments and businesses.
The Salt Lake NAACP planned to picket Temple Square during general conference. Sterling McMurrin arranged a meeting; Brown promised a statement and, with McMurrin's help, drafted one that McKay approved. Brown read it: “There is in this Church no doctrine, belief, or practice that is intended to deny the enjoyment of full civil rights by any person, regardless of race, color, or creed.” The demonstration was cancelled.
Spencer W. Kimball, then an apostle, addressed Church leaders in 'A Counselling Problem in the Church' (1964) and BYU students in 'Love versus Lust' (1965). He wrote that a person should 'repent of his perversion, force himself to return to normal pursuits and interests and actions and friendships with the opposite sex,' and that 'this normal pattern can become natural again.' He compared the condition to alcoholism, requiring continued vigilance. The medical consensus he was working inside classified homosexuality as a 'sociopathic personality disturbance' in DSM-I (1952) and a 'sexual deviation' in DSM-II (1968); the American Psychiatric Association removed it from its list of disorders in December 1973.
A graduate student found the 1832 history in a journal ledger in the Church Historian's Office and printed a transcript in his master's thesis. Before this, the document had been seen by a handful of people; Levi Edgar Young told LaMar Petersen in 1953 that he had been permitted to read a 'strange' account of the First Vision but instructed not to copy it or say what it contained.
Allen, later assistant church historian, traced the vision's absence from 1830s publications and concluded that 'an understanding of the story of Joseph Smith's vision dawned only gradually upon the membership of the Church during his lifetime, and that new and important uses were made of the story after his death.' The article is quoted approvingly by apologists and critics to this day.
Aziz S. Atiya, searching for Coptic material at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, opened a file containing eleven papyrus fragments. One was the original of Facsimile 1, glued to a backing sheet on which the missing arms, torso and head had been drawn in. An 1856 certificate of ownership was with them.
Working through Methodist Magazine year by year, Walters found abundant revival reports but nothing in Palmyra for 1819, 1820 or 1821 — then found the Reverend George Lane's account of a Palmyra revival in the March 1825 issue. His study appeared in 1967 and was argued out in a 1969 Dialogue roundtable with Latter-day Saint historians replying.
In a ceremony in the museum's Egyptian section, director Thomas P. F. Hoving presented the eleven pieces and the Bidamon letter to N. Eldon Tanner of the First Presidency. The collection was sent to Brigham Young University for study, and photographs were published in the Improvement Era in January and February 1968.
Two days after BYU learned it was under federal investigation for possible Civil Rights Act violations, Black track athletes from the University of Texas at El Paso boycotted a meet at Provo, saying there was a belief on campus that Black people were inferior. Over the next three years student-athletes at dozens of universities refused to compete against BYU.
Working from the Improvement Era photographs, Dialogue commissioned readings. In the summer issue John A. Wilson and Richard A. Parker identified fragments as a Book of Breathings copied for a Theban priest named Hor and as Books of the Dead; Grant Heward and Jerald Tanner published the identification of the Small Sensen text as the source of the margin characters. Baer's complete translation followed in the autumn issue.
Kimball's book devoted a chapter titled 'Crime Against Nature' to homosexuality. Dialogue's survey of the period lists the vocabulary as 'ugly,' 'repugnant,' 'ever-deepening degeneracy,' 'evil,' 'pervert,' 'deviant' and 'weaklings,' and describes the chapter as teaching that homosexuality was a spiritual disease that could be cured. One Latter-day Saint historian called it the earliest and most comprehensive treatment of homosexuality by an apostle and the foundation of Church thought, policy and political action for the next forty-five years.
Fourteen Black football players on an undefeated University of Wyoming team asked their coach, Lloyd Eaton, to let them wear black armbands against BYU in protest of the Church's priesthood policy. He dismissed all fourteen. The story ran in Sports Illustrated, Jet and papers across the country. Wyoming beat BYU 40–7.
President Kenneth Pitzer announced Stanford would schedule no further athletic or non-athletic competition with BYU, saying it was Stanford's policy not to schedule events with institutions which practise discrimination on the basis of race or national origin, or which are affiliated with institutions that do. Hinckley wrote to Stanford's vice provost trying to get it reversed; Pitzer refused.
A letter signed under the First Presidency's name and published in the Church section of the Deseret News opened by noting confusion and said that from the beginning of the dispensation, Joseph Smith and all succeeding presidents had taught that Negroes were not yet to receive the priesthood, for reasons believed known to God but not made fully known to man. It also affirmed civil rights and condemned discrimination in society.
A First Presidency letter stated that 'the simplest statement we know of is that statement of the Lord himself that the members of the Church should pay one-tenth of all their INTEREST annually, which is understood to mean income. NO ONE IS JUSTIFIED IN MAKING ANY OTHER STATEMENT THAN THIS,' and that every member should be entitled to make his own decision as to what he owes. The same language was still carried in the Church Handbook decades later.
Hugh Nibley published 'The Meaning of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers' in BYU Studies, arguing that the papers were either a preliminary 'studying it out' stage or a failed attempt to reverse-engineer an already-revealed English text, and portraying the work of Phelps, Cowdery and Parrish as largely independent of Smith. FAIR describes this reading as having become the dominant Latter-day Saint view.
Ruffin Bridgeforth, Darius Gray and Eugene Orr had asked the Twelve for a branch for Black members. They were given an auxiliary group under Liberty Stake instead. Gordon B. Hinckley, Thomas S. Monson and Boyd K. Packer set apart Bridgeforth as president with Gray and Orr as counselors — none of whom could hold the priesthood. Packer counselled them to keep a low profile.
Arrington became the first professionally trained historian to hold the office since the 1840s, appointed under the direction of apostle Howard W. Hunter. The Church Historian's Office was reorganised as the Historical Department, with Arrington heading a new History Division. He hired a staff of young professional historians, opened the archives to them, and launched a sixteen-volume sesquicentennial history.
Dialogue ran Bush's fifty-seven-page article with 219 footnotes, drawn from a four-hundred-page compilation of First Presidency and council minutes he had gathered over a decade, with responses from Gordon Thomasson, Hugh Nibley and Eugene England. Bush had shown the material to general authorities beforehand. A BYU vice president warned editor Robert Rees of grave consequences; Rees published anyway. It won the Mormon History Association's best article prize.
According to accounts collected by the Seventh East Press, BYU security officers removed male drama and ballet students from classes to interrogate them and obtain the names of other gay students. Students working undercover for security acted as decoys in campus restrooms, imitating the signals gay men used to identify one another. Students in the drama department printed T-shirts reading 'I'm on the list — are you?'
Brazilian Saints of mixed ancestry had been subject to lineage tracing for ordination since the 1940s; a 1967 instruction had shifted the burden of proof away from the individual. The temple announcement created a body of faithful members who were donating to and building a house they would not be allowed to enter. Leonard Arrington recorded hearing that this was one of the immediately precipitating factors of the revelation.
Governor Christopher S. Bond formally rescinded Boggs's order, stating that it had contravened rights to life, liberty and property. No Missouri prosecution had ever been brought for Hawn's Mill, and no Illinois conviction was ever obtained for Carthage.
The 1976 handbook asked temple-recommend candidates whether they were "morally clean" and whether any "major transgression" had not "been confessed and adjusted." Later the same year the question was narrowed to any "transgression relating to the law of chastity" that should have been confessed and was not. The 1976 handbook was also the first to address abortion, an indication of how directly handbook revisions tracked outside legal and social change.
Douglas A. Wallace, a Latter-day Saint attorney, baptized Larry Lester, a Black man, in a Portland motel pool and ordained him, telling reporters he meant to force a revision of doctrine. The ordination was declared void and Wallace was excommunicated. In October 1977 Byron Marchant, who had cast the first recorded opposing vote against a Church president in conference, was excommunicated and fired as a chapel janitor.
Max Ford McBride completed his dissertation 'Effect of Visual Stimuli in Electric Aversion Therapy' under D. Eugene Thorne, chair of BYU's psychology department. Seventeen men enrolled and fourteen completed treatment: a plethysmograph measured arousal while male and female images were shown, and electric shocks were administered in conjunction with certain images. Subjects set their own pain levels; the dissertation ranks the jolts on a scale from discrete to intolerable. Patients averaged about three months and up to twenty-two fifty-minute sessions. Participants signed releases acknowledging that damage to tissue or organs might occur. The independent Provo student paper the Seventh East Press later collected first-hand accounts: one former student described 'an electrical shock while viewing a pornographic picture of a male,' followed by a female image without shock, while a former BYU counselor called it 'aversive therapy - not shock treatment' using 'mild electric stimulus' and slides of men and women in various stages of dress.
In the general priesthood session, broadcast to Latter-day Saint males twelve and older across the United States and Canada, Boyd K. Packer told of a missionary who confessed to hitting his companion after a homosexual advance. Packer's reply was 'Well, thanks. Somebody had to do it, and it wouldn't be well for a General Authority to solve the problem that way.' He added: 'I am not recommending that course to you, but I am not omitting it. You must protect yourself.' The talk was not printed in the November 1976 Ensign but was issued as a pamphlet and distributed by Church headquarters for decades.
A group of gay men and women with Latter-day Saint backgrounds founded Affirmation in Los Angeles as a support group, initially for excommunicated members; satellite groups formed in Salt Lake City, Denver and Dallas, and a newsletter, Affinity, began the following year. An original stated purpose was to 'work toward influencing Church leadership to change its perception and treatment of the homosexual in the church,' on the premise that 'homosexuality is not learned or acquired; it is not something chosen.'
At President Kimball's request, Packer spoke at BYU on homosexual temptation. FAIR notes that in this address he treated such temptations as deep and relatively fixed, indicating that those affected might spend the rest of their lives resisting them — a position he restated in 2010: 'That may be a struggle from which you will not be free in this life. If you do not act on temptations, you need feel no guilt.'
The First Presidency added to the recommend instructions a statement that a person who had not repented of "impure, unholy, or unnatural sex acts" could not receive a recommend. The addition prompted inquiry by many bishops into the specific sexual activities of married couples, and the First Presidency sent follow-up instructions that bishops "should never inquire into personal, intimate matters involving marital relations between a man and his wife." That cautionary language has remained in the interview instructions since.
The First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve met in an upper room of the Salt Lake Temple. Kimball said he had spent many days alone there pleading for an answer, and that if the answer was to continue the present course he was prepared to defend it to the death. Each man spoke; then Kimball offered prayer as voice. McConkie wrote that all of them heard the same voice and received the same message. No text of the revelation was written down.
The letter said: “He has heard our prayers, and by revelation has confirmed that the long-promised day has come when every faithful, worthy man in the Church may receive the holy priesthood, with power to exercise its divine authority, and enjoy with his loved ones every blessing that flows therefrom, including the blessings of the temple.” Sunstone called it probably the most photocopied document in the history of Church headquarters. On 30 September N. Eldon Tanner presented it to conference as a constituent assembly; the sustaining vote was unanimous, and it became Official Declaration 2. In November the São Paulo temple was dedicated and the Martins family was sealed, with their son Marcus — soon the first Black full-time missionary called after the revelation — serving as witness.
Addressing seminary and institute teachers at BYU, Bruce R. McConkie said: “Forget everything that I have said, or what President Brigham Young or President George Q. Cannon or whomsoever has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation. We spoke with a limited understanding and without the light and knowledge that now has come into the world.” He added: “It doesn't make a particle of difference what anybody ever said about the Negro matter before the first day of June of this year, 1978.”
In "The Blessing of Church Interviews," Boyd K. Packer told priesthood leaders that "there must be nothing immodest or degrading in your interview" and that "our interviews are not to be indelicate, or offensive, or pornographic in any way." He added: "It is not in order for a priesthood leader to list in detail ugly, deviant, or bestial practices and then cross-examine a member of the Church as to whether or not such things are practiced." He noted the Church received occasional reports of leaders who had been "very indiscreet or indelicate" in interviews.
The sixteen-volume history was cancelled. Arrington and a core of historians were administratively transferred to BYU as the newly created Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History; by 1982 the physical move was complete. Access to the Church archives was restricted at the same time, and steps were taken to control publication of research already done there.
The 1981 edition of the Book of Mormon restored a change to 2 Nephi 30:6 that Joseph Smith had made in the 1840 edition but that had been dropped because later printings followed the 1837 European text. In October 1960 conference Kimball had preached from the older wording, saying of Indian Placement children that they were becoming white and delightsome and were often lighter than their siblings on the reservation.
The Church Historical Department announced the acquisition of a manuscript blessing of Joseph Smith III said to have come through a descendant of Thomas Bullock; it was traded to the RLDS Church. Scholars reworked the succession question around it. Jerald and Sandra Tanner questioned the provenance in 1984; after the 1985 Salt Lake bombings it was established that Mark Hofmann had made it.
Speaking to Church Educational System religious educators, Packer warned that there is no accurate, objective history of the Church without consideration of the spiritual powers attending the work, that there is a temptation to want to tell everything 'whether it is worthy or faith promoting or not,' and that 'some things that are true are not very useful.' The address was reprinted in BYU Studies that summer.
Stake presidents and bishops were advised to ensure that recommend candidates refrained from oral sex, treated as an "unnatural, impure, or unholy practice." Less than a year later a second letter cautioned local authorities not to pry into marital relations, while the recommend instructions retained a question about refraining from "unnatural, impure, or unholy practices" and supplied a paragraph to be read verbatim to anyone who asked what that meant.
Arrington received a letter from the First Presidency extending an 'honorable release' from his ecclesiastical and bureaucratic positions. G. Homer Durham was set apart as Church Historian in a private session on 8 February. Neither the release nor the new calling was mentioned in general conference or the Church News, and no portrait of Arrington was hung in the historians' gallery.
The independent BYU student weekly ran Blake Ostler's interview with philosopher Sterling M. McMurrin, in which McMurrin expressed disbelief in the First Vision and in ancient origins for the Book of Mormon, and called the title of Packer's address 'a betrayal of a very important Mormon idea, that the mantle and the intellect should not be set over against each other.'
The paper's editor was told by BYU's public relations director that the university was 'withdrawing permission for the Seventh East Press to sell or distribute issues on campus.' The staff asked who had made the decision; the paper reported that the question remained officially unanswered. The Seventh East Press ceased publication on 12 April 1983.
A civil suit was filed in Maricopa County, Arizona, concerning abuse by Church member Richard Kenneth Ray, who told Arizona police that year that he had molested at least 33 children over roughly two decades and had confessed to bishops as early as 1968. In 1988 the Arizona Court of Appeals held that Ray's own disclosures to police waived the privilege, compelling Church officials to testify; the suit settled in 1990. FLOODLIT recovered the 1984 filing date from court records in 2025.
'LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890–1904' appeared in Dialogue 18:1, documenting that plural marriages after the 1890 Manifesto had been performed by and for members of the First Presidency, apostles and mission presidents. Quinn had told Gordon B. Hinckley the substance of it in 1982; access to the First Presidency's vault was refused.
Homemade bombs killed Steven Christensen and Kathleen Sheets in Salt Lake City; a third bomb injured document dealer Mark Hofmann the next day. Hofmann had sold the Church and private collectors documents — among them the 'salamander letter' attributed to Martin Harris — that appeared to complicate the founding narrative. He pleaded guilty in January 1987 and confessed the letter was a forgery.
John Gustav-Wrathall, later executive director of Affirmation, was excommunicated in 1986. He writes that in the 1970s and 1980s the handbook was written so that a member could be excommunicated simply for being known to have a sexual orientation other than heterosexual, and that even after the Church clarified that being gay was not itself grounds for discipline, disproportionate numbers of gay men and lesbians were still cut off.
Gordon B. Hinckley taught that 'marriage should not be viewed as a therapeutic step to solve problems such as homosexual inclinations or practices, which first should clearly be overcome with a firm and fixed determination never to slip to such practices again.' The Church's pamphlet Understanding and Helping Those Who Have Homosexual Problems later stated flatly that 'marriage should not be viewed as a way to resolve homosexual problems' and that encouraging members to cultivate heterosexual feelings 'generally leads them to frustration and discouragement.'
Evergreen described itself as a nonprofit 'not affiliated with' the Church that nevertheless sustained its doctrines 'without reservation or exception,' offering help to people who wanted 'to diminish their attractions and overcome homosexual behavior.' Its board of trustees 'usually includes one or more emeritus General Authorities,' and it trained hundreds of stake and ward leaders a year. Elder Bruce C. Hafen addressed its annual conference in September 2009. Days after Utah county offices began issuing marriage licences to same-sex couples in January 2014, Evergreen shut down and transferred its resources and mailing lists - reported at up to 30,000 participants - to North Star, founded in 2006, which takes no institutional position on whether orientation can change. North Star's board chairman said: 'We don't think it's either necessary or needed to change your sexual orientation in order to be a faithful Latter Day Saint in good standing with the Church.'
In general conference Oaks distinguished between alternate voices that are 'well-motivated men and women who are merely trying to serve their brothers and sisters and further the cause of Zion' and those with less laudable motives, and cautioned members and leaders accordingly. Sunstone later judged that the address expanded the argument beyond historiography to all independent Mormon discourse and to the forums that carried it.
The 1989 General Handbook of Instructions moved apostasy into the category of transgressions for which a disciplinary council must be held, and supplied a three-part definition: repeatedly acting in clear, open and deliberate public opposition to the Church or its leaders; persisting in teaching as Church doctrine information that is not Church doctrine after correction; or continuing to follow the teachings of apostate cults after correction.
Thomas S. Monson read Martins's name among new Seventies at April conference. Neither the Deseret News nor the Salt Lake Tribune mentioned his race. The same period saw The Way to Perfection taken out of print and the temple ceremony's depiction of Satan with dark skin changed. Martins later wrote that he formally rejected the idea that he represented any group.
In 'The State of the Church,' Hinckley named the Council on the Disposition of the Tithes — the First Presidency, the Twelve and the Presiding Bishopric, eighteen men — and stated the two principles: 'One, the Church will live within its means. It will not spend more than it receives. Two, a fixed percentage of the income will be set aside to build reserves against what might be called a possible "rainy day."' He compared it to the food storage the Church asks of families.
Following the 1991 Sunstone symposium, the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve issued a joint statement criticising presentations at recent symposia that treated sacred matters inappropriately or could injure the Church, and cautioning members about participating. No organisation was named. A March 1992 poll found 42 per cent of BYU faculty would not participate in that summer's symposium.
Richard G. Scott told the Church that a victim of "another's acts of violence, perversion, or incest" is "not responsible and you must not feel guilty." In the same address he cautioned against two therapeutic practices: "excessive probing into every minute detail of your past experiences," and "blaming the abuser for every difficulty in your life," warning that leading questions could produce accusations later shown to be false.
Anderson presented her chronology to the thirteenth annual Sunstone symposium, alleging an internal system that maintained secret files on members. In the question period BYU professor Eugene England named the Strengthening Church Members Committee and said, 'I accuse that committee of undermining our Church.' An Associated Press bureau chief in the audience walked out and filed the story.
Responding to 'extensive publicity recently given to false accusations of so-called secret Church committees and files,' the First Presidency cited Doctrine and Covenants 123:1–5 and stated that the committee had been appointed to serve as a resource to priesthood leaders, that it was then composed of James E. Faust and Russell M. Nelson, and that it 'neither impose[s] nor direct[s] Church disciplinary action.'
The Hawaii Supreme Court began hearing the same-sex marriage case known as Baehr v. Lewin, later Baehr v. Miike. Church leaders and Latter-day Saint legal scholars, Elder Oaks among them, recommended that the Church oppose the Hawaii effort. BYU law professor Lynn Wardle consulted on the Church filing.
Salt Lake Stake president Paul A. Hanks and his counsellors came to Quinn's door on a Sunday morning holding a typewritten list of publications said to constitute apostasy. At the top was Quinn's essay 'Mormon Women Have Had the Priesthood Since 1843,' published the previous year in Maxine Hanks's Women and Authority.
Dialogue 26:1 carried Anderson's chronology, Richard D. Poll's supporting response, Paul Toscano's 'A Plea to the Leadership of the Church: Choose Love not Power,' and a letter co-signed by Anderson and Janice Allred announcing the Mormon Alliance, an organisation to document what it called spiritual and ecclesiastical abuse. The issue won Dialogue's Lowell L. Bennion Essay Award for the year.
Speaking to the All-Church Coordinating Council, Packer said the dangers facing members 'come from the gay-lesbian movement, the feminist movement (both of which are relatively new), and the ever-present challenge from the so-called scholars or intellectuals,' and added that local leaders must deal with all three with increasing frequency.
Hers was the first council and the only one held at ward level, before her bishop, his two counsellors, a clerk and the ward executive secretary. Her bishop had said she could bring a friend and her husband; on the night he barred her husband as well. Her friend Martha Pierce objected: 'You are thinking of dissolving this woman's temple marriage. Don't you think he has a vested interest in participating in this council?'
About a hundred people kept vigil in the Cottonwood stake centre parking lot from six in the morning. Toscano asked that the proceedings be public, that his witnesses and his wife be present throughout, and that an independent party take notes; all four requests were denied. The council worked from a transcript it had made of a cassette of his Sunstone address. Hanks, who had edited Women and Authority, was excommunicated the same day.
Gileadi's excommunication for apostasy was announced in sacrament meetings in his Santaquin Utah stake. He declined to comment publicly then and has never discussed the reasons since. Sunstone reported that he was told he was excommunicated for teaching false doctrine, for being predatory in teaching his theology, and for believing dead prophets over living ones.
Anderson did not attend, holding that the problem was not at stake level and so could not be solved there. Her stake president had told her in May that her membership was in jeopardy if she continued collecting and publicising incidents of ecclesiastical abuse; she said she could not stop. The letter she received on 24 September gave no reason; when she asked, she was told the grounds were apostasy. About two hundred people had gathered for a prayer meeting the night before.
Quinn refused to attend, writing that the process 'was designed to punish me for being the messenger of unwanted historical evidence and to intimidate me from further work in Mormon history.' His stake president had written on 11 May that there were other matters, 'very sensitive and highly confidential,' not related to his historical writings. Quinn's memoir reports the stake president telling the high council that Packer had been phoning weekly about the importance of taking action.
'Three men and three women have been charged with apostasy for their writing and speaking about Mormon subjects. Paul Toscano, Avraham Gileadi, D. Michael Quinn, Maxine Hanks and Lavina Fielding Anderson were excommunicated. Lynne Kanavel Whitesides was disfellowshiped.' The story ran on the eve of general conference; the New York Times put the affair on its front page and National Public Radio carried comments from Dallin H. Oaks.
James E. Faust told the priesthood session that those who persist in publicly challenging basic doctrines, practices and the establishment of the Church sever themselves from the Spirit of the Lord, and taught that while free discussion and expression are encouraged, 'the privilege of free expression should operate within limits.' He added: 'In some legislative assemblies of the world, there are some groups termed the "loyal opposition." I find no such principle in the gospel of Jesus Christ.'
'In light of extensive publicity given to six recent Church disciplinary councils in Utah,' the statement said the leaders deeply regretted the loss of Church membership by anyone, that general authorities have an obligation to teach principles and provide information helpful to local leaders, that 'in matters of Church discipline, the General Authorities do not direct the decisions of local disciplinary councils,' and that the right of appeal is open to anyone.
The First Presidency released a statement encouraging members 'to appeal to legislators, judges, and other government officials to preserve the purposes and sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman, and to reject all efforts to give legal authorization or other official approval or support to marriages between persons of the same gender.'
The appeals of Anderson, Whitesides and Toscano were all denied. Anderson's stake president wrote that Church leaders had 'deliberated and pondered carefully and concluded that there was no reason to alter the decision.' She told the Tribune: 'I read the words. I believed they were written sincerely. But somehow, it doesn't feel like love.' David P. Wright declined to attend his council in February and was excommunicated; Brent Metcalfe and Michael Barrett were also expelled.
President Hinckley spoke against physical and sexual abuse in the October general conference. At a leadership meeting in Calgary, Alberta, he told local leaders that abuse cases "are costing the Church millions of dollars in lawyers' fees and settlements." The same year a former General Authority, George Lee, pleaded guilty to attempted sexual abuse of a child.
At the urging of Boyd K. Packer, then acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve, a committee of Elders Faust, Nelson and Oaks prepared a draft over the Christmas holidays, Nelson serving as principal draftsman. The draft went to the First Presidency on 9 January 1995. During the same months Church leaders grew concerned about the Hawaii litigation, and on 24 February 1995 the Associated Press reported that the Church had announced a petition to intervene in the case.
Allred, a freelance theologian and co-signer of the Mormon Alliance announcement, was excommunicated after a five-hour council that examined her recent speeches and articles in independent Mormon periodicals, including a 1992 Sunstone paper toward a Mormon theology of God the Mother. Sunstone counted her the eighth high-profile Mormon intellectual excommunicated since September 1993, and the first under Gordon B. Hinckley's presidency.
The Church produced a revised "Responding to Abuse: Helps for Ecclesiastical Leaders" and set up a telephone help line for Church leaders faced with child abuse cases. Bishops and branch presidents are instructed to call it when they learn of abuse. It operates 24 hours a day and is staffed by legal and counseling professionals; the legal advice is supplied by attorneys at Kirton McConkie, the Church's outside counsel.
President Gordon B. Hinckley read the proclamation publicly for the first time at the general Relief Society meeting in the Salt Lake Tabernacle. Sheri Dew's biography of Nelson records that the general reaction among members was 'almost ho-hum' — in 1995 nothing in it seemed contested. It was later included in a 1997 amicus brief to the Hawaii Supreme Court.
Gileadi's nineteen-year-old son performed the ordinance; he was confirmed by Leaun Otten, the stake president who had excommunicated him, with the entire group of leaders who had participated in that council present. 'In my heart, I've never felt like I've had an apostate spirit,' he told the Deseret News. 'Excommunicated or not, everyone needs to repent — and forgive.'
Reading his interview with Mike Wallace into general conference, President Hinckley answered a question about what the Church was doing to reduce child abuse: "We are doing everything we know how to reduce it. We are teaching our people. We are talking about it. We have set up a course of instruction for our bishops all across the nation. All last year we carried on an educational program. We have set up a help-line for them where they can get professional counseling and help with these problems."
Ensign Peak Advisors, Inc. was founded in Salt Lake City as the Church's investment manager, structured as a supporting organization under section 509(a)(3) and supervised by the Presiding Bishopric. The SEC later found that from 1997 through 2019 it failed to file the Forms 13F required of institutional investment managers.
A new Church Handbook of Instructions was published with updated abuse policies. One change required annotation of an abuser's membership record, a marker that bars callings involving children or youth and can be removed only by the First Presidency. The same year a Texas jury awarded $4 million to a boy molested at age eight by a Church member.
A May 1999 area presidency letter asked California members to 'do all you can by donating your means and time.' Sunstone reported members being invited in ward meetings and private interviews with bishops to donate specific suggested amounts, wards asked to supply fifty volunteers each, youth firesides enlisting teenagers, and a credit-bearing canvassing internship advertised in BYU's Daily Universe. Proposition 22 passed on 7 March 2000, 61.4 percent to 38.6 percent.
In September 1990 descendants of victims and of perpetrators, with representatives of the Church and the Paiute Nation, dedicated a memorial modelled on the Carleton cairn; Gordon B. Hinckley spoke of a bridge built across a chasm of bitterness. On 11 September 1999 Hinckley dedicated a grave-site memorial on Church-owned land: 'All who knew firsthand about what occurred here are long since gone. Let the book of the past be closed. Let peace come into our hearts.'
Margaret Toscano, a classicist and theologian who had contributed to Women and Authority and written publicly on Heavenly Mother and the ordination of women, was excommunicated seven years after her husband. Her stake president had instructed her in July 1993 to stop speaking, writing or making media appearances on subjects involving Church theology.
Matis, thirty-two, a returned missionary and former elders quorum president who had worked in the temple and had never been sexually intimate, died by suicide during the Proposition 22 campaign. His mother had called twenty temples every two weeks to put his name on the prayer rolls. In a final letter he hoped his parents' action 'to help others understand the true nature of homosexuality might help to save many young people's lives.'
The Church agreed to pay $3 million to Jeremiah Scott, abused at age eleven by a ward member whose history of abusing children the family said their bishop knew and did not disclose when they asked his advice about taking the man into their home. The plaintiffs settled only on condition that they be free to discuss the evidence they would have presented; it was the first LDS abuse settlement amount ever disclosed publicly. Church attorney Von Keetch defended the annotation system: an admitted abuser "may be able to repent and come back and be a member of the Church, but what I can't do is ever work with children again."
In "Personal Worthiness to Exercise the Priesthood," President Hinckley said the Church had "issued publications, established a telephone line where Church officers may receive counsel in handling cases, and offered professional help through LDS Family Services," adding: "Professional counselors, including lawyers and social workers, are available on this help line to advise bishops and stake presidents concerning their obligations in these circumstances." He also acknowledged "some very limited expression of this monstrous evil among us."
In general conference, President Gordon B. Hinckley said: 'Our whole strength rests on the validity of that [First] vision. It either occurred or it did not occur. If it did not, then this work is a fraud. If it did, then it is the most important and wonderful work under the heavens.' He had made the same argument in 1998 and, more starkly, in 1961.
Murphy, an anthropologist, had published 'Lamanite Genesis, Genealogy, and Genetics,' concluding that no genetic link had been found between ancient Israelites and indigenous Americans. Someone sent the essay to his stake president, who summoned him on charges of apostasy. He was granted a reprieve one day before the scheduled council, after national press coverage. Murphy had written that a spiritual witness of the Book of Mormon should not be confused with scientific evidence.
Announcing the downtown redevelopment, Hinckley told general conference that 'tithing funds have not and will not be used to acquire this property. Nor will they be used in developing it for commercial purposes,' and that funds would come from commercial entities owned by the Church 'together with the earnings of invested reserve funds.'
Palmer, a retired Church Educational System institute director of thirty-plus years, was disfellowshipped after a six-hour council for An Insider's View of Mormon Origins, which argued the Book of Mormon is better explained as a nineteenth-century document. 'I regard myself as heretical regarding some of the Church's teachings, but I don't view myself as an apostate,' he said. He was later told he would have to repudiate essentially every chapter to remain on the records; he eventually resigned.
The Book of Mormon introduction, written by Bruce R. McConkie in 1981, had said the Lamanites 'are the principal ancestors of the American Indians.' A one-word change made them 'among the ancestors.' A church spokesman said the revision 'takes into account details of Book of Mormon demography which are not known.'
Church Public Affairs posted an 8,500-word interview with Elder Dallin H. Oaks and Elder Lance Wickman. It reaffirmed the Church's preferred language, rejecting 'gay' and 'lesbian' in favor of 'somebody with same-sex attraction,' and included what Sunstone called perhaps the first veiled criticism of the therapies used at BYU: 'The aversive therapies that have been used in connection with same-sex attraction contain some serious abuses that have been recognized over time within the professions.' It became the basis of the pamphlet God Loveth His Children.
At the site, Henry B. Eyring read a statement prepared by Marlin K. Jensen and authorized by the First Presidency: 'What was done here long ago by members of our Church represents a terrible and inexcusable departure from Christian teaching and conduct... We express profound regret for the massacre carried out in this valley 150 years ago today and for the undue and untold suffering experienced by the victims then and by their relatives to the present time. A separate expression of regret is owed to the Paiute people who have unjustly borne for too long the principal blame for what occurred during the massacre.'
The First Presidency sent a letter to Church leaders in California to be read to all congregations on 29 June 2008. It stated that 'the Church's teachings and position on this moral issue are unequivocal' and asked: 'We ask that you do all you can to support the proposed constitutional amendment by donating of your means and time to assure that marriage in California is legally defined as being between a man and a woman.' The Church had been approached in June 2008 by San Francisco Catholic Archbishop George Niederauer, which initiated the interfaith coalition.
The amendment passed 52 percent to 48 percent, 7,001,084 to 6,401,482. Sunstone reported Latter-day Saints contributed upwards of $20 million to the Yes campaign and $3 million to a parallel Arizona campaign. Within days, thousands picketed outside temples in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Manhattan, Mesa, Seattle, Spokane, Newport Beach and Kensington — the largest show of opposition to the Church in recent decades. White powder was mailed to the Los Angeles and Salt Lake temples; meetinghouse doors in Davis and Weber counties were shot out with a BB gun.
Amid an investigation by California's campaign watchdog into whether the Church had failed to disclose its involvement, the Church filed a report showing it had spent nearly $190,000 on the campaign — airline tickets, hotel rooms, car rentals — after previously reporting little direct activity. Individual donors were identified from public filings; several, including a Sacramento theatre director and a Los Angeles film festival director, resigned their positions under public pressure.
Andrew Cook and Christopher Smith argued in Dialogue that no more than about 56 centimetres of the interior of the Hor scroll can be missing, closely matching Baer's earlier estimate. Gee, who had estimated a much longer roll, revised his figure to about 314 centimetres. Faithful commentators concede they cannot independently adjudicate the mathematics.
The 2010 handbook told leaders that "the Church's position is that abuse cannot be tolerated in any form," that abusers are subject to Church discipline and may not hold callings or a temple recommend until discipline is resolved, and that "a person whose membership record is annotated for having abused a child sexually or physically must not be given any calling or assignment involving children or youth." It stated that "in instances of abuse, the first responsibility of the Church is to help those who have been abused."
Packer told the general conference that some 'suppose that they were preset and cannot overcome what they feel are inborn temptations toward the impure and unnatural. Not so!' After criticism, the printed text was revised. The Human Rights Campaign called the sermon 'inaccurate and dangerous'; Church spokesman Michael Otterson read an unusual statement using the word 'gay' and joining 'in unreserved condemnation of acts of cruelty' toward any group. Thousands encircled Temple Square in a silent protest.
Walker, Turley and Leonard published Massacre at Mountain Meadows with Oxford in 2008, written with what the authors describe as unrestricted access to Church archives including the First Presidency's. Turley and Walker published the Andrew Jenson and David H. Morris document collections in BYU Studies 47:3 and then as a volume in 2009; a two-volume edition of the massacre's legal papers followed in 2017. In 2011 the Secretary of the Interior designated Mountain Meadows a National Historic Landmark, an outcome three descendant organizations and the Church had agreed to support.
After two children disclosed abuse to their mother, who reported it to the West Virginia State Police, Church officials brought Michael Jensen home from a mission within about a week. According to the complaint later filed, no Church leader reported to West Virginia authorities, despite mandated-reporter status under state law; a bishop said he had called the abuse help line to consult officials in Utah about the police investigation. Ward and stake leaders did not inform members why Jensen had returned.
Hanks returned to the Church nineteen years after her excommunication, invited by Church leadership. 'I didn't recant anything I'd said or written in the past or change my feminist views or work,' she said. 'I simply wanted to restore my membership, as I am.' She has continued to publish on Mormon women's history and theology.
A BYU religion professor told reporter Jason Horowitz that Black people descended from Cain and Ham, had been less valiant premortally, and that being denied the priesthood until 1978 was the greatest blessing God could give them. It ran during Mitt Romney's campaign. The Church replied the same day that the positions attributed to Bott “absolutely do not represent the teachings and doctrines” of the Church, that it is “not known precisely why, how, or when this restriction began,” and that “We condemn racism, including any and all past racism by individuals both inside and outside the Church.” Bott retired that spring.
The First Presidency cut the ribbon on City Creek Center, a three-block mixed-use development across from Temple Square, financed entirely by the Church. Contemporary reporting put the cost at $1.5 billion at announcement and about $2 billion on completion. The center generated roughly $200 million in sales in its first nine months and was credited with 2,000 jobs and 16 million downtown visitors.
Dallin H. Oaks devoted a general conference address to institutional and civic duty toward children, saying that "children need others to speak for them, and they need decision makers who put their well-being ahead of selfish adult interests," and that his subject carried "implications for the choices being made by citizens, public officials, and workers in private organizations."
Michael Otterson later explained that Public Affairs prepared the site during the 2012 presidential campaign for more than one purpose: to head off a repeat of the Proposition 8 coverage, and to recognize what he called the plight of young Latter-day Saints who had been ordered out of their homes after coming out. The site stated that same-sex attraction itself was not a sin while maintaining the Church's position on same-sex marriage and behavior. Elders Oaks and Christofferson appeared on it.
The Church published 'Book of Mormon Translation,' stating that Joseph 'placed either the interpreters or the seer stone in a hat, pressed his face into the hat to block out extraneous light, and read aloud the English words that appeared on the instrument,' and that the two instruments were 'apparently interchangeable.' 'Book of Mormon and DNA Studies' followed in 2014.
In July 2013 Michael Jensen was sentenced to 35 to 75 years in a West Virginia prison; the Church excommunicated him in August. On 16 September 2013 six families sued the Church, a stake president, another leader and the Jensen family in Berkeley County Circuit Court, alleging civil conspiracy, fraud, intentional infliction of emotional distress and negligence. More than 90 depositions followed over four years.
The Gospel Topics essay names four firsthand accounts and five contemporary secondhand ones, links each, describes what each emphasizes, and states that they 'tell a consistent story, though naturally they differ in emphasis and detail.' Within weeks the CES Letter was circulating a bulleted list of the same differences read the opposite way.
The Church published an unsigned essay stating that “There is no reliable evidence that any black men were denied the priesthood during Joseph Smith's lifetime,” that Brigham Young announced the restriction in 1852, and that “Over time, Church leaders and members advanced many theories to explain the priesthood and temple restrictions. None of these explanations is accepted today as the official doctrine of the Church.” It then disavowed the theories that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, or reflects unrighteous premortal action, that mixed-race marriage is a sin, or that any race is inferior. The revised Official Declaration 2 header says Church records “offer no clear insights into the origins of this practice.”
Kelly, who founded Ordain Women, was excommunicated in absentia by her Virginia bishop for conduct contrary to the laws and order of the Church, the letter stating that she had persisted in an aggressive effort to persuade other members to her point of view and that her course of action threatened to erode the faith of others. Days later the First Presidency issued a public statement affirming that priesthood offices are held by men.
The Church published 'Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham.' It grants that no eyewitness account of the translation survives, that the surviving fragments are standard funerary texts dating from the third century BCE to the first century CE, that none of their characters mention Abraham, and that the grammar book's rules and translations do not correspond to those recognized by Egyptologists. It leaves the source and the method open.
The Gospel Topics essay acknowledged in the church's own voice that Joseph Smith practised plural marriage, that the youngest wife was Helen Mar Kimball, sealed several months before her 15th birthday, that some sealings were to women already married to other men, and that leaders had issued carefully worded denials. Saints, volume 1, followed in 2018 with a narrative treatment.
Elder Oaks called for governments to seek balance: 'Today, state legislatures across the nation are being asked to strengthen laws related to LGBT issues in the interest of ensuring fair access to housing and employment. The leadership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is on record as favoring such measures.' Asked whether the Church would apologize for its past rhetoric, Elder Christofferson said: 'The doctrines, values and beliefs all related to this haven't changed and won't, but I think we can express things better.'
Dehlin, founder of the Mormon Stories podcast, was excommunicated by his Logan, Utah stake president. Press reports of the decision letter attributed it to his spreading of what the letter called false concepts; commentators in Dialogue link his case to his support for Ordain Women and for same-sex marriage, and note that he, Kate Kelly and Denver Snuffer all founded organisations the Church treated as rival institutions rather than merely publishing criticism.
With the backing of Church leaders, the Utah legislature passed a bill banning discrimination against LGBT people in housing and employment while protecting religious institutions that object to homosexuality. Legislators and gay-rights advocates said the apostles' endorsement turned the tide. Elder Oaks later wrote that the negotiation grew out of a Salt Lake City ordinance first proposed in 2009 and took six years, and that the law 'offered protections to both sides.'
Changes to Handbook 1 were noticed and discussed online and in the press before hard copies were distributed. They mandated a disciplinary council for any member in a legal same-sex marriage, treating such a marriage as apostasy; directed leaders to seriously consider discipline for members cohabiting in same-sex relationships; and refused baptism to minor children living with same-sex parents until eighteen, and then only if the child specifically disavowed 'the practice of same-gendered cohabitation and marriage' and did not live with such a parent. On 6 November Elder Christofferson gave a Newsroom interview saying the policy protected children from 'difficulties, challenges, conflicts that can injure development in very tender years.'
An organized mass resignation event drew about fifteen hundred participants in downtown Salt Lake City, some waiting in line more than an hour and a half to formally remove their names from Church records. CNN reported the figure at 1,500. Affirmation's own membership survey a year later found the share of its worldwide members active in the Church had fallen from over half before the policy to roughly twenty to twenty-five percent after it.
In a worldwide young-adult devotional, Russell M. Nelson, then president of the Quorum of the Twelve, said the same prophetic process used for the 2012 missionary-age change had been followed 'again with the recent additions to the Church's handbook.' He described the Twelve meeting 'repeatedly in the temple in fasting and prayer,' and then: 'when the Lord inspired His prophet, President Thomas S. Monson, to declare the mind of the Lord and the will of the Lord, each of us during that sacred moment felt a spiritual confirmation. It was our privilege as Apostles to sustain what had been revealed to President Monson.'
Barker, Parkinson and Knoll assembled the direct, indirect and anecdotal evidence on LGBTQ Latter-day Saint suicide. They reported that Utah's fifteen-to-nineteen suicide rate had roughly doubled since 2011 while comparable Rocky Mountain states had not seen the same increase, and that Knoll's state-level regression found percentage Mormon to be the only variable reliably predicting the increase over 2009–2014. They also wrote plainly: 'there is no direct empirical evidence that indicates that the handbook policy change actually increased Mormon LGBTQ youth suicides.'
Paul Douglas Adams, a Border Patrol employee in Bisbee, Arizona, was arrested by Homeland Security agents in 2017 after Interpol traced material he had posted online. He was indicted on eleven counts of child sexual abuse and died by suicide in pretrial detention in December 2017. His wife pleaded no contest in 2018 to two felony counts of child abuse for failing to protect the children, was sentenced to prison and released in October 2020. The children were adopted into other families.
The Church published a narrative history in its own voice, with the Anthon visit, the lost manuscript and the witnesses told in scene. Its account of the plates does not use the name Cumorah for the New York hill.
Revelations and Translations, Volume 4, edited by Robin Scott Jensen and Brian M. Hauglid, printed high-resolution images and transcripts of the surviving papyri, the Egyptian Alphabet documents, the Grammar and Alphabet volume, and all the Book of Abraham manuscripts. Its editorial notes state that the scribes' work 'does not comport with modern Egyptological understanding of Egyptian characters.'
After a sustained public campaign by former bishop Sam Young and his organization Protect LDS Children, the First Presidency announced changes governing how bishops and stake presidencies conduct interviews with women and children and how they counsel abuse victims. Children, youth and women may now invite an adult to join them in what had traditionally been one-on-one interviews. Current Handbook guidance directs a leader meeting with a child, youth or woman to ask a parent or another adult to be in an adjoining room, foyer or hall.
The First Presidency and NAACP leadership issued a joint statement calling for greater civility, racial and ethnic harmony and mutual respect. Two weeks later the Church staged Be One in the Conference Center for the fortieth anniversary of the revelation, with Gladys Knight and the Bonner family. Oaks acknowledged that the restriction caused pain and that some members continued attitudes of racism afterward; Nelson asked members to build bridges of cooperation instead of walls of segregation. A hoax apology attributed to Nelson had circulated days earlier and fooled many Black members.
The Church settled the six families' suit during trial. FLOODLIT later established from court records that the settlement was $32 million and that the Church had spent more than $27 million defending the case — nearly $60 million in total, and the largest known payout tied to abuse in the Church. Roughly 12,000 pages of the record remain sealed under a 2016 order of the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals.
The Church's official narrative history opens chapter 2 with Joseph rising early on a spring morning in 1820 and praying 'O Lord, what church shall I join?' It weaves the forgiveness of the 1832 account together with the church question and two personages of the 1838 account into one continuous story, with the sources given in the chapter notes.
Six months after the interview policy changed, the Church excommunicated Young, the former bishop whose campaign had pressed for the change. He had gathered and published accounts from members describing sexually explicit questioning of minors in bishops' interviews.
John Gee reviewed the volume under the title 'The Joseph Smith Papers Project Stumbles'; Jeffrey Lindsay charged bias; the series editors Matthew Grow and Matthew Godfrey replied that they read the evidence differently from Gee, holding that translation occurred in Kirtland and again in Nauvoo. Lindsay quoted Hauglid's own statement that he now rejects a missing Abraham manuscript and no longer agrees with Gee or Muhlestein.
Twenty-six years after her excommunication, having attended her ward continuously throughout, Anderson petitioned for rebaptism. The request was denied by the First Presidency. She had told her local leaders of her concerns about the Church barring legally married LGBTQ couples from full participation, about women and priesthood, and about Mother in Heaven's place in Latter-day Saint understanding.
At the direction of the First Presidency, President Oaks announced that children of parents who identify as LGBT may be baptized without First Presidency approval where custodial parents consent, and that infants of nonmember LGBT parents may be blessed. On the apostasy designation the statement read: 'Previously, our Handbook characterized same-gender marriage by a member as apostasy. While we still consider such a marriage to be a serious transgression, it will not be treated as apostasy for purposes of Church discipline. Instead, the immoral conduct in heterosexual or homosexual relationships will be treated in the same way.' The policy had stood for forty-one months.
Speaking to the women of the Church, Oaks said the teaching that families are 'formed, sealed, and exalted eternally' has 'important implications for persons who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.' He affirmed that such persons 'should be treated with the love our Savior commands us to show toward all our neighbors,' acknowledged that 'some persons facing these issues continue to feel marginalized and rejected by some members and leaders in our families, wards, and stakes,' and concluded that the Church 'must try to keep both of the great commandments' and 'walk a fine line between law and love.'
Responding to coverage of its objections to a proposed Utah rule, the Church's director of government relations clarified: 'The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints opposes "conversion therapy" and our therapists do not practice it.' The accompanying Family Services note stated that the agency has a longstanding policy against therapies seeking to repair, convert or change sexual orientation, and that 'research demonstrates that electric shock, aversion and other analogous therapies are [ineffective] and harmful to youth who experience same-sex attraction.'
A confidential whistleblower complaint from David A. Nielsen, a former Ensign Peak portfolio manager, was received by the IRS on 21 November 2019, alleging the Church had amassed about $100 billion in accounts intended for charitable purposes and had used tax-exempt donations to prop up two businesses. Religion Unplugged and the Washington Post published on 16 and 17 December. The First Presidency responded the same day that the vast majority of funds are used immediately, that a portion is 'methodically safeguarded,' and that 'The Church complies with all applicable law governing our donations, investments, taxes, and reserves.'
Doctrine and Covenants 132 is still canonized and anyone practising plural marriage is excommunicated. Under current handbook policy a living woman may be sealed to only one husband and needs a cancellation to be sealed to another, while a widower may be sealed to a second wife without cancelling the first.
Ensign Peak filed a single aggregated Form 13F disclosing holdings of nearly $38 billion in stocks and mutual funds as of the end of 2019, including about $1.5 billion each in Apple and Microsoft, $930 million in Google and $855 million in Amazon. No earlier filings under its own name appear on the SEC website. Deseret Mutual Benefit Administrators filed its first 13F the same day.
Presiding Bishop Gérald Caussé and his counselors told the Deseret News that the Church had doubled its humanitarian spending over five years and now provided nearly $1 billion a year in combined humanitarian and welfare aid, alongside 30,000 congregations, more than 200 temples and education for hundreds of thousands of students. 'It's no surprise we are talking about billions of dollars,' Caussé said.
In February 2020 BYU removed the honor-code section barring 'homosexual behavior,' and same-sex couples celebrated publicly on campus; the change was reversed within weeks. The same month the Church published a new General Handbook with the fullest treatment of transgender members to date. It calls for 'sensitivity, kindness, compassion, and an abundance of Christlike love,' says all are welcome at meetings, and states that 'the intended meaning of gender in the family proclamation is biological sex at birth,' with priesthood ordination and temple ordinances following biological sex at birth and elective surgical transition grounds for membership restrictions.
Around the two-hundredth anniversary, BYU Studies Quarterly published both Harper's account of how the vision became 'all or nothing' and Ann Taves's essay conceding how much better attested the 1824 revival is than the 1820 one. Both appeared in the Church university's own journal.
After George Floyd's killing, Russell M. Nelson posted that “The Creator of us all calls on each of us to abandon attitudes of prejudice against any group of God's children. Any of us who has prejudice toward another race needs to repent.” In October, speaking at BYU, Dallin H. Oaks said that “Black lives matter is an eternal truth all reasonable people should support,” while declining to endorse the organization. Earlier that year Gary E. Stevenson had publicly disavowed a paragraph on dark skin as a curse that had been printed in the 2020 Come, Follow Me manual.
Attorney Lynne Cadigan filed an 87-page complaint on behalf of three of the six Adams children, alleging that two bishops and a Sunday School teacher — who was also a former Border Patrol agent — failed to report, and that the clergy-penitent privilege did not apply because the defendants had knowledge outside any confidential communication. The Church's answer asserted that it owed the children no duty. A Cochise County grand jury investigation, disclosed in December 2021, delayed proceedings.
Huntsman filed in the Central District of California seeking more than $5 million in tithing, alleging the Church misrepresented that tithing was not used for commercial projects while spending, he alleged, $1.4 billion on City Creek and $594 million on the Beneficial Life bailout. Nielsen supplied a sworn declaration that Ensign Peak staff 'referred to and revered all funds of EPA as "tithing" money, regardless of whether they were referring to principal or earnings.' Judge Stephen V. Wilson granted the Church summary judgment on 14 September 2021.
Speaking to BYU faculty and staff, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland called for more 'musket fire' in defending the faith, naming 'the doctrine of the family and defending marriage as the union of a man and a woman.' He warned that 'we have to be careful that love and empathy do not get interpreted as condoning and advocacy,' and criticized a student who had come out as gay at commencement. Matt Easton, the valedictorian in question, replied publicly that within an hour of the remarks three current BYU students had told him how unsafe they felt. Beginning winter semester 2024, the address became a core reading in UNIV 101, a course required of every incoming BYU student other than transfers; a BYU spokesperson said the class had been 'well received.'
Michael Rezendes reported that when a Bisbee bishop learned a member was sexually assaulting his five-year-old daughter, he followed Church policy and called the help line, and that attorneys who staff it told him he was legally bound to keep the matter secret. The bishop later told federal investigators: "They said, 'You absolutely can do nothing.'" The abuse continued for as many as seven more years and extended to a second daughter born after the bishops knew. The AP said it had obtained thousands of pages of sealed court documents.
Church Newsroom published a statement saying: "The nature and the purpose of the Church's help line was seriously mischaracterized in a recent Associated Press article. The help line is instrumental in ensuring that all legal requirements for reporting are met." A second, longer statement followed, itemizing what the Church said the AP got wrong and stating a leader's three responsibilities: assure that child sexual abuse is stopped; help victims receive care, including from professional counselors; and comply with whatever reporting is required by law.
AP reporting based on two pages of a call log and a deposition transcript, filed with the Arizona Court of Appeals by the plaintiffs, identified Merrill F. Nelson — then a Republican member of the Utah House and a Kirton McConkie lawyer — as the attorney who took the initial help-line call and who spoke with two bishops over roughly two years. In the same period Church spokesman Sam Penrod said: "As clergy, the bishop was required by Arizona law to maintain the confidentiality of the father's limited confession."
The Church issued a statement thanking 'all who played a part in the passage of the amended Respect for Marriage Act,' calling the religious-freedom protections 'historic and commendable,' while restating that 'the doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints related to marriage between a man and a woman is well known and will remain unchanged.'
Nielsen submitted a 90-page memorandum to the Senate Finance Committee and its Subcommittee on Taxes and IRS Oversight, alleging false statements, systematic accounting fraud and private inurement. He asserted that Ensign Peak 'failed to engage in any charitable activities for 22 years,' that 'it is clear that EPA has never been tax-exempt,' and that it had avoided more than $20 billion in taxes.
The SEC charged Ensign Peak with failing to file Forms 13F from 1997 through 2019 and with misstating information on the forms it did file, and charged the Church with causing those violations. To obscure a portfolio that by 2018 grew to approximately $32 billion, Ensign Peak created thirteen shell LLCs with the Church's knowledge and approval and filed in their names. Ensign Peak paid $4 million; the Church paid $1 million. The Church said it had relied on legal counsel since 2000, that it believed all required securities were reported, and that it 'regret[s] mistakes made, and now consider[s] this matter closed.'
Nielsen broke a three-year public silence on CBS, saying 'I thought I was going to work for a charity' and calling Ensign Peak 'really a clandestine hedge fund — once the money went in, it didn't go out.' W. Christopher Waddell of the Presiding Bishopric was interviewed and disputed the characterization. The Church issued a release calling the segment 'unfortunate' and based on 'unfounded allegations by a former employee who has a different view on how the church should manage its resources.'
A three-judge panel reversed summary judgment on Huntsman's fraud claim as to the City Creek representations, while affirming as to Beneficial Life, and denied the Church's request to seal the financial portions of the opinion. The Church sought rehearing; Chief Judge Mary H. Murguia granted en banc review and the panel opinion was vacated.
Judge Timothy B. Dickerson of Cochise County Superior Court granted the Church defendants' motions for summary judgment, holding that there was no evidence Church officials had knowledge independent of confidential communications with Adams, and that Arizona's reporting statute is overridden when the only source of the information is a confession or similar conversation. Through attorney William Maledon the Church said: "Contrary to some news reports and exaggerated allegations, the court found that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its clergy handled this matter consistent with Arizona law."
Ten years on, the November 2015 policy still turns up in Dialogue as a hinge in individual lives: a 2025 essay describes a writer who fled the Church a month into university when 'questions about my own queerness got entangled with the 2015 policy about baptizing LGBTQ couples' children,' left for half a decade, and has since wandered back into the back pews. Recent Dialogue volumes carry a growing body of queer Latter-day Saint essay collections, transgender interview studies, and theology by Petrey, Blaire Ostler and others.
An eleven-judge en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit unanimously agreed with the district court and dismissed Huntsman's suit in a 63-page set of rulings — the second dismissal in four years. Commentators noted the ruling would carry persuasive weight over two further tithing cases then pending in the Tenth Circuit. The Church welcomed the ruling, saying tithing donations are considered sacred and are dedicated to advancing its mission.
Julie Doe v. Corporation of the Presiding Bishop (D. Or. 6:25-cv-00222) was filed in the Eugene Division, alleging that a bishop of a Vancouver, Washington branch was informed of a girl's abuse by her adopted father and did not report it to police or child welfare, and that months of further abuse followed. The suit seeks $25 million. The adoptive father was separately convicted of sexual abuse charges.
A San Jose law firm filed 91 or more civil suits against the Church in California in 2024, pleading nearly identical causes of action including negligent supervision, negligent hiring and retention, and breach of mandatory duty. In September a petition sought coordination in Riverside County Superior Court; by 3 March 2025, 28 federal cases had been gathered before the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation as MDL No. 3150, In re: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Sexual Abuse Litigation.
The U.S. District Court for the District of Utah ruled for two insurers who had refused to reimburse the Church's West Virginia costs, holding that the underlying claims arose from multiple occurrences rather than one. The decision states: "Once the Church had knowledge that Mr. Jensen posed a risk of abuse to Church members, the Church had a duty to its members to prevent the abuse. The Church had multiple opportunities to act and failed to do so." The Church appealed; on 28 July 2026 the Tenth Circuit reversed and remanded, reviving the claim against the insurers.
A unanimous court, Vice Chief Justice John R. Lopez IV writing, ended the Adams children's suit. It held that whether a communication is a "confession," and whether keeping it confidential is "reasonable and necessary within the concepts of the religion," are questions of religious doctrine that the First Amendment bars fact-finders from reviewing: "We may not substitute our interpretation of Church doctrine for the Church's reading of its own doctrine." The ruling reinstated the 2023 trial-court judgment and vacated a 2025 appellate decision that had sent the case toward a jury. Amicus briefs supporting the Church came from the Catholic dioceses of Phoenix, Tucson and Gallup, the Church of Scientology International and the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, among others.
At the FAIR conference in Lehi, Utah, Kirton McConkie attorney Randy Austin and Latter-day Saint Family Services clinical social worker Kerri Nielsen described the help line as providing 24-hour legal and counselling advice to 31,000 bishops and branch presidents worldwide. Austin said: "Far more abuse gets reported when the bishop calls the helpline than if we didn't have one," and "A child's safety always comes first. We never, ever, ever, ever leave a child in harm's way, ever." He said he had done the work for thirty years and was himself a survivor of child sexual abuse. He cited 37 U.S. states with a clergy exception and argued that studies show protecting the privilege yields more reported abuse, not less.
