Latter Day Saint Movement

The defining claim of the movement is not reform but restoration. Latter-day Saints hold that after the death of the apostles the fulness of the gospel and the authority to act in God's name were lost in a Great Apostasy, and that beginning in 1820 God restored them through Joseph Smith and his successors, who are sustained as prophets, seers, and revelators.

From this follow the tradition's distinctive features. Its canon is open: alongside the Bible it receives the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants (a collection of modern revelations), and the Pearl of Great Price, together called the standard works, and it teaches that God continues to reveal his will to living prophets. Its understanding of God is nontrinitarian: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are regarded as three distinct persons who are perfectly one in purpose, and the Father and the Son are held to have glorified physical bodies.

Salvation is worked out through faith in Jesus Christ, ordinances performed under restored priesthood authority, and covenant living. Among the teachings that most set the tradition apart are a premortal existence of every human spirit, the sealing of families for eternity in temples, vicarious ordinances such as baptism for the dead, and the hope of exaltation, becoming, through Christ, joint-heirs with him. These beliefs are set out here as the tradition itself states them.

The church that Joseph Smith organized in 1830 grew quickly and moved often, driven both by its gathering impulse and by recurring conflict with its neighbours. Early centres rose in Kirtland, Ohio, and in Missouri, where tensions culminated in an 1838 "extermination order" and the expulsion of the Saints. They regrouped in Illinois and built Nauvoo, for a time one of the largest cities in the state, where Smith introduced temple ordinances and, privately, the practice of plural marriage. His killing by a mob at Carthage in 1844 set off a succession crisis.

The largest body accepted the leadership of Brigham Young and the Quorum of the Twelve and undertook the great migration west, reaching the Salt Lake Valley in 1847 and colonizing the Great Basin; this became The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Others rejected Young's leadership: several joined what became, under Joseph Smith III, the Reorganized Church (today the Community of Christ, based in Independence, Missouri), and a number of smaller groups formed, including later "fundamentalist" bodies that continued plural marriage after the main church ended it. The Utah church renounced plural marriage in the 1890 Manifesto, opening the way to Utah statehood in 1896, and in 1978 removed its long-standing restriction of priesthood and temple ordinances by race. It has since become a global faith, with more members now living outside the United States than within it.

Naming this tradition is itself a matter of some care. Scholars use "Latter Day Saint movement" (with a capital D and no hyphen) as an umbrella for the whole family of churches descended from Joseph Smith's 1830 church, which is the sense in which the atlas uses it here. The hyphenated form "Latter-day Saint" is the distinctive spelling of the largest body, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The words "Mormon" and "Mormonism," drawn from the Book of Mormon, have for nearly two centuries been the common outside names for the movement and its members.

In August 2018, following President Russell M. Nelson, that church issued revised style guidance asking that its full name be used, that "the Church" or "the Church of Jesus Christ" serve as shortened references, that members be called "Latter-day Saints" rather than "Mormons," and that the terms "Mormon" and "LDS" be retired as names for the church and its people. The guidance does not govern the other branches or the scholarly umbrella term, and the older names remain in wide historical and everyday use; the atlas records the church's preference while retaining "Mormonism" as a recognized alias. This paragraph reports the tradition's own stated wishes on the point.

How to classify the movement has been debated by scholars for decades. Latter-day Saints understand themselves as Christians, their worship is directed to God the Father through Jesus Christ, and the Bible stands within their canon, and by that self-understanding the tradition belongs to the Abrahamic, monotheistic family, which is how it is classified here, alongside other movements of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Abrahamic origin. Some other Christians dispute the label, pointing to distinctive Latter-day Saint teachings about God, scripture, and human destiny that depart from the historic creeds.

The historian Jan Shipps argued influentially that the movement is best understood not merely as one more Protestant denomination but as a new religious tradition that grew out of Christianity much as Christianity grew out of Judaism, with its own scripture, prophet, sacred history, and temple. Richard Bushman and Terryl Givens, writing as scholars from within the tradition, likewise stress both its continuity with Christianity and its genuine novelty. The question is partly one of definition, and the atlas notes the debate rather than trying to settle it: the classification chosen reflects the object of worship and the tradition's own Abrahamic self-identification, while acknowledging the distinctiveness that leads some scholars to treat it as a religious tradition in its own right.