According to the canonical account Joseph Smith wrote in 1838 and later published as Joseph Smith-History in the Pearl of Great Price, religious revivalism in the Palmyra, New York, area in the early 1820s left the fourteen-year-old Smith troubled by competing claims among the Methodist, Presbyterian and Baptist churches active in his family's circle. Reading a verse from the Epistle of James urging anyone who lacked wisdom to ask God, he went alone into a wooded grove near his family's farm in the spring of 1820 to pray about which church, if any, he should join. He reported that a pillar of light descended, and that within it he saw two personages, one of whom, pointing to the other, said, 'This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him.' Asked which church was true, Smith recounted being told to join none of them, since their creeds were an abomination and their professors were corrupt.
Smith did not publish an account of the vision until 1832, and the canonical 1838 narrative differs in emphasis and detail from that earlier, less circulated version and from other retellings recorded by associates, a pattern of variation Latter-day Saint scholarship and outside historians have both examined at length. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints treats the 1838 account as authoritative and canonical scripture; other Latter Day Saint movement denominations, and secular historians, weigh the multiple accounts differently, but within the tradition the event as narrated in the Pearl of Great Price is treated as settled and foundational regardless of the textual history behind it.