A Church That Also Functions as an Archive

Beyond its religious functions, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints maintains one of the most extensive institutional archives of any American religious body, systematically collecting documents, correspondence and artifacts connected to its own nineteenth century founding and subsequent history. This archival mission occasionally puts the church in the position of any major historical repository, evaluating and sometimes purchasing documents offered on the open market by dealers and collectors, a role distinct from its doctrinal and pastoral functions and one that briefly intersected with serious criminal fraud in the early 1980s.

That period saw a wave of purported early Mormon documents surface for sale, many through a single dealer, offering tantalising new details about the church's founding that both excited and unsettled church leadership and outside historians alike, since some of the material complicated the traditional founding narrative rather than simply confirming it. The church's acquisitions department evaluated and purchased several of these documents in good faith, standard practice for an archive seeking to preserve historically significant material regardless of whether its contents were comfortable, a policy that proved to have serious consequences once the documents' true origin came to light.