Mormonism and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Origins: Joseph Smith and the golden plates

Mormonism was founded by Joseph Smith Jr. in upstate New York in 1830. Smith claimed that beginning in 1823, he received visits from an angel named Moroni, who directed him to a hillside where golden plates were buried. Over several years, Smith said he translated the plates — using a seer stone placed in a hat, with his face buried in the hat to read glowing words — and the result was the Book of Mormon, published in 1830. The plates themselves were never seen by anyone except eleven witnesses whose testimonies appear in the book’s front matter, and Smith said they were returned to Moroni after translation.

In the same year, Smith formally organized the Church of Christ (later renamed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). He claimed additional revelations throughout his life, including the restoration of ancient priesthood authority, new scripture, and distinctive theological doctrines that diverged significantly from mainstream Christianity. He was killed by a mob in Carthage, Illinois in 1844. His successor Brigham Young led the majority of members on an exodus to the Salt Lake Valley in present-day Utah, where the church established its world headquarters.

Core beliefs

Mormonism shares Christianity’s belief in Jesus Christ as savior but differs substantially in theology. The church holds that God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost are three separate beings — not a trinity — and that God the Father has a physical, glorified body. It teaches that humans existed as spirit children of God before birth, that mortal life is a test, and that after death, individuals progress through a series of kingdoms based on their faithfulness.

The highest degree, the Celestial Kingdom, is reserved for faithful Latter-day Saints who have received the full set of temple ordinances. The doctrine of “eternal progression” — the idea that humans can, through faithfulness, become like God — is distinctive and was expressed by fifth church president Lorenzo Snow in the couplet: “As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be.”

The church considers four texts to be scripture: the Bible (as translated correctly), the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants (a collection of Smith’s revelations), and the Pearl of Great Price. This “open canon” — the idea that ongoing revelation through a living prophet continues — is central to LDS identity and sets it apart from most of Christianity.

Why it has one of the largest deconversion communities online

Few religious traditions have generated a deconversion community as large and organized as Mormonism’s. Subreddits, podcasts, YouTube channels, and support groups for former members (“exmos”) draw hundreds of thousands of participants. The reasons are structural. Mormonism asks an unusually high level of commitment: members are expected to attend church for three hours on Sundays, pay a full ten percent tithe to receive access to temples, abstain from alcohol, coffee, tea, and tobacco, serve two-year full-time missions at their own expense, and participate in lay leadership roles that can consume dozens of hours per week. When members lose faith, the cost — social, familial, financial, identity-based — is correspondingly high. Former members often describe leaving as more disorienting than any other life event.

The internet accelerated what the church itself calls the “faith crisis.” Members who encounter historical and scientific problems with church truth claims — often for the first time as adults — find vast communities of people who have had the same experience. In 2013, the church began quietly releasing a series of Gospel Topics Essays on its official website, acknowledging historical facts that had been downplayed or denied for generations. The essays addressed polygamy, the Book of Abraham, DNA evidence, the priesthood ban on Black members, and other sensitive topics. Their release was itself an acknowledgment that the information was out there, and that members were finding it.

The Book of Abraham

In 1835, Joseph Smith purchased a collection of Egyptian papyri and claimed to translate them as the writings of the biblical patriarch Abraham. The resulting text became the Book of Abraham, now part of the LDS canon. In the nineteenth century, Egyptology was in its infancy and the translation could not be verified. In 1966, fragments of the original papyri were rediscovered in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. They were examined by Egyptologists who identified them as a common funerary text called the Book of Breathings — having nothing to do with Abraham. The church’s own Gospel Topics Essay on the subject acknowledges that “Mormon and non-Mormon Egyptologists” agree the papyri do not match Smith’s translation, while offering alternative explanations for how the scripture might still be considered inspired.

DNA and Native American origins

The Book of Mormon describes migrations of ancient peoples from the Middle East to the Americas, where they became the ancestors of the indigenous populations of the New World. This claim — central to the book’s historical narrative — is directly contradicted by decades of genetic research. DNA studies of Native American populations consistently show that their origins lie in migrations from northeast Asia across the Bering land bridge, not from the ancient Near East. The church’s Gospel Topics Essay on this subject acknowledges the evidence and suggests that Book of Mormon peoples may have been a small group whose genetic signature was “swamped” by pre-existing populations — a hypothesis most geneticists consider implausible given the scope of the migration claims in the text itself.

Polygamy

Joseph Smith secretly practiced polygamy beginning in the early 1840s, including marriages to women already married to living husbands (polyandry) and to a fourteen-year-old girl, Helen Mar Kimball. The practice was publicly acknowledged by the church in 1852 under Brigham Young and was officially discontinued under church president Wilford Woodruff in 1890, largely under federal pressure following the Edmunds Act. The church’s Gospel Topics Essay acknowledges that Smith “may have married” as many as forty women. Fundamentalist offshoots — not affiliated with the main LDS church — continue to practice polygamy today.

The priesthood ban on Black members

From roughly the mid-nineteenth century until 1978, the LDS church barred Black members from receiving the priesthood and from participating in temple ordinances — effectively excluding them from the highest levels of church participation and, in the church’s theology, from the highest degree of eternal glory. The ban was rescinded under church president Spencer W. Kimball in 1978, announced as a new revelation. The church’s Gospel Topics Essay explicitly states that the ban was not a revelation from God and disavows the “theories” used to justify it — including the idea that Black people were less valiant in a pre-mortal existence — as “not moored in scriptural or historical fact.” This is a remarkable admission: the church is acknowledging that a practice it enforced for over a century, and which previous prophets defended as divine doctrine, was wrong.

The Mountain Meadows Massacre

In September 1857, a group of Mormon militia members and their Paiute allies attacked and killed approximately 120 men, women, and children from an Arkansas emigrant wagon train passing through southern Utah. The victims were initially lured out of their defensive position under a flag of truce. The massacre occurred during a period of heightened tension between the Utah Territory and the federal government, and was for decades covered up and denied within Mormon communities. Only one man, John D. Lee, was ever prosecuted. Church president Brigham Young’s precise role remains disputed by historians.