A Thumbnail History of Mormonism from When It Became a Going Concern to Utah Statehood

Other than the initial founding years of Mormonism, Alex Beam’s February 21 2020 Wall Street Journal book review of Benjamin Park’s Kingdom of Nauvoo does a great job of boiling down 19th-century Mormon history down. All to many people don’t know this fascinating story. Let me arrange key quotation from Alex into chronological order to give you the sketch:

Joseph Smith fled [Kirtland, Ohio] in the dead of night after his “anti-bank bank,” called the Kirtland Safety Society, collapsed, impoverishing both Mormon and gentile investors.
Nauvoo, where the Mormons sought shelter after fleeing Ohio and Missouri, was yet another place where the church came to grief.
The Mormons’ sojourn in Nauvoo, Ill., along the banks of the Mississippi River, is one of the grand, underappreciated sagas in American history. In just six years, the Latter-day Saints, as they called themselves—guided by their charismatic, bumptious leader, Joseph Smith—built a thriving metropolis in a mosquito-infested swamp that grew to be bigger than Chicago.
Not only did Smith confect a vibrant city from a swamp; he conjured up many of Mormonism’s best known, and most notorious, doctrines in just a few years. In Nauvoo, he introduced “vicarious baptisms” of the dead, a rite that Mormons practice to this day, even on deceased gentiles, their term for non-Mormons. He also devised the “endowment” ritual to initiate members—featuring a re-enactment of the Adam and Eve story from the Book of Genesis—and it is still performed in Mormon temples.
It was in Nauvoo that Smith introduced and practiced the most controversial teaching of all: polygamy. By 1846, just three years after his secret “revelation” calling for plural marriage, about 200 men and 700 women had multiple spouses.
Mr. Park exploits new material on Smith’s so-called Council of Fifty, a secret, all-male committee whose remit was to support his wackadoodle presidential campaign of 1844. Oh, yes, and “to rule the world,” as Mr. Park summarizes its grand ambition. The church kept the council’s minutes under lock and key for 172 years, until 2016. Why? Probably, in part, because they were seditious. The Council of Fifty was to be a theocratic “shadow government,” Mr. Park says, with a “new form of divine governance.” The council appointed a committee to draft a new constitution for the putative “Aristarchy,” a government by “the wisest & best,” in Smith’s phrase.
Another reason for concealing the council’s minutes for so long might have been its sheer ridiculousness, painful to a faith that wants its history to be taken seriously. The idea that Smith “plotted to take over American politics” and set himself up as “king of God’s empire,” as Mr. Park puts it, testifies to Smith’s manic digressions during the Nauvoo period. More than once, Mr. Park uses the adjective “reckless” to describe Smith’s actions.
Aggrieved by the Mormons’ political machinations and shocked by reports of widespread polygamy, the anti-Mormon “old settlers” of western Illinois murdered Smith in 1844 and drove his followers out of Illinois two years later.
When the mortally wounded Smith—injured by gunshots, pursued by a mob—plummeted from his second-story cell window at the Carthage, Ill., jail, … Smith “raised his arms in the Masonic sign of distress.” His last words were “O Lord my God . . . ”—the beginning of the Masonic call for help. (“O Lord my God is there no help for the widow’s son?”)
After Smith’s death, his successor, Brigham Young, led 15,000 Latter-day Saints westward to a manifest destiny in the Great Salt Lake Basin. As Mr. Park explains it, the embittered Mormons abandoned the American experiment and fled to the then-quite-wild West, “outside America’s control.”
… the Mormon hegira to Utah was a secession that worked, decades before the bloody, failed attempt by the Confederate States of America.
Mr. Park adeptly describes Smith’s cautious acceptance of female authority on the frontier and Brigham Young’s reactionary rejection of it. “I don’t want the advice or counsel of any woman—they would lead us down to hell,” Young proclaimed less than a year after Smith’s death. The Mormon Church has treated African-Americans even more equivocally, and Mr. Park is sharp and unsparing in his account of the church’s initial acceptance, and later humiliation, of its very few black members during the Nauvoo era and its aftermath. He credits Smith with an “inclusive racial vision,” undone by Young’s “policy of white supremacy.”
Fifty years later, after operating a de facto Mormon republic in and around the Utah Territory, church members rejoined the United States in 1896 as the state of Utah, and the rest is history.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints now claims more than 16 million members world-wide and is a potent economic and political force in the country that once anathematized them.

Let me add a few notes of my own to this sketch of the history of Mormonism from when it had become a going concern to Utah statehood:

Kirtland, Ohio became an early Mecca for Mormonism because Sidney Rigdon had brought almost all of his preexisting Cambellite Restorationist congregation in Ohio into Mormonism. Also, things had gotten hot for Joseph Smith in upstate New York where he founded Mormonism.
Illinois initially welcomed the Mormons when Missouri expelled Mormons under an “Extermination Order.” Nauvoo received a charter from the Illinois state government giving Nauvoo a large degree of autonomy.
Because of the predominance of Mormons in Nauvoo, Joseph Smith was the ruler of Nauvoo while he lived.
Joseph Smith was put in the jail where he was murdered by a mob because he ordered the destruction of a printing press for the Nauvoo Expositor, which in its first issue had revealed polygamy among the Mormons and was planning in its second issue to reveal that Joseph Smith had had himself crowned king of the world. Thus, Joseph Smith was going on trial for violating freedom of the press as Mayor of Nauvoo.
It has been very difficult for the Mormon Church to fully renounce Brigham Young’s racial views. But in recent years, the Mormon Church has come a long way toward doing so. See:
- Flexible Dogmatism: The Mormon Position on Infallibility
- Christian Kimball on the Fallibility of Mormon Leaders and on Gay Marriage

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Also see the links in "Hal Boyd: The Ignorance of Mocking Mormonism."

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By self-identification, I left Mormonism for Unitarian Universalism in 2000, at the age of 40. I have had the good fortune to be a lay preacher in Unitarian Universalism. I have posted many of my Unitarian-Universalist sermons on this blog.