Mormons.The Latter-day Saints church, as it is more accurately called, was intended to be a restoration of the primitive church established by Jesus

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Mormons

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also called the Mormon church) was founded at Fayette, New York, on April 6, 1830, by Joseph Smith, Jr. Smith, the recipient of dreams and heavenly manifestations in the 1820s, dictated to scribes the translated text of a holy book he said had been engraved on gold plates by an American Indian historian about a.d. 400. The six-hundred-page Book of Mormon was published in the spring of 1830.

The Latter-day Saints church, as it is more accurately called, was intended to be a restoration of the primitive church established by Jesus and his apostles. God was a personal being, Jesus his literal son, and at the head of the church was a prophet, functioning under divine leadership and through an appointed, male, lay priesthood. The church accepted the Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon, and revelations of the prophet as sacred Scriptures.

Missionaries preached throughout New England, the Old Northwest, Canada, and England, and within five years there were more than eight thousand converts. The religious beliefs of the Mormons and their attempts to institute a government in which the godly ruled, however, ran counter to the democratic pluralism of American society, and the Mormons experienced repeated difficulties with their neighbors. Mormon settlers were driven by hostile mobs, in succession, from New York to Ohio, to Missouri, and to Nauvoo in Illinois. In these moves, the Mormons lost most of their property, and many were killed or died from illness.

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In Nauvoo Mormons established a well-planned city and began building a temple, the University of Nauvoo, and a number of mills and shops. But once more the Mormons had difficulties with their neighbors, and in 1844 a mob, including members of the state militia, stormed the jail where Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were being held on the charge of inciting a riot and murdered them.

Within a few weeks, Brigham Young, leader of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, was "sustained" as the new prophet. Under his leadership preparations were made for removal of the church to ...

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