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This chapter introduces three of the main figures of the book, Joseph Smith Jr., Jane Manning James, and Wakara. It also introduces how these different Mormons conceptualized their relationship with God, and their relationship with other members of the Mormon people, especially members of different races. The founder of Mormonism, Smith believed that he was divinely mandated to create a religious movement that would end all divisions within the human family, including racial divisions. The Ute chief, Wakara, and his brother Arapeen believed that they were divinely called to share the lands of Utah with white settlers, but also called to fight against Mormon efforts to destroy the Ute way of life. An early black Mormon pioneer, James believed that she was divinely called to prove her Mormonness, which would help her shed her supposed black accursedness.

This chapter sketches the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), or Mormons, in America. Headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, the LDS has a worldwide membership of more than 14 million, with two-thirds of these adherents outside the United States. It likewise received international media attention in 2008 as the proudly avowed faith of a “conservative Republican” candidate for the U.S. presidency. This merging of ecclesiastical growth with political prominence began to characterize North America's homegrown religion within a few years of its formal inception in 1830. That amalgam resulted from the faith's insistence that there is no real distinction between the secular and the religious, “for all things are spiritual” to God. The Mormons are noted for their own exclusionary assertions of authority, truth, and liturgy, as well as claims of continued revelation to a series of “living prophets of God” on earth in modern times. This claim alone separates Mormonism from traditional Christianity. The first of these prophets was Joseph Smith Jr., the founder of the Mormon Church.

This chapter explores the potential in Mormon scripture and theology for a reformulation of the confessional narrative of the Great Apostasy: one that both remains true to the fundamental tenet of apostasy and appreciates the nuanced complexity of the historical record. Noting that LDS theology is heavily, and often unwittingly, reliant on theological formulations and institutions that emerged before Joseph Smith, it contends that Mormons should take a much longer view of providential history than their standard narrative permits. It models this new approach by looking at the historical development of the doctrine of Christ’s Atonement, showing that Mormons believe in doctrines that predate Joseph Smith by several centuries. From a providential viewpoint, examples like this may demonstrate for Mormons the persistence of God’s inspiration through centuries once considered dark and apostate.

This chapter examines the multifaceted discourse about the apostasy of Christianity in early Mormon sermons and conversion narratives. It categorizes two prevailing attitudes in this discourse—an exclusive perspective that rejected other religious traditions as inadequate and an inclusive perspective that perceived other religious traditions as inspired yet insufficient. Latter-day Saints’ perceptions about apostasy were conditioned by their previous religious background, by the cultural context in which they wrote, and by ongoing developments within Mormonism.

The epilogue questions whether an LDS restoration demands a precipitous juncture with the past, since Joseph Smith advocated embracing, not standing apart from, the past as a means of reforming and expanding possibilities for human and divine interaction. It traces Joseph Smith’s evolving understanding of Revelation 12 and the image of the church coming out of the wilderness as he came to understand himself as the inaugurator of a new dispensation of Christianity that gathered and extended the truths of the past. Joseph Smith set a precedent for contemporary Mormonism to imagine fundamental continuity with the past, instead of radical discontinuity.

First published in 1830, over the next half-century The Book of Mormon appeared in some dozen new editions. Perhaps the most important edition of the nineteenth century appeared in 1879 and was edited by Orson Pratt. When this edition appeared, Pratt had served as a member of the original Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, a mission president in Britain, and was a member of Brigham Young’s “Vanguard Company” that crossed the Western plains to select a site for Mormon colonization. More important, he was one of early Mormonism’s premier educators and theologians. His edition bore all the marks of a lifetime of study, presenting the book in a highly systematized format and including footnotes that incorporated theological glosses on Mormon history, archaeology, and geology. This essay explores the origin of many of the textual changes found in the 1879 edition and the enduring influence of these changes.