Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS/Mormonism)

A Restoration in Upstate New York

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was a Christian restorationist faith founded in upstate New York in the early nineteenth century. Its members, commonly called Latter-day Saints and historically known as Mormons, believed that the church Jesus Christ established in the New Testament had been lost through apostasy and was restored to the earth through a modern prophet.

That prophet was Joseph Smith, a farmer's son from the Palmyra district, who taught that he had seen God the Father and Jesus Christ in a grove near his family's farm in 1820. Over the following decade he dictated the Book of Mormon, which he described as a translation of an ancient record of peoples in the Americas, engraved on golden plates and delivered to him by an angel. The book was published in 1830, and the church was formally organised on 6 April that year.

The new faith grew quickly and drew hostility almost as fast. Its claims of new scripture and living prophets, its tight communal organisation and its tendency to vote as a bloc unsettled its neighbours. Its members moved from New York to Ohio, then to Missouri, where they were driven out by force in 1838, and then to Illinois, where they built the city of Nauvoo on the Mississippi River.

The Trek to the Great Basin

Joseph Smith was killed by a mob at Carthage Jail, Illinois, in June 1844. Most of his followers accepted the leadership of Brigham Young and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Smaller groups followed other claimants and formed separate churches. In 1846 Young led the main body of the church west across the plains, and in July 1847 the first wagon companies entered the Salt Lake Valley, then outside the United States.

Over the following decades, tens of thousands of converts from the eastern states, Britain and Scandinavia made the same crossing, many of them on foot pulling handcarts. They settled hundreds of towns across the Great Basin. Salt Lake City became the church's headquarters, and the Salt Lake Temple, begun in 1853, took forty years to complete.

The church's open practice of plural marriage from the 1850s brought it into prolonged conflict with the United States government. Federal laws, prosecutions and the seizure of church property followed, and in 1890 the church's president issued a manifesto ending the sanction of new plural marriages. Utah became a state in 1896. Groups that refused to abandon the practice broke away and formed separate fundamentalist movements, with which the church had no connection.

Belief and Practice

Latter-day Saints accepted the Bible alongside the Book of Mormon and two further volumes of modern revelation, the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price. They taught that God the Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost were three distinct beings, that people lived as spirits before birth, and that families could be bound together beyond death through ordinances performed in temples.

Temples were set apart from ordinary meetinghouses. Sunday worship took place in local chapels open to anyone, but temples were reserved for members holding a current recommend from their bishop and were used for sacred ordinances: endowments, marriages "sealed" for eternity, and baptisms and other ordinances performed by proxy for the dead. That last practice drove the church's long investment in genealogy and made its family history records among the largest in the world.

Daily life for a devout member followed a recognisable pattern. The Word of Wisdom, a health code, forbade alcohol, tobacco, coffee and tea. Members paid a tithe of ten per cent of their income and fasted once a month, giving the cost of the skipped meals to the poor. Young men, and increasingly young women, served full-time missions at their own expense, usually for eighteen months to two years. Families held a weekly home evening, prayed together and read scripture together.

The church had no paid local clergy. Bishops, teachers, organists, youth leaders and clerks were all ordinary members called to serve for a season alongside their jobs and families, and released when the season ended. This gave congregations an unusual sense of shared ownership. It also placed heavy loads on the most willing members and meant that leadership quality varied widely from ward to ward.

A Church of Wards and Stakes

The church was governed from Salt Lake City by a First Presidency of three, led by the church's president, who was sustained as prophet, seer and revelator, and by the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. On a president's death, the senior apostle succeeded him. Beneath them, general authorities oversaw large geographic areas of the world.

Locally, members belonged to a ward, a congregation usually of a few hundred people within set boundaries, presided over by a bishop. Several wards made up a stake, led by a stake president. In areas with fewer members, smaller branches and districts served the same purpose. Members did not choose their congregation. They attended the ward in whose boundaries they lived.

Alongside the priesthood quorums for men stood the Relief Society, founded in Nauvoo in 1842 and one of the oldest and largest women's organisations in the world. It organised care for the sick, the bereaved and the poor at ward level, and in most congregations it did much of the practical work that held the community together. Primary served children, and the Young Men and Young Women organisations served teenagers.

A Global Church

For most of the twentieth century the church's membership was concentrated in the American West, but from the 1950s it grew rapidly abroad, in Latin America, the Pacific Islands, the Philippines and later Africa. In 1978 it ended a long-standing restriction that had barred men of Black African descent from the priesthood and both men and women of that descent from temple ordinances, a change that opened the way for growth in Africa and Brazil. The history of the restriction remained painful and contested long after it was lifted.

Temples multiplied, from a handful in the mid-twentieth century to well over a hundred by 2000, many of them smaller buildings built to a standard design so that members far from Utah could reach one. The church also changed its emphasis on its own name in 2018, asking members and the media to use its full name rather than "Mormon" or "LDS". Towards the end of the decade it replaced home teaching and visiting teaching with a less structured programme it called ministering, and from January 2019 Sunday meetings were shortened from three hours to two.

The church entered the 2020s with close to seventeen million members on its records, although actual weekly attendance was a much smaller share in most countries. The pandemic of 2020 closed its temples and meetinghouses worldwide for months, and sacrament was administered in members' homes. In October 2025 the church's president died after a long tenure and was succeeded by the senior apostle, following the church's usual order. By 2025 membership was reported at close to eighteen million.

Faith and Friction

The church attracted criticism throughout its history, and some of it came from within. Historians and former members questioned the origins of the Book of Mormon and its claims about ancient America. The legacy of plural marriage, the priesthood restriction, the church's opposition to same-sex marriage, its limits on women's roles in the priesthood and the scale and management of its financial reserves all drew sustained public criticism. In 2023 the church and its investment arm settled with United States regulators over the way those reserves had been reported.

Members' responses varied widely. Many remained devout and found the church's demands a source of meaning, structure and belonging. Others drifted into inactivity while keeping a cultural identity, and others resigned their membership altogether. In most congregations the rolls held many more names than the pews held people, and families frequently contained both believers and those who had left.

The Church in Australia

The first Latter-day Saint missionary arrived in Australia in 1840, and the first organised branch was formed in Sydney in 1852. For a century the church remained small and largely urban, its members few enough that many emigrated to Utah. After the Second World War it grew more steadily, swelled by British migrants who had joined the church at home and by local converts, and stakes were organised in the major cities from the 1960s onwards.

In South Australia, congregations grew up in Adelaide's suburbs and in regional centres such as Whyalla and Mount Gambier. The new satellite town of Elizabeth, built in the 1950s and 1960s in the city's north, drew a large share of migrant members, and its branch grew in time into the congregations of the northern suburbs, including Playford Ward. The Adelaide Australia Temple was dedicated in 2000 in the eastern suburb of Marden, sparing South Australian members the long journey to the temple in Sydney.

By the 2020s the church in Australia counted well over one hundred and fifty thousand members on its records, organised into dozens of stakes within its Pacific Area. Adelaide's stakes remained modest in size, their congregations a mix of multi-generation families, Pacific Islander communities, recent converts and migrants from across the world.

In July 2018 a visiting apostle, Elder Nathaniel Carter, called a special gathering of selected members from Adelaide's Modbury stake at the Adelaide Australia Temple. In the months that followed, a number of families from those congregations left their homes without explanation. Inquiries made through the church's regular channels found no record of any sanctioned relocation, and the church made no public statement on the matter.