About the Mormons

About the 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.

In Nauvoo Mormons established a well-planned city and began building a

temple, the University of Nau...

... middle of paper ...

...aster (banks closed).

· The Mormons were chased out of Kirtland.

Missouri:

· Smith and his followers fled to the colonies which the Mormons set

up.

· By 1831 there were 1000 members in the Mormon movement.

· In the winter of 1838 the Mormons let Missouri.

· Attempts were made to stop Mormons from voting

Nauvoo:

· Nauvoo was created for the Mormons.

Joseph smith and the start of the Mormon movement:

· Most of the emigrants who went west were afraid of god.

· The most important religious group to go west was the 'church of

Jesus Christ of the letter day saints' - the Mormons.

· In 1920 Smith was visited by an angel after he had dug up some

strange plate that told quite a different story to the bible.

· Smith started with 5 followers but by 1830 it turned into several

hundred.