2 “Except among that Portion of Mankind”: Early Mormon Conceptions of the Apostasy Purchased

“By Searching the Scriptures, ” declared Joseph Smith in his earliest history, “I found that mankind did not come unto the Lord but that they had apostatised from the true and living faith and there was no society or denomination that built upon the Gospel of Jesus Christ as recorded in the new testament and I felt to mourn for my own Sins and for the Sins of the world.” Penned in 1832, Smith’s commentary on contemporary Christianity served as the backdrop for what Latter-day Saints today refer to as the First Vision and as the rationale behind the need for a restoration of prophetic authority. It was because of this perceived apostasy “from the true and liveing faith” and Joseph Smith’s concern for his salvation that he “cried unto the Lord for mercy for there was none else to whom I could go to obtain mercy.” In response to his prayer, Joseph recorded that “the [Lord] opened the heavens upon me and I saw the Lord.” After forgiving the teenage boy of his sins, the heavenly messenger confirmed that “the world lieth in sin at this time and none doeth good no not one they have turned aside from the Gospel and keep not my commandments they draw near to me with their lips while their hearts are far from me.”¹

This point—that the world had fallen into sin and that the earthly church established by Christ and his apostles had ceased to exist—was a central teaching of Mormonism from its inception, and references to a corrupt Christianity and its apostate practitioners are found throughout the published and private writings of early Mormons. The idea shows up in sermons, articles, tracts, and pamphlets. It also appears in conversion narratives and autobiographical memoirs, sources largely ignored in prior studies of the subject. This chapter examines these sources to explore the multifaceted array of early Latter-day Saint understandings of the apostasy. While all Mormons agreed that an apostasy had occurred and that a restoration of ecclesiastical authority and a new divinely mandated church were necessary, individual understandings and articulations of what that apostasy entailed range from harsh and blanket condemnations to more conciliatory and nuanced views of Christian history, existing alongside one another. This spectrum of understandings has persisted until today, with Mormons understanding their religion simultaneously as a restoration of pure Christianity completely and utterly lost between the time of Christ and the First Vision and as a culmination of scattered truths carried on in disparate movements within the Christian tradition. One view holds Christianity before the advent of Mormonism to be inauthentic, while the other maintains that it is incomplete.² The way individual Mormons understood and spoke of the apostasy was conditioned by their own religious background, by the cultural context in which they wrote, and by ongoing developments within Mormonism itself.

We first consider early understandings of the apostasy as found in the teachings of Smith and other church leaders and those published in newspapers and pamphlets by early Mormon essayists and apologists. These preachers and writers were often responding to the pressures and persecution from Christian critics who forthrightly denounced Mormonism as heretical, or worse, altogether invalid. Responding in kind, Mormons marshaled their understanding of Christian history to demonstrate the fallen condition and apostate character of their Protestant opponents and the churches to which they belonged. In an 1834 editorial appearing in the Mormon periodical The Evening and the Morning Star, for example, Sidney Rigdon—Joseph Smith’s counselor in the newly organized church presidency—argued that “any candid person” who “read the history of religion as it has been practized in the world from one period to another” would find “nothing but a mixture of folly and wickedness from one end of the earth to the other.” Yet Rigdon’s study of Christian history, gained during his years as a Baptist and then a Campbellite minister, convinced him to include this important caveat: “except among that portion of mankind who received direct revelation from heaven.”³ While Rigdon and his fellow Mormons spent more time criticizing other churches than admiring them, they typically did not claim that the Mormons were the only “portion of mankind who received direct revelation from heaven” throughout history.

Among rank-and-file Latter-day Saints, this caveat was even more pronounced, and it is to the autobiographies and personal memoirs they wrote that we then turn our attention. In narrating their conversion to Mormonism, early Latter-day Saints expressed a more positive view of other religions. Many early Latter-day Saints found much to praise in their former faiths, believing that God had led them in and out of particular denominations in preparation to accept the Mormon message. Yet, even in those accounts, Mormons insisted that the world needed a restoration and that the truths taught by Methodist or Presbyterian preachers offered only partial spiritual satisfaction compared with the fullness of the gospel found in Mormonism.

Any discussion of early Mormon conceptions of the apostasy must begin with Joseph Smith, whose own conversion narrative and visionary experiences, as mentioned above, served as the rationale for the restoration he felt called to bring about. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, though, aside from his First Vision narratives and revelatory declarations, Smith’s corpus of writings and speeches contains few in-depth statements about the apostasy. Two chapters in the Book of Mormon—1 Nephi 11 and 13—said that the world would war against Christ’s apostles and mentioned the rise of the “great and abominable church, ” and some of the revelations included in the Doctrine and Covenants alluded to an apostasy. Although such texts were central to later Latter-day Saint understandings of apostasy, early Mormons very rarely cited Mormon scripture in their sermons and writings, including in their assessments of Christian apostasy. In an effort to avoid an ahistorical reading of how Mormonism’s first generation of leaders and converts understood and used these scriptural passages, we address them only when early Latter-day Saints explicitly referenced them.⁴

The most succinct and clear statement from Joseph Smith on the subject comes from the last sermon he ever preached. The June 16, 1844, “Sermon in the Grove, ” as it has come to be known, was recorded in somewhat choppy notes by one of Smith’s clerks, Thomas Bullock:

Old Catholic Church is worth more than all—here is a princ[iple]. of logic—that men have no more sense—I will illustrate an old apple tree—here jumps off a branch & says I am the true tree. & you are corrupt—if the whole tree is corrupt how can any true thing come out of it—the char[acte]r of the old ones have always been sland[ere]d. by all apos[tates] since the world began—I testify again as God never will acknowledge any apost[ate]: any man who will betray the Catholics will betray you—& if he will betray one anoth[e]r. he will betray you—all men are liars who say that they are of the true—God always sent a new dispensat[io]n. into the world—when men come out & build upon o[the]r men’s foundat[io]n.—did I build on anot[he]r. mans found[a]t[io]n. but my own—I have got all the truth & an indepen[den]t. rev[elatio]n. in the bargain—& God will bear me off triumphant.⁵

While the notes of this segment from the sermon are not very clear, the ideas articulated by Smith serve as a useful summary of early Latter-day Saint understandings of Christian history and apostasy: Catholicism was a corrupt tree, and Protestantism was no better (and possibly worse). It lacked not only a new heavenly commission for its reforms but also the priesthood authority to authorize them. Joseph Smith did have such a revelatory commission, though, independent of the “old apple tree’s” Catholic trunk and Protestant branches alike.

In many ways, Smith’s statement was the culmination of the earliest Mormon commentary on the apostasy. Although systematic treatments of the historical apostasy from early Mormon writers are few, Sidney Rigdon, Parley P. Pratt, and Benjamin Winchester penned assertions that Smith seemingly endorsed with the above declaration. We therefore explore the statements of these three authors and a few others to highlight common themes found in early Mormon conceptions of the apostasy and, in the process, to illuminate Joseph Smith’s final sermon.

In the first section of the excerpt above, Joseph Smith compares Catholicism to a tree: “[O]ld Catholic church is worth more than all—here is a princ[iple]. of logic—that men have no more sense—I will illustrate an old apple tree—here jumps off a branch & says I am the true tree. & you are corrupt—if the whole tree is corrupt how can any true thing come out of it.” Echoing a theme articulated earlier by both Parley Pratt and Benjamin Winchester, Smith asserted that the various Protestant churches had no authority because any authority they did possess was derived from the corrupt Catholic church. In an 1841 article published in the British Mormon periodical The Millennial Star, missionary and apostle Parley P. Pratt sought to use the Protestants’ logic against them. “All the Protestant world agree, ” he wrote, “that the Roman Catholic, or mother church, is so corrupt, and so far apostatised from the truth, that a reformation was not only needed but absolutely necessary. Many of them even go so far as to say that she is the ‘mother of harlots’—the woman upon the ‘scarlet coloured beast’—‘Anti-Christ’—‘the man of sin, ’ &c.” Continuing, he argued that “all the offices and ordinances were administered by her. She ordained the bishops and clergy, and she christened the entire population, from generation to generation.” And even though the Reformation turned most of the English-speaking world Protestant and “they were excommunicated from the communion of the mother church, and withdrew from her fellowship, ” they nevertheless “professed to retain the priesthood and ordinances which she had received from the Catholic or mother church.” The consequence in Pratt’s mind was clear, and like Joseph Smith would do three years later, Pratt turned to an analogy of a tree to make his point:

If the mother church was a good tree, why should protestant England leave her communion. If, on the other hand she was a bad tree, how could her priesthood and ordinances be good?…The fact of her having retained her baptism and her priesthood, which she received, while catholic establishes the point beyond controversy, that she is a stock or branch of the old tree. And by so doing she virtually acknowledges the tree from which she grew to be a good tree, or herself a bad one.⁶

On the very same day on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Benjamin Winchester, president of the LDS branch in Philadelphia, published an article in The Gospel Reflector, a biweekly newspaper he edited. Entitled “The Present Condition of Both the Jews and Gentiles in Regard to Religion, ” the article challenged the authority of “Luther, Calvin, Henry the VIII, and many others to establish churches, ” arguing that “if the Catholic Church is corrupt her authority is not good: then as the most of the Protestants are branches that sprung from them, of course their authority, or church power, is not pure.” “A corrupt fountain, ” he concluded, “cannot send forth pure water.”⁷ Winchester articulated this point even more forcefully in his 1843 publication, entitled A History of the Priesthood from the Beginning of the World to the Present Time, Written in Defence of the Doctrine and Position of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Those who confer authority, ” he contended, “have the right and power to take it way, or revoke it; therefore, if these reformers received authority from the Mother church, she has all sufficient power to take it from them.” Intriguingly, such reasoning led Latter-day Saints to occasionally express preference for Roman Catholicism over Protestantism. Just as Joseph Smith declared that the “old Catholic Church [is] worth more than all, ” Benjamin Winchester explained that given the choice, “I would take the authority of the Catholics in preference to that of the Protestants, ” though he was quick to add that “it is evident that neither have any God acknowledges to be legal.”⁸ Contrary to modern Mormons who often praise the Protestant Reformation as an important precursor to the Restoration, then, these early Mormon writers denounced Luther, Calvin, and others as equally corrupt as, and perhaps even more corrupt than, the Catholics they and their ecclesiastical heirs protested.⁹

This did not necessarily mean, though, that Mormons praised Catholicism. The very notion that the Protestant branches of the tree were corrupt was predicated on the assumption that the original tree from which they grew was also corrupt. For Sidney Rigdon, Catholic and Protestant denunciations of each other were enough to prove this point. In 1834, he reveled in the fact that “all the Catholics declare that the protestants have departed from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; while all the protestants say, that the Catholics have corrupted the kingdom of heaven at the very root, so that there is not fruits of righteousness among them.” “We have got the testimony of both Catholics, and protestants, in all their various sects, and parties, ” Rigdon triumphantly concluded, “all testifying to the same thing[:]…that the Gentiles have not continued in the goodness of God.”¹⁰ This analogy led some early Mormons to wonder how and when the original tree became corrupted.

Mormon speculations about the advent of the Christian apostasy varied in timing and specificity. In 1830, the first Mormon missionaries in Ohio urged their listeners to “be baptized by them for the remission of them [sins], for they said that if they had been baptized it was of no avail, for there was no legal administrator, neither had been for fourteen hundred years.”¹¹ Thomas Campbell similarly noted that the Mormons taught that “there has been none duly authorized to administer baptism, for the space of fourteen hundred years up to the present time.”¹² There was no explanation of what exactly occurred fourteen centuries earlier, but this timing of the loss of priesthood authority gained some currency among Latter-day Saints. In 1832, W. W. Phelps defended Joseph Smith’s inspired translation of the Bible by asserting “that the most plain parts of the New Testament have been taken from it by the Mother of Harlots…from the year a.d. 460 to 1400. This is sufficient reason for the Lord to give command to have it translated anew.”¹³ Others suggested an earlier date. Joseph Smith hinted at such in an 1842 article explicating the Latter-day Saint practice of baptism for the dead. After noting that the Marcionites, a second-century gnostic sect, performed rituals for the dead that began with a living person speaking on the deceased individual’s behalf, he asserted that “the church of course at that time was degenerate, and the particular form might be incorrect, but the thing is sufficiently plain in the scriptures.”¹⁴

Others were more specific in their explanations about the causes of apostasy. In his 1837 tract A Voice of Warning, Parley Pratt drew upon Daniel 7:21 and Revelation 13:7 to show that the saints would be persecuted:

In fulfillment of these sayings, power had been given to the authorities of the earth, to kill the apostles and inspired men; until, if any remained, they were banished from among men, or forced to retire to the desolate islands…there to live, being men of whom the world was not worthy; while at the same time, many false prophets and teachers were introduced in their place….In this way the kingdom of God became disorganized and lost from among men, and the doctrines and churches of men, instituted in their place.¹⁵

Pratt’s somewhat vague suggestion that the apostasy thus began with the killing of Christ’s apostles was articulated more clearly by Sidney Rigdon in 1840, who claimed that “The Church of Christ was extinct from the death of the apostles, to the rise of the Mormons.”¹⁶ While some Latter-day Saints thus ventured imprecise guesses at the specific timing of the early Christian church’s loss of authority, many others likely agreed with missionary Erastus Snow, who responded to an 1840 anti-Mormon tract that reported that the Mormons believed the apostasy to have begun in 450 by explaining, “We do not set any precise time when it was lost, or when the covenant was broken, but I believe that the apostacy of the church from the Apostolic order was a gradual decline.”¹⁷

This notion of a gradual decline and eventual loss of authority squared with the views of Benjamin Winchester, who described in greater detail than anyone else the specifics of the historical apostasy. In the 1841 article quoted above, he cited Acts 20:29–30, which warns of wolves entering the flock. “From this prediction we are led to believe, ” Winchester deduced, “that this apostacy commenced in an early age, ” perhaps as early as the age of the apostles, when “men began to dissent, and introduce new doctrine, and draw disciples after them.”¹⁸ He expounded his views even further in A History of the Priesthood, declaring it “probable the apostles ordained efficient men to succeed them, that the work of the ministry might be performed, ” but suggesting that “how long their successors continued to hold fellowship with God, is uncertain.” While agreeing with Erastus Snow that “there is no way of finding out the exact time when the priesthood was taken from the church, ” Winchester maintained that “it is evident, it took place about the time the popish hierarchy supplanted the primitive order of it, ” thus placing the ultimate loss of authority sometime between the first and seventh centuries.¹⁹

In making such claims, Winchester read widely and relied upon a variety of prominent church historians of the day to make his case. He cited Johann Lorenz von Mosheim, William Jones, Charles Buck, William Cobbett, and William Gahan.²⁰ Mosheim, Jones, and Buck were all popular Protestant historians, but Winchester did not limit himself to their orthodox histories. He also regularly cited Gahan, an Irish Catholic priest, and Cobbett, and English radical whose history asserted that the English Reformation “was engendered in beastly lust, brought forth in hypocrisy and perfidy, and cherished and fed by plunder, devastation, and by rivers of innocent English and Irish blood.”²¹ Like Rigdon before him, Winchester thus used Protestants and Catholics to denounce both as equally apostate, citing Mosheim and Jones to criticize the Christianity of Constantine’s day and relying on Cobbett to criticize the Protestant Reformers.²² But Winchester also used these historians to pinpoint particular developments in Christian history that he considered apostate. When citing both the Catholic Gahan and the Protestant Mosheim, Winchester assured his readers that “the testimony of these men is of undoubted authority, and probably would not have been given, could they have honourably avoided it: for in doing it, they have condemned themselves, both having adopted another mode.”²³ In this effort, Winchester was joined by other Latter-day Saints who pointed not only to historical evidence but also to contemporary confirmations of Christian apostasy.

Following his allusion to the old tree and its corrupt branches and concluding that the “old Catholic Church [is] worth more than all, ” Joseph Smith explained in his 1844 sermon that “the char[acte]r of the old ones have always been sland[ere]d. by all apos[tates] since the world began—I testify again as God never will acknowledge any apost[ate]: any man who will betray the Catholics will betray you—& if he will betray one anoth[e]r. he will betray you.”²⁴ This point, like the one preceding it, received fuller explication in the writings of Parley Pratt, Benjamin Winchester, and others. Picking up where he left off in highlighting the corruption of both Catholic and Protestant churches, Benjamin Winchester argued in A History of the Priesthood that “all these celebrated reformers were apostates from the Mother church” and accused many of them of being “men of the most infamous character.”²⁵ Similar to Smith’s claim that “any man who will betray the Catholics will betray you, ” Winchester pointed to “the tortures of the rack, and the effects of the inquisition, ” arguing that they “are too well known to need any further remarks upon them.” But the subsequent persecution perpetrated by Protestants was equally incriminating. “We see in other societies, ” Winchester wrote, “an equal portion with the Mother Church of the spirit of persecution developed.” To prove this point, he looked not to ancient history but, rather, to the ongoing struggles of Latter-day Saints in nineteenth-century America. “Witness for instance, the persecution the saints received in the State of Missouri, ” he noted, pointing the finger of blame at a variety of Protestant churches: “Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, &c.” were all “actively engaged in the work.”²⁶

In criticizing Protestant persecution, Latter-day Saints sought to highlight not only the persecution itself but also its hypocrisy, as Protestants who had previously been persecuted were now guilty of persecuting others. In response to anti-Mormon preaching from Methodist ministers while a missionary in the British Isles, apostle John Taylor suggested that “Mr. Heys seems to have forgot the time when Methodist ministers were belied and slandered, as we are now belied and slandered by him. He must recollect that it is not long ago since the finger of scorn was pointed at the Methodists, and the lip of reproach and tongue of scandal were employed against them.” Taylor warned the Methodist minister “to remember ‘the rock from whence he was hewn; and the pit from whence he was dug.’…Then they were despised, persecuted, and cast out; but it is different with them now.”²⁷ Five years earlier, Oliver Cowdery had articulated a similar argument. Responding to an article in a Protestant periodical warning that the Catholics were attempting to establish the Inquisition in the United States, Cowdery used the Catholics and Protestants to criticize one another. “As much as our blood chills, ” Cowdery began, “on the reflection that that church has persecuted those who were unwilling to be governed by its principles, we sincerely hope that no extravagant nor unfounded report may have influence over the public mind against our Catholic community.” And then drawing the attention back to the Mormons, Cowdery argued that “the late shameful persecution against the church of the saints in Missouri, has taught us that others beside the Catholics, would, if they had the power exterminate all who refuse to worship the same way!” “We have not yet learned when the Catholics violated the Constitution, ” Cowdery concluded, “and since the Protestants can no more than keep it honorably, we advise each party to read it!!”²⁸ The historical and present persecution committed by both Catholics and Protestants, then, was evidence for early Mormons of collective Christian apostasy. But there was other evidence as well.

While Winchester had concluded in 1841 that the historical atrocities of the Catholic church were “too well known to need any further remarks, ” he did not hesitate to describe them in A History of the Priesthood two years later. Winchester’s citation of the Catholic Gahan and the Protestant Mosheim mentioned above concerned the question of baptism. Winchester gleefully pointed out that, according to Gahan, immersion had been the mode of baptism until the middle of the third century and then noted with equal delight that Mosheim agreed. It is perhaps unsurprising that for the Mormon preacher, changing the mode of baptism was a particularly damning point. “The change of this ordinance alone, ” Winchester concluded, “in time destroyed all legal authority to administer any ordinance of the kingdom.” But he did not limit his critiques to the ordinance of baptism alone, joining Protestants of the day in condemning a long list of grievances against the Catholic church. “The arrogance and assumption of the popes, the sale of indulgences, amalgamation of numerous pagan rites and ceremonies with those of the church, the worship of images, the celibacy of the clergy, monkery in all its horrid forms, the flagitious court of inquisition, exorcism, the nunnery system, and scores of other equally absurd notions and practices” confirmed in Winchester’s mind that “no one can be so unreasonable as to suppose, that the priesthood has been retained pure by a people that have been guilty of these enormities.”²⁹

As he moved chronologically through time, though, Winchester condemned the Protestant Reformers as equally objectionable. In fact, he found their sins eerily reminiscent of Catholic transgressions. The Protestants “retain a family likeness, ” he explained: “The Catholics sprinkle or christen infants, teach for hire, and in many respects make merchandize of the gospel, and so do they.” Winchester even went so far as to suggest that the number of the Beast, 666, represented the number of Protestant churches.³⁰  A History of the Priesthood stressed this point as crucial: “Indeed, nearly, if not all, the Protestant denominations with their divisions, subdivisions, and factions, are the offspring of the church of Rome; and as all join in calling her the ‘Mother of harlots, ’ I leave the reader to judge who her daughters are, and what must be their character.”³¹

While Latter-day Saints thus joined Protestants in criticizing the much-maligned Catholic church, they were equally vociferous in condemning the many Protestant churches whose meetinghouses dotted the landscape of antebellum America. They were all collectively guilty in carrying out the apostasy of the first-century church Christ had established.

A final theme found in early Latter-day Saint writings on the apostasy—and the most important one to Mormonism’s claims to restoration—was the lack of revelation from heaven claimed and received by Christians. The concluding point in Joseph Smith’s sermon emphasized this argument: “All men are liars who say that they are of the true—God always sent a new dispensat[io]n. into the world—when men come out & build upon o[the]r men’s foundat[io]n.—did I build on anot[he]r. mans found[a]t[io]n. but my own—I have got all the truth & an indepen[den]t. rev[elatio]n. in the bargain—& God will bear me off triumphant.”³² This point was central to Sidney Rigdon’s 1834 consideration of Christian history:

The perfect folly of all the pretended reformations of ancient and modern times, when there were not inspired men at the head of them, both apostles and prophets; for without such, the God of heaven never at any time produced a reformation, nor did he ever bring back an apostate race at any time, by any other means, than by raising up and inspiring men from on high, and giving unto them the spirit of revelation in the knowledge of himself….Any man proclaiming himself a reformer in religion, and in the next sentence denying inspiration and revelation, declares to all the world, that God never sent him…for this has never yet been done by any person unless he was inspired of God, and had in himself the spirit of revelation, and actually received revelations from heaven for himself. Nor can an apostate generation be brought back to the order of heaven without some persons [who] are inspired, as the apostles of old were, to bring them back.³³

This lack of revelation was not only partly the cause of apostasy but also the reason for its perpetuation over more than a thousand years. Every attempt to reform Christianity without a revelation from God only increased the problem. Parley Pratt thus argued in an 1841 essay that “since the great apostacy from primitive Christianity, all the reformers of which we have any knowledge have fallen into this one inconsistency, viz. of patching new cloth on to old garments; and thus the rent has been made worse.”³⁴ Instead of “building on another man’s foundation, ” which they claimed the Reformers had done, Joseph Smith and other early Mormons firmly asserted that Smith was not merely another in a long line of religious reformers but, rather, one with a commission and revelation directly from heaven. Christianity was corrupt because God had appeared to Joseph Smith and told him so; Smith was equipped to restore Christianity to its primitive purity and truth because God had shown him how.

While Sidney Rigdon was open to the possibility that there existed a “portion of mankind who received direct revelation from heaven, ” he and other early Latter-day Saints were generally adamant that Protestant Reformers were not included in that portion because those Reformers rejected continuing revelation.³⁵ In addition to the other sins carried over from Catholicism by Protestant Reformers, Parley Pratt singled out their rejection of revelation as paramount. The Protestant church “professed to retain the priesthood and ordinances which she had received from the Catholic or mother church, ” he wrote: “That is, her bishops and clergy claimed no new commission from heaven, and her members were not christened anew.”³⁶ Benjamin Winchester similarly tied the lack of priesthood authority to the rejection of revelation. “They certainly received no priesthood from heaven, ” he explained, “for they universally denied immediate revelation from God to themselves, and made no pretensions to the administration of angels.”³⁷ On another occasion, Winchester took this one step further, linking the lack of revelation to not only illegitimate priesthood authority but also corrupt doctrine and a general deficiency of spiritual gifts: “If God had called these Reformers, they would have preached the pure gospel, and contended for the faith once delivered to the saints: also for the spiritual gifts….[T]he fact that these reformers received no revelations, proves beyond successful contradiction that God never authorized them to build up church or administer ordinances. It is true that they [have] done good by moralizing the world, but their doctrines were contrary to the Holy Scriptures.”³⁸ In essence, Mormon understandings of apostasy and Mormon understandings of restoration revolved around this one point—that a new revelation from heaven was necessary to reestablish God’s true church. On that issue rested almost all others.

Yet, even in their most strident denunciations of historical and contemporary Christianity, these commentators sometimes singled out individuals to praise. Benjamin Winchester, perhaps the most critical of all, expressed his belief “that the Lord has had many witnesses of His goodness in all ages, and many honest persons, perhaps in all societies, who have lived in accordance with the light and intelligence they received, and who have been nourished or sustained by the Lord; although figuratively speaking, they were in the wilderness. Under these circumstances, the woman has been sustained, one thousand two hundred and threescore days.”³⁹ Yet Winchester did not identify any of these persons or groups by name. The one group that Sidney Rigdon praised was the Waldensians, whom he said “were doubtless the remains of the apostolic church.”⁴⁰ Winchester conceded that among twelfth-century “Albigenses, Waldenses, Petrobrusians, ” “without doubt, many in all these societies were good and exemplary Christians, as far as their knowledge and authority extended.” Yet Winchester stressed that “Dr. Mosheim, and several other eminent historians, have made it plain that they had no church power or authority, other than that which they received from the Mother church.”⁴¹ Despite such praise of medieval dissenters, neither Winchester nor Rigdon found much to commend among their religious contemporaries. Other Latter-day Saints, however, did find non-Mormon individuals and institutions to praise. Converts often spoke highly of their previous denominations, seeing their prior affiliation as spiritual preparation for receiving the greater light of the Restoration. Many Mormons singled out Methodism and its founder John Wesley in particular for such praise. Wesley and his early followers, among others, were thus understood to be “among that portion of mankind” inspired of heaven.

At some point in the early 1840s, Joseph Smith told circuit rider Peter Cartwright “that among all the Churches in the world the Methodists was the nearest right” and that “we Latter-day Saints are Methodists, as far as they have gone, only we have advanced further.”⁴² Brigham Young and Parley P. Pratt each, on more than one occasion, similarly singled out Methodist founder John Wesley in strikingly positive terms, with Pratt proclaiming him “a latter-day saint, in regard to the spiritual gifts and the apostasy of the church” while reprinting a sermon of Wesley’s that decried the staid state of Christianity and its rejection of charismatic gifts. Brigham Young claimed that Wesley was “as good [a man] as ever walked the earth, ” who was prevented from “building up the kingdom of God on the earth” only by his lacking proper priesthood authority. “That was all the difficulty he labored under, ” Young explained: “Had the priesthood been conferred upon him, he would have built up the kingdom of God in his day as it is now being built up. He would have introduced the ordinances, powers, grades, and quorums of the priesthood: but, not holding the Priesthood, he could not do it.”⁴³ William Appleby, in his sweeping analysis of Christian reformers, also took time to praise John Wesley even as he condemned other such individuals as perpetrators of apostasy. Like others, though, Appleby stressed that the Methodists “have a part of the Gospel, but not the fullness of it, ” lacking proper priesthood authority.⁴⁴

Such an understanding of Christian apostasy—in which a single thing is found lacking and commonalities instead of differences are emphasized—found its most regular expression, though, not in sermons and systematic treatments of history or theology but, rather, in conversion narratives and autobiographies penned by early converts to the Mormon movement. This alternative view of Christian apostasy among early Latter-day Saints was based less on systematic analysis of Christian history than on individual religious experience and what was assumed to be a commonsense reading of the New Testament. Those who subscribed to this view assumed that some sort of falling away had indeed occurred but denied—sometimes explicitly but much more often implicitly—that said apostasy was universal and comprehensive. Core teachings and ecclesiastical forms had survived into the nineteenth century. The heavens had remained open, and God still did speak to and through men (and women). The sick were healed, visions were seen, and persons were convinced of their sins and converted to Christ. Mormonism and its restoration of primitive and pure Christianity represented, in this narrative, not so much a rejection of the contemporary Christian world as an expansion of its doctrines and gathering of its disparate parts.

That conversion narratives would speak to issues of apostasy and restoration should not surprise us. After all, some of Joseph Smith’s earliest and most explicit statements on the subject came from his own rehearsals of the First Vision—which was, it should be remembered, initially understood as a conversion narrative in the tradition of evangelical Christianity. When Smith recorded God’s words to him—that “all [sects were] wrong, ” that “all their Creeds were an abomination in his sight, ” and that they had “a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof”—he was tapping into a discourse previously articulated by German pietists, including Nicolaus Ludwig Zinzendorf, and British reformers, such as John Wesley, each of whom decried the staid state of contemporary Christianity and tried to infuse it with a more charismatic and experiential “religion of the heart.” He also echoed American restorationists, such as James O’Kelly and Alexander Campbell, who sought to recreate the ecclesiastical structure of the New Testament church they believed had been corrupted in the intervening fifteen hundred years.⁴⁵

The Mormon Prophet was not alone in picking up on these themes. Hundreds of other Latter-day Saints joined him in describing what they saw as the fallen state of the Christian world in which they lived. That commentary—embedded within rehearsals of the individual’s religious background and descriptions of Mormonism’s appeal—is crucial to grasping the complexity and diversity of early Mormon understandings of the apostasy. There we find echoes of the themes highlighted by the Mormon commentators—an emphasis on the loss of priesthood authority and the lack of spiritual gifts throughout the Christian world and sometimes even the strident denunciations of both Protestantism and Catholicism—but just as often we find Christianity (or at least the convert’s prior denomination) cast in complimentary terms.

Two brief examples highlight the divergent views well. Joel Johnson, raised “a very strict Presbyterian” by his mother and instructed in “heaven and hell, God, Jesus Christ, the devil, etc., ” became acutely aware of his depraved nature and need for God’s pardoning grace. But when he turned to the Bible for guidance, Johnson only became more frustrated, concerned that he “had not been baptized for the remission of my sins and received the Holy Spirit.” It was not until meeting itinerant Mormon preachers and hearing them preach that he heard for the first time a “discourse…that corresponded with the New Testament.” After reading the Book of Mormon and comparing it with his New Testament, he concluded, in words reminiscent of Benjamin Winchester,

that as all Protestant sects had sprung from the Church of Rome, they have no more authority to administer in the ordinances of the Church of Christ than the Church of Rome had, and if she was the mother of harlots, they must consequently be her daughters, therefore, none of them could be called the Church of Christ. Secondly, that a supernatural power did attend the Mormon Church, and it had risen independent of all denominations; therefore, its origin must be from Heaven or Hell. Thirdly, that it is unreasonable to suppose that God would suffer the devil to bring forth a work with the gifts and blessings of the ancient Church of Christ corresponding with that which he has promised to bring forth in the last days for the gathering of the House of Israel and by that means lead astray all the honest men of the earth. And fourthly, that as the principles taught in the Book of Mormon corresponded with the Bible and doctrine of the Church was the same that was taught by Christ and his apostles with signs following the believer.⁴⁶

Comparing that account with David Patten’s autobiographical description highlights the diversity of thought on Christian apostasy among early Latter-day Saint converts. After converting to Methodism, Patten recalled, “I lived in the enjoyment of [God’s] Spirit for three years, during which time, by dreams and visions, many things were made known unto me, which were to come; and from the teachings I received of the Holy Spirit, I was looking for the Church of Christ to arise in its purity according to the promise of Christ, and that I should live to see it.” After hearing Mormon elders preach, Patten was baptized in 1832.⁴⁷ While Patten and Johnson both delighted in finding Mormonism, sure that it was the ancient and pure Church of Christ they both sought, their pathways to discovering it were different. Frustrated with what he viewed as unscriptural teachings and unable to experience religion at revivals he attended, Johnson became convinced that all Christianity was corrupt, void of spiritual gifts and divine approval, and converted to Mormonism only after finding that its revelations corresponded to what he understood the New Testament to teach. Patten, meanwhile, enjoyed God’s spirit while a Methodist and experienced several dreams, visions, and communications from God, which led him to embrace the Mormon gospel.

In both instances, Mormon converts believed that their new faith was founded on revelation that restored pure Christianity, but for David Patten and others it was not nearly as total or all-encompassing as the version articulated by Joel Johnson. Both interpretations of apostasy represent a uniquely Mormon adaptation of the evangelical conversion narrative in literary form and structure. In those narratives, the individual describes his or her religious upbringing, typically focusing on the good intents and fundamental religious values and habits instilled by loving parents but emphasizing early premonitions that all was not right and something was lacking. A period of backsliding, religious indifference, and pursuit of worldly things might accompany entry into adulthood, but ultimately the writer describes the pull of God’s grace and the Holy Spirit and a desire to “get religion.” Whereas in evangelical conversion narratives, that religion is found in dramatic fashion at a religious revival, in Mormon writings, the religious revivals and camp meetings are not enough. Camp meetings either failed to deliver the promised conversion experience, as with Joel Johnson and Joseph Smith, or touched the would-be converts but left them wanting more, as with David Patten and many others. In some instances, converts experienced genuine conversion to Christ and subsequent spiritual gifts in their prior denominations. In all cases, though, a more complete and spiritually satisfying religious experience came only with conversion to Mormonism.

Some early Latter-day Saint converts—especially those from Baptist and Campbellite backgrounds—emphasized in their autobiographical writings that they were attracted to the New Testament teachings of their former denominations before converting to Mormonism. Milo Andrus, for example, described his time as a Campbellite before converting to Mormonism by noting, “I had my mind much exercised about a future state, and had read the views of Alexander Campbell, and that being the nearest to the truths of the New Testament, I had been baptized by Elder Orson Hyde, then a minister of that section; but when I compared the scriptures with the teachings of the elder of The Church of Christ, I found that he had the truth; after trying for nearly one year, I yielded to baptism.”⁴⁸ Elizabeth Ann Whitney similarly recalled her family’s experience: “We united ourselves with the Campbellites, who were then making many converts, and whose principles seemed most in accordance with the scriptures. We continued in this church, which to us was the nearest pattern to our Saviour’s teachings, until Parley P. Pratt and another elder preached the everlasting gospel in Kirtland.”⁴⁹

A sort of sectarian hierarchy thus existed in the minds of these early converts, with some denominations possessing more truth than others. Thomas B. Marsh felt for a time that Methodism approximated the truth, and he “tried for two years to be a genuine Methodist but did not succeed.” “I compared Methodism with the Bible but could not make it correspond, ” he explained, while Orson Hyde moved from Methodism to Campbellitism before discovering Mormonism, the whole while, according to his autobiography “enjoying myself as well as the light and knowledge I then had would allow me.”⁵⁰ For others, though, this hierarchy of truth was not strictly a matter of New Testament teachings but, rather, ranked according to religious experience. Solomon Chamberlain initially united with the Methodist Episcopal Church, believing that “they were the rightest of any on the earth, ” but later became convinced that the Reformed Methodists were “more right than the Episcopal Methodists” because it was while worshiping with them that he experienced spiritual gifts and heavenly visions. Ironically, those heavenly visions ultimately convinced him to leave the Reformed Methodists and embrace Mormonism. As with David Patten, God had revealed to Chamberlain that “there were no people on the earth that were right, and that faith was gone from the earth, excepting a few and that all churches were corrupt. I further saw in vision, that he would soon raise up a church, that would be after the Apostolic Order, that there would be in it the same powers, and gifts that were in the days of Christ, and that I should live to see the day.”⁵¹ But even when critiquing all others as corrupt, Chamberlain and others never denied the reality of their Christian conversions and the validity of their dreams and visions prior to becoming Mormons. In fact, they embraced them as preparatory to accepting Mormonism.

Some converts to Mormonism were very specific in identifying what their former religion lacked. William Huntington Sr. “experienced religion” and united with the Presbyterians for fourteen years before being “mov[ed] by the spirit of God to look into the situation of the churches, ” and, echoing Joseph Smith, he concluded that others “had a form of godliness, but denied the power thereof.”⁵² Jacob Gibson likewise testified that prior to his affiliating with Mormonism, he joined the Methodists and at one of their camp meetings “got converted and I believe changed as I was very Powerfully raught uppon.” The only thing lacking in Gibson’s mind was authoritative preachers—“I think if I only had the right sort of teachers I wood of done first rate.”⁵³ Again and again, priesthood and spiritual gifts were at the heart of their conceptions of apostasy. Brigham Young’s brother Lorenzo, who, like Brigham, struggled to fully embrace the Methodist religion of their other siblings, nevertheless maintained that he “was somewhat affected by the intense religious feeling” at Methodist revivals.⁵⁴ His brother Phineas—the most devout of the Young brothers—described his time as a Reformed Methodist:

I felt a great responsibility resting upon me, and I prayed continuely to God to make me holy, and give me power to do good. While in this state of mind I had a very singular manifestation….I felt like one alone, for I could pray for nothing but to become holy. And I had got in a corner as much to myself as possible; when all of a sudden I saw the Heavens open and a body of light above the brightness of the sun descending towards me, in a moment it filled me with joy unutterable, every part of my system was perfectly light, and perfectly happy; I soon arose and spoke of things of the Kingdom of God as I never spoke before. I then felt satisfied that the Lord had heard my prayers and my sins were forgiven.⁵⁵

He also reported exercising several spiritual gifts, including healing the sick and the nearly dead. Phineas was so increasingly pleased with his experience as a Methodist preacher that when he first read the Book of Mormon and became convinced of its truthfulness, he was not prepared to abandon Methodism entirely. “I still continued to preach, trying to tie Mormonism to Methodistism, for more than a year, ” he remembered. “When I found they had no connection, and could not be united, ” he concluded that “I must leave one and cleave to the other.”⁵⁶

True religion and its attendant spiritual gifts, in the writings of these individuals, were thus not lost entirely in a universal apostasy; they could not have been, because the various authors experienced them personally. Phineas Young may not have been able to tie Mormonism to Methodism, but converting to Joseph Smith’s Church of Christ did not negate his time and experience as a Methodist. In proclaiming Mormonism a restoration of ancient Christianity, then, and even when defending it as “the only true and living church” on earth, it was, for these early Mormons, not necessarily a question of true Mormonism in contrast with untrue Christianity but, rather, a matter of degrees of truth. Campbellites might possess a more true ecclesiastical structure, Baptists baptized after the manner commanded by Christ, and certain spiritual gifts could be found among the Methodists. Mormonism represented not a rejection, then, but a culmination of these scattered truths. In the parlance of some of the earliest revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants, the church was coming out of the wilderness (D&C 5:14, 33:5). And in the minds of many of these converts, their prior denominations were a sort of Elias. John Wesley or Alexander Campbell rhetorically became John the Baptist crying in that wilderness to prepare the way for the advent of Mormonism.

Early Mormon conceptions of the apostasy, then, were wide ranging. Contrary to previous assessments that the views of early Mormons “made it abundantly clear that God had sanctioned one true church and that all others were false” with “no room for abstractions, ambiguities, or shades of gray, ” early Mormon views were multifaceted, complex, and at times, contradictory.⁵⁷ And far from “being suspended between an unusable past and an uncertain future, ” early Latter-day Saints—regardless of whether they understood that history in positive or negative terms—were very aware of Christian history and made good use of it in crafting their narratives of apostasy.⁵⁸

Internal changes and external pressures both led to shifts over time in what Mormons emphasized when discussing apostasy and restoration. The doctrinal developments of the 1840s and thereafter, for example, led to a more explicit focus on the restoration of theological truths and significant changes in the ways Mormons understood the priesthood and its purposes. As Latter-day Saints who previously limited their discussions of apostasy and restoration to priesthood authority and spiritual gifts were introduced to secret rituals and ordinances carried out in God’s temples, unique teachings concerning the nature of God, and a reorientation of their relationships with one another, they were left unable to find precedent in their prior faiths or experiences and began to see Mormonism as a radical restoration of truths lost or rejected altogether by contemporary Christianity.⁵⁹ Furthermore, second- and third-generation Mormons in nineteenth-century Utah likely felt no connection with their parents’ and grandparents’ religious backgrounds and no sympathy with the Methodists and Presbyterians who denounced them as dangerous and blasphemous.

In the subsequent century and a half, Mormonism has expanded into an international church with a membership of more than ten million. In many respects, the LDS church looks little like the small band of believers who converted during the 1830s. But in one intriguing respect it finds itself in a position today reminiscent to that during its early years: most of its adherents are not multigenerational members but, rather, converts themselves. In efforts to historicize Mormon conceptions of the apostasy and in ongoing attempts to work out what the “Great Apostasy” means to Mormons today, not only the views expressed by church leaders and in official publications but also those by recent converts should be considered. Like the earliest Mormons, we are likely to find a variety of views, all equally committed to Mormonism’s truth claims yet also full of nuance and contradiction.