Timeline

Before the Church is organized, Smith is brought before a court in Bainbridge, New York, in connection with his paid work searching for buried treasure using a seer stone. For most of the twentieth century the trial was treated as an anti-Mormon invention; the Church now publishes an account of it, and of the treasure seeking that surrounded it.

Joseph Smith let his scribe Martin Harris borrow the first 116 pages of the Book of Mormon manuscript, and they were lost. The Church's account says he did not resume translating for about nine months. When he did, a revelation forbade him to translate that material again: enemies were said to hold the pages and to have altered the words, so a second translation would not match the first and would be used to prove he had no gift. He was told instead to translate the small plates of Nephi, a second record covering the same period.

The difficulty members raise is simple. If the text came word for word from God through a seer stone, the same words would come again, and any alteration would be exposed rather than concealed. The revelation gives the opposite reason.

The Book of Mormon is published. In it the Lamanites are cursed with "a skin of blackness" so that they will not be "enticing" to the Nephites (2 Nephi 5:21), dark skin marks the cursed throughout the book, and when the curse is lifted their skin becomes white (3 Nephi 2:15). The passages are about a people the book places in the Americas, not about Africans, but they teach that God marks a lineage by the colour of its skin, and they were used for a century and a half to explain why he had.

In his revision of Genesis, now the Book of Moses, Joseph Smith dictates that the Lord set a mark upon Cain (Moses 5:40), that "the seed of Cain were black" (Moses 7:22), and that "a blackness came upon all the children of Canaan" (Moses 7:8). The chapters were printed in the Church's newspapers in 1832 and 1833 and canonized in the Pearl of Great Price in 1880. No such verses exist in the Bible; they are unique to Mormon scripture, and they became the text leaders cited for the priesthood ban.

In February 1834 a revelation commanded Joseph Smith to raise the strength of the Lord's house and redeem Zion, promising that “the redemption of Zion must needs come by power” and that the Saints driven from Jackson County would be restored to their lands. About 230 men, women and children marched roughly a thousand miles from Ohio to Missouri, some days covering as much as forty miles.

They never fought. At Fishing River a storm broke up an armed Missouri force, and there Joseph Smith dictated the revelation above: the redemption of Zion would wait. Cholera swept the camp, killing thirteen participants and two Missouri members. The camp disbanded and the Saints were not restored to Jackson County. Members reading the two revelations together ask what it means for a commandment to be given, obeyed at that cost, and then set aside.

Oliver Cowdery wrote the statement and William W. Phelps read it to a general assembly at Kirtland, which sustained it. Joseph Smith was in Michigan that day. He kept the article in the Doctrine and Covenants afterwards, including in the Nauvoo edition of 1844, the year he died and the year he was sealed to dozens of women. It stayed in the book until the 1876 edition, when it was removed and the revelation on plural marriage, now section 132, was added in its place.

For forty-one years, then, members could read in their own scripture that the Church believed one man should have one wife.

Joseph Smith's relationship with a teenaged household help in Kirtland is the earliest of his plural marriages that historians can document. Oliver Cowdery, the Church's second elder, called it "a dirty, nasty, filthy affair," and the dispute contributed to his excommunication in 1838. The Church's account describes the relationship as an early plural marriage; Emma Smith put Alger out of the house.

Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon open a bank-like institution in Kirtland without a state charter. It collapses within months, taking members' savings with it, and Smith is fined for illegal banking. In the dissent that follows, roughly a third of the Church's leading men leave or are removed, including several apostles and three Book of Mormon witnesses, and Smith flees Kirtland in January 1838.

A covert band called the Danites forms among the Saints in Missouri and takes part in raids and intimidation, including against dissenting members. The conflict escalates into the Mormon-Missouri War, Governor Lilburn Boggs issues an order that the Mormons be "exterminated or driven from the state," and seventeen Saints are killed at Hawn's Mill. The Church's own account now treats Latter-day Saint violence as part of the story rather than only the violence done to them.

Zina Diantha Huntington married Henry Bailey Jacobs on 7 March 1841. Seven months later, on 27 October 1841, she was sealed to Joseph Smith by her own brother Dimick Huntington. She went on living with Jacobs, and bore him children.

The Church's essay on plural marriage acknowledges this pattern plainly: before he married other single women, Joseph Smith “was sealed to a number of women who were already married,” and its footnote puts the estimates at twelve to fourteen such sealings. In the Nauvoo temple on 2 February 1846, Zina was sealed again to Joseph Smith, by proxy, and sealed for time to Brigham Young. She was then seven months pregnant with Henry Jacobs's child. Jacobs lost his wife and family to the arrangement and remained in the Church.

Orson Hyde, an apostle, left Nauvoo in 1840 on a mission that took him to Jerusalem and kept him away until December 1842. While he was gone, Joseph Smith dictated this revelation instructing Ebenezer and Angeline Robinson to take his wife Marinda and her children into their house “until my Servant Orson Hyde returns from his mission,” and instructing Marinda to follow Joseph Smith's counsel in all things.

The Joseph Smith Papers note that a list added to Joseph Smith's journal by the scribe Thomas Bullock records Marinda Hyde as being married to him as a plural wife in April 1842, while her husband was still abroad. In the same month, according to the Papers, she was the person who approached Nancy Rigdon at a funeral to tell her Joseph Smith wished to meet her.

Joseph Smith publishes the Book of Abraham in the Times and Seasons. It traces Pharaoh to Ham through a daughter called Egyptus, of a lineage "cursed as pertaining to the Priesthood" (Abraham 1:21 to 27). Canonized in 1880, this is the passage that turned a curse about skin into a bar on ordination, and it was the proof text for the ban even though Smith himself had ordained black men.

Nancy Rigdon was nineteen, the daughter of Sidney Rigdon of the First Presidency. The Joseph Smith Papers record that on 9 April 1842 Marinda Hyde approached her at a funeral to say Joseph Smith wanted to meet her, that Willard Richards rescheduled the meeting for 14 April, and that at it Joseph Smith proposed to her and promised to write. She refused. The letter, delivered by Richards, argues that happiness is the object of our existence and that the same act can be wrong in one circumstance and right in another, because God's commands are given to particular people at particular times.

Her brother John later swore an affidavit confirming the proposal. Joseph Smith said nothing publicly, neither confirming nor denying the letter or the approach. Sidney Rigdon, who had been at his side since Kirtland, was never the same ally afterwards.

Lilburn W. Boggs, the Missouri governor who in 1838 had ordered that the Mormons be “exterminated or driven from the state,” was shot through the window of his home in Independence and badly wounded. He survived. John C. Bennett, newly cut off from the Church, accused Joseph Smith of having sent his bodyguard Orrin Porter Rockwell to do it. On 20 July 1842 Boggs swore an affidavit naming Joseph Smith an accessory before the fact, and Missouri sought his extradition.

Joseph Smith denied it and went into hiding. The Nauvoo municipal court freed him on habeas corpus, and in January 1843 a federal court in Springfield discharged him. Rockwell was held in Missouri for months; a grand jury declined to indict him for the shooting. The Church publishes its own account of the episode.

Sarah Ann Whitney was seventeen when she was sealed to Joseph Smith on 27 July 1842, in a ceremony performed by her father under a revelation Joseph Smith dictated for the occasion. Emma Smith was away from Nauvoo. Three weeks later, hiding from the Missouri warrant, he wrote to the Whitneys asking all three to come to him after dark, to have Brother Whitney go ahead and knock at the south east corner window “next to the cornfield,” and to burn the letter.

The following spring the concealment was formalised. On 29 April 1843, in the Joseph Smith Papers' words, Joseph C. Kingsbury agreed to “stand by Sarah Ann Whitney as supposed to be her husband” in “a pretended marriage,” for the purpose of “Bringing about the purposes of God.” The letter survives in the Church's own archive and is published by the Church's own documentary project.

William Clayton was Joseph Smith's clerk. Margaret Moon was the sister of Clayton's wife Ruth, and she was engaged to Aaron Farr, who was away serving a mission. Joseph Smith performed the sealing of Margaret to Clayton himself, at Heber C. Kimball's house. That evening, Clayton wrote, he “told Mother in law concerning the priesthood.”

Two months later Clayton recorded dictating the letter in which Margaret told her fiancé she would not marry him. Farr's family and the Walkers, Clayton wrote in August, were “conspiring … to accomplish my downfall.” Four days after sealing Margaret to Clayton, Joseph Smith had Clayton perform his own sealing to Lucy Walker. The same clerk would write down the revelation on plural marriage ten weeks later.

Six bell-shaped brass plates dug up in Illinois are brought to Joseph Smith, who according to William Clayton's journal began translating them and identified a descendant of Ham and Pharaoh. The plates were a hoax made by local men to test him, proven a nineteenth-century forgery by laboratory analysis in 1980. The Church published the translation as Smith's history for over a century and now describes the plates as a fraud.

Lucy Walker's mother died in January 1842 and her father was sent away on a mission. Joseph Smith took the four eldest Walker children into his own household. She was sixteen when he told her, in her words, “I have a message for you. I have been commanded of God to take another wife, and you are the woman,” and gave her a day to answer.

She was sealed to him on 1 May 1843, the day after her seventeenth birthday. William Clayton, who performed the ceremony, wrote it in his journal that morning: “At 10 married Joseph to Lucy Walker.” She was one of at least ten wives sealed to him who were teenagers, in a household she had entered as an orphaned dependent.

Emily and Eliza Partridge were the orphaned daughters of Edward Partridge, the Church's first bishop, and were living in the Smith home. Emily was nineteen and Eliza twenty-two when they were sealed to Joseph Smith on 4 and 8 March 1843, without Emma Smith's knowledge.

In May, Emma offered to accept two plural wives if she could choose them herself, and she chose these two. Rather than tell her they were already married to him, a second ceremony was performed on 11 May 1843 with Emma present and consenting. Emily testified under oath in 1892 that she roomed with Joseph Smith that night. Within weeks Emma required both sisters to promise to break their covenants and leave. William Clayton recorded on 16 August that Joseph told him Emma “had resisted the P. in toto” and that he “should not relinquish any thing.”

Helen Mar Kimball was born on 22 August 1828. She was sealed to Joseph Smith in May 1843. The Church's own essay states it without softening: she “was sealed to Joseph several months before her 15th birthday,” the youngest of his wives.

Her father was Heber C. Kimball, one of the Twelve. In her own account she wrote that he “had but one Ewe lamb, but willingly laid her upon the alter,” and that he offered her to the prophet. She went to the sealing believing what the verse she later wrote describes: “I thought through this life my time will be my own, the step I now am taking's for eternity alone.” She wrote afterwards that she had been “too young or too ‘foolish’ to comprehend and appreciate all.” She stayed in the Church and defended plural marriage in print for the rest of her life.

William Clayton wrote the revelation down as it was dictated. His journal for that day: “This A.M. I wrote a Revelation consisting of 10 pages on the order of the priesthood … After it was wrote Prests. Joseph & Hyrum presented it and read it to E. who said she did not believe a word of it and appeared very rebellious.” Hyrum had offered to take it to Emma and convince her. Joseph answered, “You do not know Emma as well as I do.” Hyrum came back saying he had never received a more severe talking to in his life.

The text warns her three times. Verse 52 commands her to receive the wives given to Joseph, and says those “who are not pure, and have said they were pure, shall be destroyed.” Verse 54 is above. Verse 64 says that a wife who is taught this law must “believe and administer unto him, or she shall be destroyed.” Verses 61 and 62 say a man given ten virgins “cannot commit adultery, for they belong to him.” Emma asked to burn the original and Joseph let her; Clayton recorded that too. It is canon, printed in every copy of the Doctrine and Covenants today.

He said it from the stand, to the Saints, a month before he died. The Church's own essay estimates that he had by then been sealed to between thirty and forty women. The sermon came the day after William and Wilson Law had sought an indictment against him for adultery. Three weeks later the Nauvoo Expositor printed what the dissenters knew, and the press was destroyed.

The Church now describes this pattern in its own words: members and leaders “issue[d] carefully worded denials that denounced spiritual wifery and polygamy but were silent about what Joseph Smith and others saw as divinely mandated ‘celestial’ plural marriage.” Members who grew up hearing that Joseph Smith never practised polygamy, or that the denials settle the question, are reading the same sentences the congregation heard in 1844.

William Law and other former insiders publish one issue of a newspaper documenting Joseph Smith's plural marriages and his political power. As mayor, Smith and the city council declare the press a public nuisance and order it destroyed. The destruction of a press leads to the charges that put Smith in Carthage Jail, where he is killed seventeen days later.

Joseph Smith left no undisputed procedure for choosing a successor. Sidney Rigdon claims guardianship, Brigham Young claims authority for the Quorum of the Twelve, and the Saints in Nauvoo sustain the Twelve. Thousands do not follow Young west; the movements that result include what is now Community of Christ, led for generations by Smith's own descendants, and the Strangites.

Brigham Young tells the territorial legislature that men of African descent cannot hold the priesthood. Joseph Smith had ordained black men, among them Elijah Abel. No written revelation for the ban was ever produced, and for 126 years black members were barred from the priesthood and from the temple, which meant barred from the covenants the Church teaches are required for exaltation. In the same speech Young said they would one day “come and have the privilege of all we have the privilege [of] and more.”

In general conference Young teaches that Adam "is our Father and our God, and the only God with whom we have to do." He repeated it for twenty years and taught it in the endowment. Later leaders rejected it: Spencer W. Kimball told the Church in 1976 that the Adam-God theory was false doctrine. What one prophet taught as revelation, another called error.

Plural marriage was not presented as an option. Thirty-five years before the Manifesto withdrew it and a century before the Church described it as a phase, the prophet made accepting it a condition of salvation. Members who lived through the reversal had been told this.

A revival campaign sweeps Utah, with searching catechisms put to every member and mass rebaptism. Brigham Young and Jedediah Grant preach that certain sins are beyond Christ's atonement and require the sinner's own blood be shed. The Church now teaches that no such doctrine was ever practiced and that the sermons were rhetorical; the preaching nonetheless shaped the climate of the year that followed.

The sermon opens by acknowledging that women are “wading through a perfect flood of tears,” then gives them two weeks to leave. The offer came with a condition for those who stayed: his wives must “round up their shoulders to endure the afflictions of this world, and live their religion, or they may leave, for I will not have them about me.” To a first wife objecting after thirty years and a family, his answer was “it is time that you gave him up to other women who will bear children.”

Not a stray remark but a sermon in general conference by the second-ranking man in the Church, in the same years members were being told that rejecting plural marriage would damn them.

Latter-day Saint militia in southern Utah, with some Paiute men, lay siege to a wagon train from Arkansas, then persuade the emigrants to surrender their weapons and kill about 120 men, women and children. Seventeen children under seven are spared. The killings were concealed for decades and blamed on the Paiutes; John D. Lee, executed at the site in 1877, was the only person ever convicted.

In the same sermon he set the term of the ban: “They were the first that were cursed, and they will be the last from whom the curse will be removed. When the residue of the family of Adam come up and receive their blessings, then the curse will be removed from the seed of Cain.” He taught it again in 1866. The Church disavowed these explanations in 2013, 154 years later.

The sentence immediately before it was an attack on both sides of the American Civil War: “The Southerners make the negroes, and the Northerners worship them; this is all the difference between slaveholders and abolitionists. I would like the President of the United States and all the world to hear this.” He was describing a divine penalty for interracial marriage, and saying it would never change. The Church now disavows the teaching that mixed-race marriage is a sin.

The same sermon, printed under the heading “Beneficial Effects of Polygamy, Final Redemption of Cain,” also fixed the term of the priesthood ban: “when all the rest of the children have received their blessings in the Holy Priesthood, then that curse will be removed from the seed of Cain.” Both teachings were later abandoned, plural marriage in 1890 and the ban in 1978, and neither reversal came with an explanation of how the original teaching had been wrong.

The same man, thirteen years after offering to release his wives, telling a congregation that women should study law and medicine and keep the books. Utah women voted in 1870, fifty years before the federal amendment. The record does not run one way, and a site that only quoted the worst of it would be as unreliable as a manual that quoted none.

Brigham Young's twenty-seventh wife sues him for divorce and spends years lecturing across the United States on plural marriage, drawing large audiences and testifying before members of Congress. Her memoir, Wife No. 19, becomes one of the most widely read books about the Church in the nineteenth century and helps build support for federal anti-polygamy legislation.

Facing the seizure of Church property and the loss of Utah's path to statehood, Wilford Woodruff issues a statement advising members to contract no marriage forbidden by law. It is presented to the Church for a sustaining vote. Many members understood it as a temporary political accommodation rather than the end of the principle, and plural marriages continued to be authorized privately for fourteen more years.

The Senate spends four years deciding whether to seat Reed Smoot, an apostle, and takes testimony that plural marriages had continued after 1890 with the knowledge of Church leaders. President Joseph F. Smith testifies that he has continued to live with his plural wives and that he has never received a revelation. In the middle of the hearings he issues a Second Manifesto making new plural marriages grounds for excommunication.

Ralph Chamberlin and the brothers Joseph and Henry Peterson teach organic evolution and higher criticism of the Bible at Brigham Young University. The superintendent of Church schools investigates and reports that the three are the strongest teachers in the institution, which makes their teaching the more dangerous. All three leave. The Church today holds no official position on evolution, and it is taught at BYU.

Franklin S. Spalding, the Episcopal bishop of Utah, sends the Book of Abraham facsimiles to eight of the leading Egyptologists of the day and publishes their replies. They agree that Joseph Smith's explanations do not match the documents. Church writers answered in the Improvement Era the following year. This is the first public, testable challenge to a Latter-day Saint scripture, fifty-five years before the papyri themselves resurfaced.

Asked to answer an investigator's questions, the Church's foremost defender compiles "Book of Mormon Difficulties" on language, horses and metals, and the origins of Native Americans, and presents it to the First Presidency and the Twelve. No one can answer the questions; the apostles bear testimony instead, and Richard R. Lyman suggests the matter be dropped. Roberts's manuscripts were published in 1985 and are still argued over.

The sentence appears in a ward teachers' message in the Church's magazine and is quoted for decades afterward as Latter-day Saint doctrine. President George Albert Smith privately disavowed it that December, writing to a Unitarian minister who had objected that the statement did not express the position of the Church and that members are not asked to follow their leaders blindly. The disavowal was not published at the time.

A Latter-day Saint schoolteacher from southern Utah spends years gathering the record and publishes the first full account of the massacre, concluding that local Church leaders ordered it and that Brigham Young helped conceal it afterward. She was not excommunicated, but she was watched and shunned, and she remained a believing member. Her book stood for decades and the Church's own 2008 history reaches many of the same conclusions.

Bruce R. McConkie, then a seventy, publishes an A-to-Z volume of doctrinal definitions under a title that claims to speak for the Church. Two apostles assigned to review it reported 1,067 items needing correction, and the First Presidency decided it should not be reprinted; a second edition appeared in 1966 anyway. For two generations members treated it as authoritative, including its teachings on race, the Catholic Church, and evolution.

From 1915 to 1959 the Church announced its annual income and expenditures in general conference. After 1959, in the Church's own words, auditors presented only "the results of an annual general audit, assuring the public that leaders had followed financially responsible procedures." No figures. Every argument about Church money since has been conducted without the Church's books.

Under pressure to raise convert numbers, missionaries in Britain and elsewhere baptize children recruited through sports, many without their parents' knowledge or any real instruction. Thousands were baptized and almost none stayed. The programme was stopped and the mission leadership changed, and it remains the clearest case of a statistical target driving the work rather than following it.

Graduate students at Stanford start an independent quarterly of Mormon thought, edited by Latter-day Saints but not controlled by the Church. For sixty years Dialogue has been where difficult questions get argued in print. Its independence is also why several of its authors later faced Church discipline.

Fragments of Joseph Smith's Egyptian papyri, long believed destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire, turn up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and are given to the Church. Egyptologists, including Latter-day Saint scholars, identify them as ordinary funerary texts of the Book of Breathings and the Book of the Dead, dating a thousand years or more after Abraham. The Church's essay acknowledges that the translation does not match and offers alternative explanations of what Smith was doing.

Spencer W. Kimball's book on repentance sells well over a million copies and becomes the volume bishops hand to members who confess a sexual sin. It teaches that sexual sin is next to murder in seriousness, that masturbation leads to homosexuality, and that a rape victim may bear some responsibility. Deseret Book quietly let it go out of print in the 2010s without a public statement, and it is still the book many people name when they describe the shame they carried.

A trained economic historian is called as Church Historian, the first professional scholar in the post, and opens the archives to researchers. The decade produces a generation of serious history and is remembered as Camelot. It ends with the History Division moved out to Brigham Young University, the archives tightened, and Arrington's own history of the Church shelved. His diaries, published in 2018, record what happened from the inside.

A magazine started by students becomes the other independent forum in Mormon life, and from 1979 the Sunstone Symposium gives it a stage. For two decades it is where new research is presented and where the Church's difficulties are discussed in public by people who mostly still attend. Leaders discouraged participation in 1991, and several presenters were later disciplined.

After months of private prayer and one-on-one conversations with each apostle, Spencer W. Kimball gathers the Twelve in the Salt Lake Temple and the ban is ended, announced as Official Declaration 2. Members wept. The announcement did not say the ban had been wrong, and no apology has been offered since; leaders kept counselling against interracial marriage for years afterward. Both the relief and the silence are reasons people give for leaving.

Boyd K. Packer tells Church educators that some things that are true are not very useful, that historians who write of the weaknesses of leaders do the Church harm, and that a scholar may become a judge of the very prophets he should sustain. The address becomes the charter for a generation of institutional caution about history, and it is the text critics and defenders both return to when they argue about what members should be told.

In the 1981 edition of the Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 30:6 is changed so that converted Lamanites become a "pure" rather than a "white and delightsome" people. The wording had stood in the Church's editions since 1840. The change was made without announcement, three years after the priesthood ban was lifted, and members who noticed it found that scripture presented as translated by the gift and power of God could be edited when it became an embarrassment.

A letter to stake presidents and bishops instructs that candidates for a temple recommend must refrain from oral sex, treating it as an "unnatural, impure, or unholy practice." Bishops began asking married couples about their sexual practices. Within the year a second letter told local leaders not to pry into marital relations, but the recommend question remained, and the episode is still cited as the moment the institution reached furthest into members' private lives.

A document surfaces in which Martin Harris describes a white salamander, not an angel, at the hill where the plates were found. It is bought and given to the Church, which acquires and keeps quiet a series of such documents. Leaders, historians, and critics alike accept it as genuine for two years. It is a forgery by Mark Hofmann, who had studied the folk-magic world that the Church was not then discussing.

An evangelical film and the book that followed present the temple ceremony and Latter-day Saint doctrine to a mass Protestant audience, in a cartoon sequence and a tone that even critics of the Church found unfair. Interfaith bodies condemned it as bigoted. Its lasting effect was double: it hardened members against any criticism, and it taught the Church that outside attacks on the temple could be survived by dismissing the messenger.

D. Michael Quinn, then a BYU history professor, publishes an article in Dialogue showing that apostles authorized and performed plural marriages for fourteen years after the 1890 Manifesto. The research was accurate and it was not welcome. Quinn left BYU in 1988 and was among the September Six in 1993; the Church's own Gospel Topics essay now concedes the substance of what he documented.

Two pipe bombs kill Steven Christensen and Kathleen Sheets in Salt Lake City, and a third injures Hofmann himself the next day. He had been forging documents and selling them to the Church and to collectors, and killed to keep the scheme from collapsing. He pleaded guilty in 1987 and is serving a life sentence. The case exposed how readily the Church bought and shelved documents it did not want circulating.

Quinn's book places Joseph Smith's seer stones, divining rods, and treasure seeking in the folk-magic culture of his time and place, using sources the Church had not published. It was attacked on publication and much of its factual groundwork is now in the Church's own Gospel Topics essays and history topics pages, which describe the seer stone in the hat and the family's treasure seeking without embarrassment.

Without announcement, the endowment drops the penalties in which patrons had mimed the ways their lives could be taken, the scene in which a Protestant minister is a hireling of Satan, and other elements dating to Nauvoo. Women's covenant to obey their husbands is softened. Members who had been taught the ceremony was restored unchanged from antiquity, and who had covenanted never to discuss it, had to absorb the change in silence.

One of the Church's most beloved speakers, whose talks and recordings described playing major league baseball and surviving combat in ways that could not have happened, is exposed by an investigative reporter. Dunn issued a public apology and was given emeritus status. For many members it was the first time they had to weigh a faith-promoting story against the record, and ask what else had been told that way.

The existence of a committee that collects files on members' published writings and public statements, reporting to local leaders, is disclosed in the press. The Church confirmed it, citing a revelation on record keeping. Members learned that what they wrote could be gathered and sent to their bishop, and the disclosure came a year before the September Six.

Anthropologist Thomas Murphy publishes an essay concluding that genetic research places Native American origins in Asia, not the ancient Near East. Molecular biologist Simon Southerton, a former bishop, follows with Losing a Lost Tribe. Both faced Church discipline. The science itself has not been disputed by the Church, whose 2014 essay argues instead that the Book of Mormon's peoples could be genetically undetectable among much larger populations.

John Dehlin starts interviewing members, scholars, and former members about the difficult questions. The fourth episode, with Gregory Prince, is about the priesthood ban.

The introduction added in 1981 said that the Lamanites "are the principal ancestors of the American Indians." In a 2006 edition that becomes "are among the ancestors." A Church spokesman said the change took account of Book of Mormon demography that is not known. The wording of the book Latter-day Saints had been handed on their missions had changed, and most members learned of it from the newspapers.

The talk that became this project, given by John Dehlin and released as Mormon Stories 111.

Deseret Book stops reprinting McConkie's volume after more than fifty years and some forty printings, citing low sales. No statement was made about its contents. The book had carried the Church's teaching on the priesthood ban to two generations of members, and it disappeared two years before the Church publicly disavowed the explanations it contained.

Members in Sweden, led by area authority Hans Mattsson, put their questions about Church history to two Church historians sent from Salt Lake City, and record the meeting. The answers confirmed the problems rather than resolving them. The recordings circulated widely, and the episode is the clearest documented case of the Church meeting an organised body of doubting members and losing them anyway.

3,388 people who once believed the Church was "the only true and living church" and no longer did answer a detailed online survey about why.

Reuters reports Elder Marlin K. Jensen, the Church Historian, telling a Utah State University class that the Church has not seen a period of apostasy like the present one since 1837. It is the first public acknowledgment by a General Authority of the scale of the departures.

The 27-page report ranks the reasons and finds that doctrine, history, Joseph Smith, and the Book of Mormon lead, while offense and desire to sin come last.

The Church opens the shopping mall it developed across from Temple Square. Its own announcement gives no cost. Declarations the Church later filed in federal court put its investment at about $1.4 billion between 2007 and 2012; the Salt Lake Tribune, quoting the Church's own design director, called it a “$1.5 billion-plus” development; Bloomberg Businessweek reported an estimate of $2 billion for the mall inside a $5 billion rebuilding of downtown. The mall became the single most cited example in the 2011 survey's written comments about Church money: “The fact that the church is funding a billion-dollar mall in SLC, while millions of Saints don't have clean water to drink, was/is sickening to me.”

A report built on the 2011 survey data, "LDS Personal Faith Crisis," is delivered to Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf by Elder Jensen. It recommends candor about the history.

The Church quietly posts "First Vision Accounts" and "Are Mormons Christian?" Over the next two years it publishes thirteen essays that confirm, in its own voice, most of the facts the survey respondents had been punished for repeating: "Race and the Priesthood" (December 6, 2013), "Book of Mormon Translation" (December 30, 2013), "Book of Mormon and DNA Studies" (January 31, 2014), "Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham" (July 8, 2014), "Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo" (October 22, 2014), and "Mother in Heaven" and "Joseph Smith's Teachings about Priesthood, Temple, and Women" (October 23, 2015).

The Church publishes an unsigned essay disavowing the explanations given for the priesthood and temple ban: that black skin is a sign of divine disfavour, that it reflects conduct in a premortal life, or that mixed-race marriages are a sin. The theories had been taught by prophets and apostles and printed in Church manuals. The essay disavows them without saying who taught them, and stops short of an apology.

The Church states in writing that Joseph Smith translated much of the Book of Mormon by placing a seer stone in a hat and reading what appeared, with the plates not always present. Members had been taught for a century from paintings showing him studying the plates directly. The method was in the historical record all along; the essay is the first time most members met it.

The Church addresses the genetic evidence directly, arguing that the Book of Mormon does not require all Native Americans to descend from Lehi and that a small founding group could be undetectable today. The essay does not dispute the science. It came eleven years after Thomas Murphy was called to a disciplinary council for saying much of the same thing.

Readers of this site are asked what the survey missed. Their answers become a sixteen-category list of reasons.

The Church acknowledges that the surviving papyri do not correspond to the Book of Abraham, that Egyptologists date them long after Abraham, and offers instead that the papyri may have been a catalyst for revelation rather than a text Smith translated. It is the first official admission that the translation cannot be defended as a translation.

Three essays set out what the Church had not taught in its manuals: that Joseph Smith married between thirty and forty women, that some were already married to other men, that the youngest was Helen Mar Kimball at fourteen, and that plural marriages continued after the 1890 Manifesto. For many members this was the single largest shock of the essay series, because it came from the Church itself.

In a volume of the Joseph Smith Papers and an accompanying magazine article, the Church prints pictures of the brown stone Joseph Smith used, and describes him placing it in a hat to block the light while dictating the Book of Mormon. Members raised on paintings of Smith reading the plates with his finger on the page saw, for the first time in an official publication, the method the witnesses actually described.

A leaked handbook change declares members in same-sex marriages apostates and bars their children from blessing and baptism until age eighteen. Attorney Mark Naugle later says he received two thousand resignation requests in seventy-two hours.

Jana Riess and Benjamin Knoll report that former members most often cite a conflict of values, disbelief in one true church, and distrust of leaders on historical questions. Riess's book "The Next Mormons" follows in 2019.

A woman reports that Joseph L. Bishop, a former president of the Church's Missionary Training Center, sexually assaulted her there in the 1980s, and releases a recording in which he admits to serious misconduct. The Church said it had investigated at the time. The case, and the Church's handling of it, drove the campaign against one-on-one worthiness interviews of children and youth.

A joint statement with the Boy Scouts of America says the Church "will conclude its relationship as a chartered organization with all Scouting programs around the world," effective 31 December 2019, after more than a century. The Church cites the need for a global youth programme. In February 2020 the Boy Scouts filed for bankruptcy under tens of thousands of sexual abuse claims, many from Church-sponsored troops.

The endowment is revised so that women covenant directly with God rather than to their husbands, Eve's role in the drama is expanded, and language many women had found diminishing is removed. Members welcomed it and also noticed what it implied: the ceremony taught as unchanging had changed again, and the version they had made covenants under was gone.

President Dallin H. Oaks announces that children of LGBT parents may be baptized and that same-sex marriage will no longer be treated as apostasy, three and a half years after the policy was announced as revelation.

Laura Gaddy files suit in federal court in Utah, arguing that the Church knowingly misrepresented its own founding history to induce her tithing, and pleading it as racketeering. It is the first serious attempt to put the truth claims themselves in front of a jury. Six years later the appeals court would affirm its dismissal, on the ground that civil courts may not decide religious questions.

The Washington Post reports a whistleblower complaint filed with the IRS a month earlier by David Nielsen, a former senior portfolio manager at Ensign Peak Advisors, the Church's investment arm. It alleges the fund had accumulated about $100 billion in surplus tithing, paid no tax on it, and had made no charitable distribution in decades. Members who had been told the Church lived within its means, and who had been asked for a full tithe before a temple recommend, read the number in a newspaper. No IRS action has ever been made public. CBS News reported in 2023 that “the status of the IRS investigation into the Mormon church and Ensign Peak isn't clear,” and that such complaints take an average of eleven years to resolve.

The son of a prominent Latter-day Saint family files suit in California for the return of $5 million in tithing, alleging the Church had assured members that no tithing funded the City Creek mall while using it to do exactly that. Church declarations later filed in the case state that about $1.4 billion was appropriated for City Creek between 2007 and 2012, from investment earnings rather than tithing principal. The distinction between the two is what the case turned on.

The Church agrees to contribute $250 million to the trust compensating people abused in Scouting, in exchange for broad releases from liability. With $850 million from the Boy Scouts and local councils, the fund would have reached almost $1.9 billion. The bankruptcy court refused the deal the following summer, and the money was never paid.

A BYU professor and Young Men general presidency member, speaking to youth, asks why black people did not get the priesthood until 1978 and answers by asking instead why white people had to wait until 1829, and makes dismissive remarks about other faiths and about women. The talk was recorded and spread within days. He apologised. What the Church had disavowed in writing in 2013 was still being taught from a stand in 2022.

Judge Laurie Selber Silverstein declines to approve the $250 million the Church had offered in exchange for sweeping releases from abuse liability. Two weeks later the Boy Scouts filed a revised plan with the Church's contribution removed. The plan confirmed that September records the Church as “not a Contributing Chartered Organization.” When the trust took effect in April 2023 with about $2.48 billion in assets, none of it came from the Church, and the Church kept no release.

The Associated Press publishes "Seven years of sex abuse: How Mormon officials let it happen," by Michael Rezendes, who spent more than a decade on the Boston Globe Spotlight team that won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for exposing abuse in the Catholic Church. Drawing on nearly 12,000 pages of sealed records, it reports that the Church's help line for bishops is answered by counselors who decide whether to route a case to Church lawyers, and that a bishop in Bisbee, Arizona was told the clergy-penitent privilege required him to keep Paul Adams's abuse of his daughter confidential. The bishop's account of what he was told: "They said, 'You absolutely can do nothing.'" The abuse continued for years. The Church replied the next day that the help line's nature and purpose had been "seriously mischaracterized" and that it is "instrumental in ensuring that all legal requirements for reporting are met."

The Associated Press reports that the children of Paul Adams have named the Church's law firm Kirton McConkie, a Utah state representative who advised on the help line, and LDS Family Services in their Arizona suit. The filing alleges "an ever-increasing group who knew about criminal misconduct in the Adams family but never reported it to the police."

The Securities and Exchange Commission fines Ensign Peak Advisors $4 million and the Church $1 million for concealing the size of the Church's stock portfolio. From 1997 to 2019 the investments were filed under thirteen shell companies with borrowed signatures, so that no filing showed the whole. By 2018 the portfolio had reached about $32 billion. The Church said it regretted the mistakes.

The Associated Press publishes recordings of Paul Rytting, head of the Church's Risk Management Division for about fifteen years, discussing an abuse settlement. On confidentiality: "Disciplinary proceedings are subject to the highest confidentiality possible." On the recordings themselves: "The recommendation is that you acknowledge that there's been some recordings made of all of our communications and that you agreed to destroy those recordings within 10 days of signing this."

Utah's Senate passes HB 432 twenty-six to nothing, shielding clergy who choose to report child abuse from liability. It does not make them report. As the coverage put it, the bill "does not remove the legal loophole known as clergy-penitent privilege," the provision at the centre of the Arizona case.

The B. H. Roberts Foundation publishes its 2023 survey of 3,865 current and former members. Former members rank Joseph Smith's history, the Book of Mormon, and race as their leading reasons, and local leaders and the Word of Wisdom last: the same order as the 2011 survey.

The Church publishes no accounts in the United States. Where a country requires it, it files. Its British charity reported income of £87,826,000 and expenditure of £85,311,000 for 2024, with audited accounts on the public register. Its Canadian charity reported revenue of CAD $211,407,520 and expenses of CAD $217,043,145, including CAD $64,287,517 given to other charities. The information exists; American members simply are not given it.

Eleven judges of the Ninth Circuit, sitting together, unanimously dismiss James Huntsman's suit for the return of $5 million in tithing, which alleged the Church had told members no tithing funded City Creek. "No reasonable juror could conclude that the church misrepresented the source of funds for the City Creek project." A three-judge panel had revived the case in 2023 before the full court reversed.

Washington's governor signs a law adding clergy to the list of mandatory reporters of child abuse with no exception for privileged communication, the provision that decided the Arizona case. Catholic bishops sue, not the Latter-day Saints, and a federal judge blocks it within weeks. In October a permanent injunction settles it: clergy remain mandatory reporters, but not for what they hear in confession.

The Arizona Court of Appeals reverses the trial court and puts the case back on foot, holding that a judge or jury could find the bishops had waived the clergy-penitent privilege by discussing Paul Adams's abuse with people who were not clergy. For a year the question of whether the Church had a duty to report was live.

Laura Gaddy had argued that the Church misrepresented its own history to induce donations. The appeals court upholds the dismissal on two grounds: the church autonomy doctrine, which keeps civil courts out of religious claims, and a failure to plead reliance and causation. Courts have now twice declined to weigh whether the Church's account of its history is true.

Pew Research Center reports that 54% of Americans raised Latter-day Saint still identify that way, down from at least 70% in 2007 and 64% in 2014.

The Church's statistical report for 2025 lists 17,887,212 members of record and 385,490 convert baptisms, the highest in years. Membership of record counts everyone who has not formally resigned.

Jeff Strong, a former bishop, mission president and BYU faculty member, publishes Torn: Why People We Love Are Leaving the Church and What We Can Learn from Them, with a foreword by Steve Young. It is the largest study of Latter-day Saint disaffiliation yet attempted, more than 20,000 survey responses gathered with a research team of academics that included Jana Riess, and it is written by a believing member for believing members. Its findings match what former members have been saying since 2011.

• About 40% of once-active American Latter-day Saints have stepped away in the past 25 years. Strong's own data, the Pew Religious Landscape Study (46%) and Harvard's Cooperative Election Study put the range at 30 to 50%, with 40% a reasonable midpoint. The pace is accelerating: departures roughly tripled from the 2000s to the years around 2010 to 2014.
• 42% named Church history as their primary reason for leaving, ahead of social and lifestyle factors. That is a marked shift from the 2016 Next Mormons Survey and a close match to the 2011 survey's ranking.
• Believing members are wrong about why. Strong reports that about three quarters of active members misidentify the reasons, reaching for sin, laziness or worldliness. What his respondents actually described was not belonging, not believing the restoration, and not finding the promised fruits of the gospel in their church experience. The myths page is the same finding from the other side.
• People wrestle for about a decade before they step away. Leaving is the end of a long private process, not a sudden decision.
• 83% of those in a faith transition tell someone, and who they tell matters: Strong found conversations with church leaders about four and a half times more likely to go badly than conversations with a sibling, because leaders try to correct or contain rather than build trust.
• Growth on paper is not growth in the pews. Members of record rose about 60% after 2000 while the number of wards grew about 11%.

Strong is candid that his survey is an opt-in, non-representative sample that "cannot be generalized to the total Latter-day Saint population in the U.S." The same limit applies to the 2011 survey on this site. What is new is not the ranking but the messenger: the man reporting it served as a mission president, and he published it to the people still inside.

A unanimous Arizona Supreme Court reverses the appeals court and reinstates judgment for the Church and its bishops in the Adams children's suit. Vice Chief Justice John Lopez wrote that deciding whether Paul Adams's admissions counted as a confession would be "explicitly doctrinal," and that under the First Amendment such an inquiry is "beyond the purview of the factfinder." The case that began with the AP's help line reporting ends with the privilege intact. The survivors asked the court to reconsider on 12 August; it refused nine days later and issued its mandate on 8 September 2026. Their lawyer's response: the opinion “creates an obvious incentive for religious organizations of all stripes to conceal child abuse, all under the ironic banner of religious freedom.”

The Church's investment arm files its quarterly disclosure with the SEC: 1,724 holdings worth $60,816,389,385 as of 30 June 2026. That is United States listed shares only. It does not include the Church's land, its farms, its commercial property, or anything held outside the market, so it is a floor rather than a measure of what the Church is worth.

Bloomberg publishes an investigation into the Church's American real estate, built by matching property records across thousands of counties to the Church's subsidiaries: Property Reserve for offices, apartments and hotels, Land Reserve for master-planned communities, Farmland Reserve for farms and ranches. Its reporters summarised the finding on Bloomberg's own podcast: "As far as we can tell, the church owns about 2.4 million acres... To our estimate it's worth upwards of $20 billion." They note the true figure is higher, because states such as Texas do not disclose ownership.

A consolidated class action brought by nine members, who argued they would not have paid tithing had they known how it was invested, is dismissed as filed too late: the three-year limitation period had run. "We see no reversible error." Parallel suits had been filed in California, Tennessee and Washington.