LDS Church Research Articles

The Indian Student Placement Program: An Assessment of Mormon Theology and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Contribution to 20th Century Indigenous Child Removal Trends

This paper examines the 20th-century Indigenous child removal trends in the United States with a specific focus on Mormon involvement and influence. Due to the important role Native Americans played in Mormon prophecy, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints created programs that aimed to academically and spiritually educate Native youth. More specifically, programs such as the Indian Student Placement Program (ISPP) housed Native children with predominantly Mormon families during the school year from 1954 to 1996. However, shifts in Church leadership and attitude throughout this period strongly suggested mental and physical abuse and destruction of tribal identity. By weighing scholarly arguments and referencing the Book of Mormon, this paper will evaluate the extent to which the ISPP can be justified by theology and to what degree the LDS Church contributed to 20th-century assimilation and acculturation trends.

Exalting Blackness in Wynetta Willis Martin's: Black Mormon Tells Her Story

ABSTRACT: Black and Mormon were seemingly irreconcilable identities during the priesthood/temple ban against people of African descent (c. 1852–1978). But in 1966, Wynetta Willis Martin converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And in 1972, Martin published Black Mormon Tells Her Story . In this book, Martin interwove her African American and LDS identities in a powerful way. Challenging anti-Black racism in the LDS community, Martin produced a new story about Black Mormon identity: past, present, and future. Previously underestimated as a problematic book, this article retheorizes Black Mormon Tells Her Story , emphasizing Martin's agency in race-making. This article extends Judith Weisenfeld's theory of Black new religious movements to analyze a "religio-racial narrative" authored by a Black member of the predominantly white LDS Church. Demonstrating how Martin positively reconstructed the meaning of Blackness, this article fills a gap in the scholarship on Mormon racial construction.

Leadership, Retention, and Perception of the United States in the LDS Church in Latin America and Europe

Leadership, Retention, and Perception of the United States in the LDS Church in Latin America and Europe

How the LDS Church Can Follow Its Prescribed Steps of Repentance to Reduce Its Systemic Racism

How the LDS Church Can Follow Its Prescribed Steps of Repentance to Reduce Its Systemic Racism

Not Before Jesus Comes, If Ever: Mormon Views on When Women Will Receive the Priesthood

While there has been agitation in recent years among some members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) for women to be ordained to the priesthood, research has established that the leaders of the religion and most members continue to oppose the idea. Drawing on data from an online purposive sample (n=49,568), we examine how likely members of the LDS Church are to think that women will be ordained to the priesthood and contrast that likelihood with a similar estimation of when Jesus will return and the leadership of the LDS Church will call on some members to move to Jackson County, Missouri in preparation for the Second Coming. Our results suggest that the Mormons in our sample believe that it is more likely that they will move to Missouri to greet Jesus than that women will receive the priesthood.

Leadership, Retention, and US culture in the LDS Church in Latin America and Europe

Leadership, Retention, and US culture in the LDS Church in Latin America and Europe

Gender, Symbolic and Social Boundaries, and Deconversion from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

Abstract The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is characterized by specific expectations in the realm of gender roles and sexuality, expectations which can be interpreted as heteronormative symbolic boundaries between the LDS Church and the world at large. In this article, through qualitative interviews, we explore the ways 27 women who leave the Church are influenced by, respond to, and ultimately reject some of the symbolic boundaries. We found that many women struggle with gendered expectations regarding home, careers, with norms regarding heterosexuality and sexuality within marriage, and gender identity conformity expectations, rejecting them at different times in their lives. Intersecting with the life course, we demonstrate how the interaction between the rejection of these symbolic boundaries and experienced social boundaries in the form of exclusion from the family, community, and church-related institutions contributes to deconversion and shapes its consequences afterward.

“А Supervisory Type of Thing”: the Establishment and Impact of the Latter-Day Saint Mission in Postcolonial Southeastern Nigeria

This article analyzes the challenges that confronted the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) in establishing its official mission in southeastern Nigeria following the 1978 Priesthood Revelation, and the impact of its mission strategy on the religious and daily life of Nigerian adherents. The emergence of unofficial LDS congregations in Nigeria between the late 1940s and 1970s required the LDS Church to abandon its traditional mission focus on proselytization, and instead develop a strategy of supervision–a strategy geared towards appointing and training local church leaders, teaching adherents to be proper Latter-day Saints, and integrating congregations in the administrative hierarchy. Using documentary records and oral histories archived at the LDS Church History Library and L. Tom Perry Special Collections, this article highlights the reciprocal impact of cross-cultural encounters and the shortcomings of the LDS Church’s missionary training programs.

A Kaupapa Māori Intervention on Apology for LDS Church's Racism, Zombie Concepts, and Moving Forward

ABSTRACT This intervention paper, based on the Kaupapa Māori writing inquiry, aims to offer an alternative path forward to the idea that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints should apologise for its racism. It argues that an apology is redundant to the Indigenous World. The goal is for better Church-Indigenous relations in the face of racism rooted in The Book of Mormon, Church Policy, doctrine, teachings, and theology. The author develops a positionality and outlines mahi tuhituhi as a Kaupapa Māori (post) qualitative writing inquiry. The Author then moves to contextualise these issues by framing them with what sociologists describe as Zombie Concepts. A brief overview of the Book of Mormon and its significance in Mormonism is provided. Following that, an understanding of the connection between Aileen Moreton-Robinson's white possessive and Lamanitism is provided. Hagoth and his relationship with Tāngata Moana (Māori and Pacific Peoples) is then addressed. Recent remarks by Thomas Murphy to help readers understand the racism in the Book of Mormon. Other issues for Indigenous Peoples are highlighted, with an emphasis on anachronisms and the Book of Mormon's plagiarism. The investigation then shifts to provide Veracini's commentary on settling to build relationality is discussed from the viewpoint of Aotearoa New Zealand. A discussion of the issues is followed by an outline of the research's consequences, which include seven issues that need to be addressed as part of the relationality building in order to create a collaborative future values-based project to move Church-Indigenous relations forward in a positive way.

Genoa, Nebraska, Settlement of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Development, Demise, and Those Who Remained

Genoa, Nebraska, Settlement of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Development, Demise, and Those Who Remained

Transcending Mormonism: Transgender Experiences in the LDS Church

Transcending Mormonism: Transgender Experiences in the LDS Church

Revelations and Translations, Volume 5: Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon

Revelations and Translations, Volume 5: Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon

The Law of the Gospel: Shifting Interpretations of a Temple Covenant throughout Latter-day Saint History

The Law of the Gospel: Shifting Interpretations of a Temple Covenant throughout Latter-day Saint History

Deseret Hospital, Women, and the Perils of Modernization

Deseret Hospital, Women, and the Perils of Modernization

Walking My Path Together with W. W. Phelps

Walking My Path Together with W. W. Phelps

Harold B. Lee: Life and Thought

Harold B. Lee: Life and Thought

Two Danish Artists—Two Not So Divergent Paths: C. C. A. Christensen, Carl Bloch, and the Evolution of Latter-day Saint Art and Aesthetics

Two Danish Artists—Two Not So Divergent Paths: C. C. A. Christensen, Carl Bloch, and the Evolution of Latter-day Saint Art and Aesthetics

Eli and Susannah Wiggill: South African Saints

Eli and Susannah Wiggill: South African Saints

Review: Under the Banner of Heaven, by Dustin Lance Black

Review: <i>Under the Banner of Heaven</i>, by Dustin Lance Black

Review: The Last Called Mormon Colonization: Polygamy, Kinship, and Wealth in Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin, by John Gary Maxwell

This thoroughly researched book investigates a little-known aspect of Mormon history, namely the settlement of the Bighorn Basin in 1900 and 1901 by ardent proponents of plural marriage—the final called colonization, that is, a migration officially mandated by LDS Church authorities. John Gary Maxwell argues that leaders of the colonization project saw the remote area of Wyoming as a potential home for a polygamous enclave. He frames the book by beginning with a general discussion of polygamy in the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints (chapter 1) and concludes with a focused analysis of the polygamous practices of the leaders of the colonization movement (chapter 11) and the effects of plural marriage on state and national politics (chapter 12). Sandwiched in between is an analysis of the key players, the motivations for Mormon expansion—apart from polygamy—and the actual results of moving to the Wyoming frontier. The account includes an honest appraisal of Mormon efforts to dispossess Ute Indians and other Native Americans they encounter in their expansionary movements. The liveliest chapter, “Idealists Among the Pragmatists” describes the lives and times of the four leaders of the colonization effort—Abraham Owen Woodruff, Matthias Foss Cowley, John Whittaker Taylor, and Marriner Wood Merrill. Photographs of these four, along with other photos from the period, provide glimpses of a bygone but by no means forgotten era.Although the book suffers at times from repetition, it tells a fascinating story of outsized personalities with grand plans and questionable schemes. It will be of interest of scholars of Mormonism and historians of the American West.