Mormonism

No religion born in the United States has been expelled from more states at gunpoint than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Joseph Smith founded it in upstate New York in 1830, after describing a series of visions in which God and Jesus Christ appeared to him and an angel named Moroni directed him to golden plates buried in a hillside. The church he built — theologically distinct from all existing Christian denominations, claiming new scripture and new revelation — was met with mob violence in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, culminating in Smith's murder by a mob that stormed the jail where he was held in Carthage, Illinois, in June 1844.

Brigham Young led the surviving membership west in 1847 in one of the great overland migrations in American history — nearly 1,600 miles to the Salt Lake Valley, then still outside U.S. territorial authority. Utah's incorporation brought the federal government into direct conflict with the church over polygamy, which Smith had introduced as a doctrine and the church practiced openly. The Edmunds Act (1882) stripped polygamists of the right to vote; the Edmunds-Tucker Act (1887) disincorporated the church and seized its assets. The church formally abandoned plural marriage in the 1890 Manifesto; Utah achieved statehood in 1896.

The 20th and 21st centuries saw the church expand from a persecuted American sect into a global denomination of over 17 million members, with especially rapid growth in Latin America and Africa. The church's missionary program, organizational discipline, and conservative social values made it a significant presence in American political life. Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign was the first by a major-party Mormon candidate. The church's reckoning with its own racial history — it excluded Black men from the priesthood until 1978 — remains part of its ongoing negotiation with American pluralism and its own founding ideals.