Most of the main branches of the Restoration were formed within roughly two decades of the martyrdom of the Prophet Joseph Smith. One clear exception, however, is the Mormon Fundamentalist movement. Here’s a little backstory: In 1890 President Wilford Woodruff issued a manifesto announcing the Church’s intention to submit to those laws recently passed and declared constitutional by the US Supreme Court forbidding plural marriage. Then in 1904, as a result of the Reed Smoot hearings before the US Senate and the national attention this brought to the continued practice of plural marriage in Utah, President Joseph F. Smith issued what is known as the “Second Manifesto,” which announced the Church’s policy to excommunicate anyone who continued to enter into new polygamous marriages.
Yet some Church members felt that the manifestos of Presidents Woodruff and Smith were not inspired. Instead, they saw them as weak and uninspired capitulations to government demands rather than a continued courageous commitment to God’s commands in the face of persecution. Within a few decades, those who dissented against these manifestos or were excommunicated from the LDS Church for entering into additional plural marriages began to gather on the Utah/Arizona border at a place known as Short Creek. They believed in a 1912 statement by Lorin C. Woolley, who had been courier for President John Taylor, about an unpublished 1886 revelation of President Taylor wherein the Lord declared that the “New and Everlasting Covenant” had not been revoked, nor would it ever be. This was interpreted by those in this group to mean that plural marriage would never be withdrawn. They concluded therefore that President Taylor’s unpublished revelation (and their interpretation of it) overruled and superceded the first manifesto of President Woodruff in 1890 and the second manifesto of President Smith in 1904. They were staying true to this core fundamental element of Mormonism while the LDS Church was not.
In time these Mormon Fundamentalists fragmented into various groups, including the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or FLDS Church), the Apostolic United Brethren (or AUB), the Righteous Branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the True and Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last Days, among others.
In this episode of Church History Matters, Casey and I sit down with Dr. Brian Hales, an expert researcher and author of several books on the Mormon fundamentalist movement, to discuss this fascinating branch of the Restoration.
For show notes and transcript for this and other episodes go to https://doctrineandcovenantscentral.org/church-history-matters-podcast/
