The Activated Disciple

By Elder B. H. Roberts

Joseph Smith, Jr. (December 23, 1805 - June 27, 1844) was an American religious leader who founded the Latter Day Saint movement, the predominant branch of which is Mormonism. At age twenty-four, Smith published the Book of Mormon, and by the time of his death fourteen years later, he had attracted tens of thousands of followers, established cities and temples, and founded a religion and a religious culture that continues to the present day.

Smith was born in Sharon, Vermont, and by 1817 had moved with his family to western New York, then the site of intense religious revivalism as part of the Second Great Awakening. There, according to Smith, he saw and heard a series of visions beginning in the early 1820s; in the first of these visions "two personages" (implied to be God the Father and the Son) appeared to him, and in subsequent visions an angel directed Smith to a buried book of golden plates inscribed with a Judeo-Christian history of an ancient American civilization. In 1830, Smith published what he said was an English translation of these plates, titled the Book of Mormon. Also in 1830, he organized the Church of Christ, calling it a restoration of the early Christian church. Church members were later called "Latter Day Saints", or "Mormons".

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