The Line That Divides Two Churches Sharing a Book

The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints renamed itself Community of Christ on January 1, 2001, after delegates to the church's 2000 World Conference approved the change by close to eighty percent, a rebranding meant to state plainly what the church had already become rather than to announce a sudden shift in direction. The reorganization itself traces back to 1860, when Joseph Smith III accepted leadership of a body of Latter Day Saints who had rejected Brigham Young's claim to succeed his father and had never followed Young's westward migration to Utah, giving the Missouri based reorganization and the Utah based church separate leadership, separate histories and, over the following century and a half, separate approaches to their shared founding scripture. The Book of Mormon is the clearest place that divergence shows today. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints in Utah treats belief in the book's ancient historical origin, an actual record of ancient American peoples translated by Joseph Smith from real golden plates, as foundational to membership and to temple worthiness. Community of Christ, non creedal by explicit conviction and governed by continuing revelation rather than a fixed confession, holds the same book as scripture without holding its members to any single verdict on that historical question, a difference in how one shared text is held rather than a difference over which texts count as scripture at all.