The Mormon Reformation was a period of renewed emphasis on spirituality within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), and a centrally-directed movement, which called for a spiritual reawakening among church members. It took place during 1856 and 1857 and was under the direction of church president Brigham Young. During the Reformation, Young sent his counselor, Jedediah M. Grant, and other church leaders to preach to the people throughout Utah Territory and surrounding Latter-day Saint communities with the goal of inspiring them to reject sin and turn towards spiritual things. During this time, some of the most conservative or reactionary elements of LDS Church doctrine came to dominate public discussion. As part of the Reformation, almost all "active" or involved LDS Church members were rebaptized as a symbol of their commitment. The Reformation is considered in three phases: a structural reform phase, a phase of intense demand for a demonstration of spiritual reform, and a final phase during which an emphasis was placed on love and reconstruction. Consequently, by the early 1850s, many communities within the Mormon settlement region were prosperous and secure, yet contained a segment of inhabitants whose personal practices were not within the exacting standards of the LDS Church.
In 1852, Brigham Young felt that the church in Utah was secure enough to announce the practice of plural marriage to the world. Shortly after the announcement, however, the Latter-day Saints in Utah experienced a period of hardship. The population of the Utah territory had increased rapidly as converts from Europe joined American Saints in their migration across the Great Plains. In 1855, a drought struck, due to light snowfall during the winter of 1854. In addition to the damage caused by drought, an infestation of grasshoppers and crickets destroyed their meager crops, and around a third of the valley's cattle perished due to the cold. At a quarterly conference in Kaysville, Utah, Grant and Joseph Young of the First Council of the Seventy delivered various sermons over the span of four days, calling for repentance and a general recommitment to moral living and religious teachings. Rebaptism as a practice was not unique to the Reformation, and the practice, which had begun in the 1830s, continued to be commonplace throughout the nineteenth century. It was later discouraged by the First Presidency in 1879. He also introduced various controversial doctrines, such as blood atonement and the Adam-God doctrine, both of which were rejected by other church leaders. According to Brigham Young: "The time is coming when justice will be laid to the line and righteousness to the plummet; when we shall take the old broadsword and ask, Are you for God? And if you are not heartily on the Lord's side, you will be hewn down."
To encourage reformation, certain adjunct theocratic committees may have attempted to ensure order and conformity by censuring local troublemakers. Dissident Mormons of the time reported rumors that committees resorted to summary judgments with punishments meted out by enforcers colloquially termed "Danites" or "destroying angels". For example, the southern Utah pioneer and militia scout of the time John Chatterley later wrote that he had received threats from "secret Committee, called... 'destroying angels'" in late 1856 and early 1857. Contemporary commentators have pointed to pronouncements during the period by Brigham Young and Jedediah Grant that would seem to give vigilante-style bloodshed a religious basis. Young denied that any such acts were condoned by him or the church leadership. In a speech in 1867 Young said:
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Is there war in our religion? No; neither war nor bloodshed. Yet our enemies cry out "bloodshed," and "oh, what dreadful men these Mormons are, and those Danites! how they slay and kill!" Such is all nonsense and folly in the extreme. The wicked slay the wicked, and they will lay it on the Saints.
</blockquote>The Reformation also had an effect on the culture and society that had begun to develop among the Mormon community in Utah, due in large part to the Polysophical Society, which had been organized in 1854 by Lorenzo Snow and his sister, Eliza R. Snow. The society promoted large-scale public education through lectures, musical presentations, literature readings, and poetry writing. At the beginning of the Reformation, Jedediah M. Grant and Heber C. Kimball attacked the society, with Grant saying that it possessed an "adulterous spirit".
Historian Dean L. May noted that the more zealous reformation efforts were not universally accepted in Utah. For these offenses, Young believed that only the voluntary offering of the sinner's own life would be able to expunge the sin.
Young reiterated the concept in several other sermons during the Reformation period. Although the belief was never widely accepted by church members, it became part of the public image of the church at the time and was pilloried, along with the practice of polygamy, in newspapers in the Eastern United States.
Impact
In addition to the Reformation's appeal to the spiritual and emotional lives of Latter-day Saints, actions taken during the movement had lasting impacts on church members, their families, and the church organization. Among the main outcomes of the Reformation were personal recommitment, communal economic innovation, strengthened unity among church members, and an increase in the number of those entering plural marriage. Gustive O. Larson writes that "Mormonism was a civilizing force at work in the Great Basin. Not unlike the experience of some other Christian communities, it threshed its harvest of converts vigorously, lost some of them together with the tares, but produced thereby a better product. The call to repentance in the Reformation was generally heeded and as a result, in the words of historian Andrew Neff, 'the spiritual tone of the entire Mormon commonwealth was markedly raised.'"
The Reformation also resulted in an increase in practical and emotional unity among church members. During the conflict, known as the Utah War, Mormon militia were asked to engage in diversionary action on the plains and in Wyoming. Also, church members were prepared, under Brigham Young's direction, to abandon and destroy their homes, farms, and businesses and move again to the White Mountains of Arizona, which Young had selected as a possible place of refuge if full-scale war were to begin. Historians have also asserted that the emotional rhetoric of church leaders contributed to the defensive dialogue and actions in Southern Utah, which ultimately burst forth in the Mountain Meadows massacre. After some months of these missionary visits, Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City and surrounding communities who had not yet been rebaptized were asked to do so as an expression of their ongoing commitment to the church.