Title: Divergent Paths of the Restoration Review: An Encyclopedia of the Smith–Rigdon Movement (Fifth Edition)
Author: Steven L. Shields
Publisher: Signature Books
Genre: Reference
Year Published: 2021
Number of Pages: 1085
Binding: ebook only
ISBN: 978-1-56085-401-2
Price: 9.99
Reviewed for the Association for Mormon Letters by Mark Tensmeyer
Anyone with a moderate familiarity of Mormon Studies needs no introduction to Steven Shields’ Divergent Paths of the Restoration: an Encyclopedia of the Smith-Rigdon Movement. My sixteen-year-old self, far from an aficionado in Mormon Studies, first encountered it when my dad bought it at the bookstore in the RLDS Visitors’ Center in Nauvoo. Like many other members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, visiting these historical sites exposed me to the fact that other Restoration churches exist. Shields’s book showed me just how expansive these other groups were.
With four previous editions, this classic has long been the premier source on the various religious expressions that trace their founding back to Joseph Smith Junior. Shields takes on the Herculean task of identifying, cataloging, and briefly describing all the current and past church, groups, and movements in the Restoration. A large percentage of these groups are small and obscure. Shields’ write-ups of the larger groups or better-known groups like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Community of Christ serve as good introductory material, but it is the entries on these obscure groups that make this volume essential.
For example, a member of a social media discussion board I co-administer asked about an Iowa-based group that practices Amish-like self-sufficiency and had a book they claimed to be translated from tablets. Other members were quickly able to identify this as the group headed by Ron Livingstone. I was able to look up this group in Divergent Paths and found that Shields listed it as the Brotherhood of Christ Church (5.25). I learned that this group was founded by Ron Livingstone an RLDS/Community of Christ member who started this new church in the 1980s. The Brotherhood practices communitarian life based on the Essens and has a book of scripture called the Sealed Portion of the Brother of Jared that Livingstone claims to have translated from the stone tablets carved by the brother of Jared. Thanks to Divergent Paths, I was able to find reliable, basic information about this interesting and obscure group.
Shields has advocated the past few years that the Mormon Restoration movement ought to be referred to in academic circles as the “Smith-Rigdon movement.” Shields uses this name as Joseph Smith, of course, founded the movement because of Sidney Rigdon’s doctrinal contributions, together with the mass conversion of his congregation at the early stage qualify him as a co-founder. The name “Mormon” is actively disclaimed by many members of the movement, most recently by President Russell M. Nelson, and the term “Restoration” is also used to describe other Christian movements such as the Stone-Campbell movement. The new subtitle of this edition reflects this position.
It has been nearly two decades since the last edition and this new edition was much needed. Aside from a greatly updated, expanded catalog of groups, this edition’s new feature is a Dewey decimal system-like enumeration of all the groups. Shields designates the church founded on April 6, 1830, as the “Original Church” designated 1.0. Groups that broke off during Joseph Smith’s lifetime fall under the “1.” designation. For example, Isaac Russell’s short-lived “Church of Latter Day Saints” is designated 1.7. Those under 2.0 refer to the groups that emerged during what Shields calls the “Fragmentation Era,” or the period between the death of Joseph Smith and the 1860s, during which time the six major denominations formed. These six groups persist to this day, and it is from these that nearly all the remaining groups come from. Shields lists them roughly in chronological order: 3.0 Church of Jesus Christ (Strang), 4.0 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Young), 5.0 Community of Christ, 6.0 Church of Jesus Christ (Cutler), 7.0 Church of Jesus Christ (Bickerton), 8.0 Church of Christ (Hedrick). The designation 9.0 refers to groups with no clear connection to the main six submovements. 10.0 refers to religious expressions that have elements of the Smith-Rigdon movement but do not identify as part of the movement, and 11.0 refers to groups or possible groups of which there is incomplete or unverified supporting evidence. It should be noted that Shields considers all groups separate from the “Original Church” (1.0) and looks to the reorganization of the First Presidency and sustaining of Brigham Young as the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as the beginning of that organization.
Shields further divides schismatic organizations from their parent churches and from sibling churches with decimal numerals. For example, Otto Fetting’s Church of Christ split from 8.0 Church of Christ in the 1930s and is designated by Shields as 8.3. Fetting’s church itself has experienced several schisms that have in turn had their own schisms. In 1943, William Draves took a good percentage of the Church of Christ (8.3) into his new church Church of Christ with the Elijah’s Message, Established Anew 1929 (8.3.7). Nine resultant further churches emerged from 8.3.7, the most recent being the Church of Christ with the Elijah’s Message, the Assured Way of the Lord (8.3.7.4.1). This numbering system effectively shows where a group fits into the larger picture of the Restoration and simplifies differentiating identical or similarly named groups.
This system works well with groups that consider themselves worldwide and recognize a central leader or formal organization. This describes most movements, big or small, in the Restoration. There are notable exceptions that do not fit into Shields’s system. One notable exception is the Restorationist Branches that arose in the RLDS/Community of Christ movement during the 1980s over the Church’s embrace of female ordination and other trends that the many in the conservative wing found unacceptable. Like many churches in the Protestant world, this movement consists largely of independent local congregations that share a measure of mutual recognition based on shared beliefs and genealogy but have no shared leadership or organization. Technically, every one of these local congregations is its own denomination. To the extent possible, Shields names and catalogs the conventions that some branches ascribe to such as the Joint Conference of Restoration Branches (5.46.1) and the Conference of Restoration Elders (5.45). Rather than list each branch individually, Shields discusses the movement and Appendix I.
Organizations are abstract concepts that only exist in the tangible sense in the actions and words of the participants. As such, questions like when an organization started, what other organization it derived from is going to be a matter of human perception and will be subject to some debate. This makes complete neutrality impossible in a book like this, but Shields makes a noble effort by giving equal space to the different groups and employing neutral, academic language. For example, Shields maintains that the Original Church (1.0) ceased to exist at the death of Joseph Smith, that the church that sustained the Quorum of the Twelve in August 1844 was the Original Church (2.0), and that Brigham Young started a new church, the present-day Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (4.0), when he reorganized the First Presidency in December 1847. Reorganizing the First Presidency would hardly be considered the start of a new Church by anybody nor is there any indication that Brigham Young or any members of that church intended that move to signal the start of a new church. It would be easy to view this move by Shields employing an old polemic from the RLDS Church/Community of Christ, the group he belongs to, but in a book about the different Restoration churches, it makes sense to take a neutral stance that the Original Church ended with Joseph Smith and then account for the LDS Church (4.0) in a rational way. In contrast, the late Michael Quinn wrote in his seminal The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power, quoting RLDS/Community of Christ historian Richard Howard, that one can hardly call the “Utah Church” a schismatic organization given the continuity of membership and leadership. Shields’s stance, in this case, is not a universally held one but a common one and one that works in the context of this book.
One interesting editorial decision was to refer to the RLDS Church/Community of Christ (5.0) exclusively as the Community of Christ, including in references to the Church prior to the name change in 2000, even going so far as replace the older name with a bracketed “Community of Christ” while quoting documents rewritten about the Church in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century. This convention is not unknown in Mormon Studies and is currently the style on Wikipedia. However, the usual style is to refer to the pre-2000 Church as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (or shortened RLDS) with some notation in the first mention that it is now called the Community of Christ. For instance, Richard Howard, former official historian of the Church, used this terminology in the preface of this book. This latter convention would be academically accurate and less off-putting to Restorationists.
With so many groups over nearly two hundred years, there has to be some missing movement or some group that should have been included, but I can’t think of any, and I consider myself fairly informed on the subject, having made a hobby of it for many years now. The unavoidable problem here is that this book and future editions will never be able to keep up with all the new movements. Significant recent groups include those led by Chad and Lori Daybell, Phil Davis, and Julie Rowe. Shields kept this book as up to date as humanly possible and has done an impressive job in covering recent complicated developments including the schism that occurred in the Remnant Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (5.47.3.1) resulting in the creation of the Everlasting Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days (5.47.3.1.1).
The inclusion of so many groups comes to us by Shields’s considerable leg work in seeking out and learning about these groups. For many of these groups, the only reference Shields can cite is his own personal communication with the respective leaders and adherence. Shields is as much a journalist as he is a historian.
Perhaps the most important accomplishment of Divergent Paths is that it is the only place that many of these groups will appear in writing, or at least in writing accessible to the general public. Without Divergent Paths, the existence of many, many of these groups would be lost to history within a few short decades. This is one reason why I would like to see at least a limited run of a print version of this book so that research libraries could preserve it for generations to come.