[See Part One: Beginnings] Let’s talk about the middle section of John Turner’s new Joseph Smith biography, covering Chapters Nine through Twenty, the time in Kirtland and Missouri. Neither of these LDS “gathering projects” turned out well. Kirtland was the first “gathering place,” and attracted hundreds of LDS converts between 1831 and 1837, but it was conveniently described as a temporary gathering place. There was never a sense after 1837 that “someday we will return to Kirtland.” The LDS urge to gather lasted through the end of the 19th century, but faded away in the 20th century.
Missouri was initially designated as a more permanent gathering place and set apart as “Zion.” A ramshackle LDS Zion theology grew up around this designation and is still prominent because it is featured in a series of D&C sections. However, the current form of LDS Zion theology in our day has abandoned both the urge to gather and the community-level vision of some sort of Zion city or state. Now we gather in place, which isn’t really gathering. We’re never going back to Missouri. Furthermore, current LDS Zion theology is now an individual-level concept that just means being nice to people (extra nice, Zion nice) and serving through ward callings and service projects (extra special service, Zion service).
That’s the big picture. Both Kirtland and Missouri were failed attempts at a form of gathered Zion. It took a couple of generations for the full impact of those failures, along with the subsequent failure in Nauvoo and decades of conflict in Utah with the US national government, to have full effect. With the achievement of Utah statehood in 1896, the Church moved into a post-Zion mode, finally getting along with local and national governments and adopting the standard model for Christian churches: local units with chapels and local leadership (bishops and stake presidents); and a central leadership cadre with central administrative offices and senior leaders who exercise church-wide authority. Don’t gather, just join your local ward and lead a happy Mormon life.
With that as an overview — and I am obviously focusing on just one big theme, gathering and Zion — here are a few quotations from the book.
“The move to northeastern Ohio [Kirtland area] had been a resounding success” (p. 102). For a few years, until things fell apart at the end in the late-1830s, the Ohio period was stable and productive for the young and growing church. Several of the still-foundational D&C sections (76, 84, 88, 93, 110) were produced in Kirtland during this period.
“They hate Yankees worse than snakes” (p. 104). That was the reality on the ground in Independence, Missouri, as reported by W. W. Phelps. That should have given a measure of caution to the Zion in Missouri project, but it didn’t. It was also described as a “remote and inhospitable place.”
“What happens when a prophet gets it wrong?” (p. 142). That question frames Turner’s discussion of how things fell apart in Jackson County, Missouri in 1833. He notes that Joseph “had staked a great deal on his identification of Independence as the millennial New Jerusalem to which Jesus Christ would return. … It was by far the riskiest act of Joseph’s prophetic career to date” (p. 143). Let’s be honest: it was a colossal failure. Of course, Joseph (and God through revelations) blamed the Missouri members for being insufficiently faithful and diligent.
“It was an inglorious end to Joseph’s seven years in northeastern Ohio” (p. 203). That’s how Turner summarized the troubling events that led to Joseph abandoning Kirtland for Far West, Missouri in early 1838. There was continuing fallout from the failed Zion’s Camp brigade of about 200 Mormons, with Joseph in the lead, that travelled from Ohio to Missouri, accomplished nothing, then returned to Ohio. There were rumors of Joseph’s early experiments with polygamy (Fanny Alger). There was the failure of the Kirtland Bank which economically injured many of the members in Kirtland and spurred a lot of unhappiness, even anger, toward Joseph. At the end of 1837, things just fell apart.
After a brief attempt at gathering the remaining Saints from Jackson County, Missouri and Ohio to the newer Mormon settlements at Far West, Missouri and neighboring towns in Clay County, Missouri, Joseph and the Mormons ended up in Illinois in 1839 to try it all again, one more time. The eventful Nauvoo period will be the topic of Part 3.
So reflect a bit on the LDS Zion experience. What do you make of it?
- What does “Zion” mean to you right now in 2025? Does it mean anything?
- Do you think the Mormons will ever “go back to Missouri”? If not, why do members and manuals keep talking about it?
- Do you see the whole “gathering to Zion” push a success or a failure? Good arguments on both sides of the whole Zion/gathering question.
- As I see it, the move from gathering to just building the Church up wherever it could — through Mormons relocating to establish communities up and down the Mormon Corridor and through convert growth — enabled the Church to grow and prosper through the 20th century right up to the present day. That was the biggest and most consequential transformation of the institution in its 200-year history.
Wheat & Tares 
The move to “home centered, church supported” felt like a final abandonment of a communal Zion by the church. It’s just you and the temple now. There might well be some GC talk on “building our individual Zion” or something, but I don’t see building a society as a thing the church cares about anymore.
I grew up with ideas of people getting called back to Missouri. (For some reason too many of these ideas involved walking to Missouri, like cars wouldn’t exist in this Missouri-pocalypse.) Other times I have heard that only people with 2 years of food storage will be the ones to get a phone call one evening that the trucks will be arriving the next morning to take them (and their food storage) to Missouri. (It was unclear why the move would be so hasty, or where tens of thousands of trucks would come from.) This year a Sunday School teacher in my ward (in his 70s) mentioned the tens of thousands of portions of bread and water they had prepared at Adam-ondi-ahmen for the big meeting. In seminary (in the 90s) I was told that Adam-ondi-ahmen had electrical and water utilities in the ground ready for whatever quick building projects would be needed.
We still talk about Missouri because people who have spent their whole lives teaching lessons about how we’re going back someday don’t want to be wrong about it. We don’t talk about it all the much though. The idea will gradually fade out with the baby boomers, and it will just be a funny thing from the past, and somewhere in there it’ll get purged from all the lesson manuals.
Talk about going back to Missouri terrified me and gave me nightmares when I was growing up. At girls camp, which is very different now than when I went, the skills such as lashing showers and latrines, putting up tents, orienteering with a map and compass, cooking over fires, being able to tell the difference between normal plant life and dangerous or poisonous ones, etc were taught to us so that when the time came and we had to walk take our belongings in handcarts because roads and cars would do us no good we girls would be prepared to do so. I personally enjoyed learning the few skills that my dad, Mr Outdoors himself, hadn’t already taught me and my sibs plus the opportunity to be in the mountains that I love so much. But the relentless talk about how scary the walk would be terrified most of us. You could almost guarantee that you’d be woken up in the night by someone who’d had a nightmare about the trek to Missouri. Think Mad Max with handcarts!
And then, about the time that President Hinkley took over the Missouri talk suddenly stopped. I was so grateful for the change because I didn’t want my son hearing those horrible stories. When I could think about the subject without fear (especially after I left the church) I realized that the whole “trek to Missouri” was just another way to control members through fear. Fear along with shame are the church’s favorite methods to get members to do what they want. Look at how tithing and the temple have been weaponized against the members since 2018.
If you stop to really think about the idea of all of the church members going back to Missouri various problems become apparent. First of all, how are you going to accommodate several thousands or millions of people in a finite space? What about food, water and sanitation? What happens to the people who are sick, disabled or have little ones who couldn’t make the trek? What about all of the people who live outside of the US? What happens to them? You get the idea. In all reality and practicality such a mass exodus wouldn’t work.
My neighbor has a farm near Adam-ondi-Ahman where he and his sibs have basically built a family compound in preparation of the great and dreadful day. People in our neighborhood have moved back to Independence to avoid having to pull a handcart to Missouri. This is just craziness. Don’t members have better things to do than wait in fear for something that scares them to death and which is based on 19th century folk doctrine?
“Do you think the Mormons will ever “go back to Missouri”?”
When I first got married, my wife told me that her cousin was going to move to Missouri. I asked her why she was moving to Missouri. Her answer was that it was because she believed that the Second Coming was near and that Saints were to gather there. Luckily her husband eventually talked her out of it. They had no job lined up. They were just going to move on faith.
I see the concept of Zion as problematic. It was originally a sort of land-based utopia for the Israelites. And it is something that is currently spurring the violent conflict and genocide in Gaza that we now see. There has been no easy resolution to the conflict in Israel Palestine in large part because a relatively small group of Zionist Jews insists, just insists, that Gaza, the West Bank, Southern Lebanon, the Sinai, parts of Syria, and the Golan Heights are their God-given lands that they must inhabit. In the Mormon context, Zion is also somewhat land-based, with Missouri being the location of Zion, but thankfully it is mostly just metaphorical now.
I think the church will make Independence the center place at some point in the future—perhaps in a millennial day. That said, I agree with the OP’s final point—that the church’s focus in the present is to spread worldwide. And I think it’s important to remember that we wouldn’t’ve been able to become a global entity if we hadn’t made it a priority to gather for a relatively short period of time in the Rocky Mountains. It was there that the church was able to drive its roots deep into the earth and become grounded and established. And so even though we failed to establish Zion at the outset we’ve pulled ourselves together well enough to move towards that goal in a way that will eventually transform the entire earth. And the funny thing is—I think that’s what the Lord had in mind all along.
Did the lord consider how African Saints living on modest means will gather in Independence, MO? Or South American Saints or South Pacific Saints, for that matter? …particularly if there were another Presidential administration so adverse to immigration and/or people of color.
All these mythologies about Zion and Missouri, and how impossible it would actually be, puts it in the same metaphorical boat as Noah and his global flood!
I agree that the Zionist concept is highly problematic. All concepts of favored (or cursed) lineages are false and dangerous!
“What does “Zion” mean to you right now in 2025? Does it mean anything?”
To me Zion is a beautiful aspiration, and what comes to mind is mainly the wording of Moses 7:18 and the call from Joseph Smith to give our best efforts to create such a society. I know the historical use of the term, but to me today Zion is not tied to a specific location in Missouri but rather to building a community, that incidentally could include people of very different beliefs than mine.