well.... here;s the thing....... if they rejected the teachings of the first joseph smith - then why retain any part of the name smith gave the mormon church?....... ..why let their be any confusion about it at all?...... ... and as far as joseph smiths "assassination" - i heard and read multiple different accounts of how that happened.... ... the only thing people agree on was that it happened in a prison and smith died at the hand of a mob...... they also agree smith was not being held in a cell when he died and many say smith was armed at the time.... and some say he even shot at the rioters outside the prison from a window..... that last group maintains that smith and his followers were trying to orchestrate a jail break - and that the mob had showed up in an attempt to stop it.............
Because they weren't converted from "Mormonism." They merely reorganized, and their president was receiving new revelations about how to proceed. He was either a liar or he was talking to demons, but it was political expediency that they shed themselves of the polygamy and other more extreme trappings of the cult.
Before the split, when they first settled in Missouri, they stole the land on the basis of their own brand of Zionism. They were the true children of Abraham, and God had given this land, Zion, the New Jerusalem, to them. They were run out by the state militia. But when they came back, their Zionism took on a more spiritual nature, and so they were tolerated. They no longer could be properly called a cult in the sense that we use the word.
I don't know all the details, but the LDS church has a whole temple cultus with two orders of priesthood and rites derived from their wackadoodle reading of the Old Testament and new revelations. The RLDS spiritualized all that, and by all outward appearances, operate like an orthodox Christian church.
The Mormon name wasn't a name they adopted for themselves. They called themselves The Church of Christ. It was given by outsiders after the publication of the Book of Mormon, which I've read cover to cover. It's their divine record of the original inhabitants of the Americas, who are really Jews who migrated across the Atlantic to avoid the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem. I understand that the LDS and RLDS versions differ from one another. There is another version I'm familiar with called The Record of the Nephites which is/was published by one of the many factions that fell from LDS movement, The Church of Christ with the Elijah Message. (Elijah was appearing to their prophets. I don't know if that faction even operates any more.) But Mormon was the last contributor to the record, and he was the one who is supposed to have buried the records that Smith found by divine revelation.
It wasn't until later the LDS church accepted the Mormon name as distinctive. The RLDS never did. I was speaking with an anachronism when I said the reorganized church shed the trappings of Mormonism. It's just easier that way and is less wordy.
In short, the Book of Mormon is the record of a single Jewish family that moved to the Americas, and gave rise to two groups, the Nephites and the Lamanites. The Lamanites forsook the law, and were marked by dark skin. The Nephites were righteous and stayed white as Europeans. The Lamanites made war constantly with the Nephites. After Christ's ascension in the East, He landed in North America, many believe where Independence is now, and began another three-year ministry with another 12 disciples. Then He leaves again, and the church grows, but then falls away again, and instead of being turned into redskins, they are completely wiped out by the Lamanites, except for three (I think) Nephites who were rewarded with immortality along with St. John, and who still walk among us and visit a congregation from time to time though always 'unawares'. Typically is afterward that someone is 'given to know' that the stranger that visited them was one of the Nephites.
The Mormon missionary efforts with the American indians were a direct cause of many Indian and settler skirmishes, the Black Hawk Wars being a notable one. They were being taught they were sons of Abraham, the chosen people, and that they have divine right to the land.
The LDS Scriptures are the KJV, the Book of Mormon, The Doctrine and Covenants (which is their collection of revelations given to the president of the church), and The Pearl of Great Price.
The RLDS Scriptures are the Inspired Version (the 'corrected' KJV), the Book of Mormon, and their own Doctrine and Covenants.
After being run out of Missouri, the settled in Illinois, and turned swampland into a veritable paradise. They called it Nauvoo, meaning "Beautiful".
The LDS (and RLDS) are a factious people. Countless little cults cropped up, and they made enemies everywhere they went. The first issue of the paper published in Nauvoo was critical of Smith. So he burned the office down and declared martial law, which got him and his brother arrested and incarcerated in Carthage, Illinois (Not Carthage, MO). That was when the jail was stormed and he and his brother were shot. And yeah, someone previously smuggled in a gun. The Mormons believed they lived by a higher law. They were the Israelites. God himself was walking and talking with them. Everyone else was false, so Smith's incarceration was an injustice...to them.
remember.... all these people i talked to about that incident were mormons themselves.... i even saw a few arguments break out between them over disagreements on the details......
well then.... like the RLDS who foster confusion by retaining part of the mormon label.... you provoke these eroneous assumptions from others by using that same RLDS label to describe your early church experience....... have they ever thought of calling themselves something else or joining in with different congregation?....
It took them a while, but they did just that. They call themselves the Community of Christ, now. This was over a controversial revelation given that said women could serve in the priesthood. This controversy was raging when I was dating Tammy...the RLDS girl I spoke of earlier. So there was another major split. The owners of the RLDS name received the prophecy, the splinter group didn't. The RLDS changed their name to CoC, and the splinter group became The Church of Jesus Christ Restored, or, the Restoration Branch or some such designation. I don't keep up with it.