"When the Puritans arrived in America in the early seventeenth century," writes one historian of philosophy, "they brought not only their strong theological orientation but also tenacious communal impulses, utopian hopes, a sense of being chosen, and a belief in social and religious exclusivity and uniformity." This description sounds uncannily prophetic of the Mormon experiment of two hundred years later. The Latter-day Saints also gathered to a physical place of refuge (several times in succession), initiated a communal society, captured utopian moments and millennialist glimpses in Kirtland [Ohio] and Nauvoo [Illinois], heard themselves declared a chosen people, and differentiated themselves with unique beliefs, practices, and covenants. But the Mormons reenacted these Puritan aspirations to spiritual exclusivity with a monumental difference: they did it in the context of a hostile culture consisting of fellow citizens rather than in the relative isolation of a wilderness refuge. The Babylon the Puritans left behind was so geographically remote as to be little more than a rhetorical trope. Their principal adversary in spiritual warfare was a devil whose menace preachers had to assert through harrowing sermons (or who could occasionally reveal his hand through troublesome witches or marauding Indians). Mormon religious difference, on the other hand, was emphatically demonstrated by perennial conflict with neighbors and militia that frequently amounted to bloodshed, and fellow Christians that threatened a very literal extermination. Even once removed to the remote Utah desert, Mormons found themselves besieged by a federal army, federal judges, and punitive federal laws.
The Mormon emphasis on exceptionalism is traceable to the first recorded spiritual experience of the young Joseph Smith. Long before he ever heard the word Mormon, or had an inkling of what his life or ministry would stand for, he learned what he was to be set against. Having knelt in a wooded grove on his family's farm and inquired of God what church he should join to find salvation, he found he was not to be a fellow traveler with any Christian then alive: "I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt." Like many religious revolutionaries, Joseph early saw his relationship to the world in thoroughly adversarial terms. "I was destined to prove a disturber and an annoyer of his kingdom; else why should the powers of darkness combine against me? Why the opposition and persecution that arose against me, almost in my infancy?" From the time he was "an obscure boy, only between fourteen and fifteen years of age," he would later record, "all the sects...united to persecute me." Less than two years before his death, he would boast that "deep water is what I am wont to swim in. It all has become a second nature to me; and I feel, like Paul, to glory in tribulation." Jonathan Edwards similarly gloried, "I am born to be a man of strife," and Luther's self-conception was famously an embattled one.What was different about Joseph's posture was how effectively he imbued an entire people with this same sense of hostile separation from the world. It didn't hurt that he had the weight of scripture to reinforce Latter-day Saint exceptionalism. A revelation received a year after the church's founding declared that Mormonism was "the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth, with which I, the Lord, am well pleased" -- a designation "too low to scorn" in the view of one Baptist preacher writing in 1843. Reformation churches of the era contended vociferously over doctrine and converts, but made virtually no comparable sweeping institutional claims. Such rhetoric was until then largely associated with a church that contemporaries would liken to Mormonism: Roman Catholicism.
But Mormonism went far beyond mere allusions to their church as "the only true" one. Early on, Joseph Smith introduced a geographical gathering based on reference to chosen lineage. Mormons were not unique in this regard; Christians had long seen themselves as spiritual Israel, and religious figures would occasionally insist on going beyond metaphor.
