Across the library

The United Order

Latter-day Saints tried to abolish private property twice — in Missouri in 1831 and across Utah Territory in 1874. Both attempts are documented in revelation, sermon, and settlement record, and both ended. Every quote links to its source.

For about sixty years the church taught that private property was a temporary arrangement, that the goal was a community where nobody was rich and nobody was poor, and that members would eventually be asked to deed everything they owned to the bishop. That is not a fringe reading — it is in the Doctrine and Covenants, it was preached from the Tabernacle, and roughly two hundred settlements actually tried it. This page follows the whole attempt, and every quote links to its source.

1831: the law of consecration

The founding text is a revelation given in Kirtland in February 1831, six months before the first Saints reached Missouri. The mechanism is specific: you deed what you own to the bishop, and he deeds back what you need.

And behold, thou wilt remember the poor, and consecrate of thy properties for their support that which thou hast to impart unto them, with a covenant and a deed which cannot be broken.

Doctrine and Covenants 42:30, February 1831

…every man shall be made accountable unto me, a steward over his own property, or that which he has received by consecration, as much as is sufficient for himself and family.

Doctrine and Covenants 42:32

Anything above what a family needed went back to the bishop to be given to those who had less — that every man who has need may be amply supplied and receive according to his wants. The Missouri attempt collapsed with the expulsion of the Saints from Jackson County in 1833.

1834: the united order

Three years later a further revelation named the arrangement and made its terms harder, not softer:

…I give unto you counsel, and a commandment, concerning all the properties which belong to the order which I commanded to be organized and established, to be a united order, and an everlasting order for the benefit of my church, and for the salvation of men until I come…

Doctrine and Covenants 104:1, April 1834

But it must needs be done in mine own way; and behold this is the way that I, the Lord, have decreed to provide for my saints, that the poor shall be exalted, in that the rich are made low.

Doctrine and Covenants 104:16

And the sentence that gives the whole system its edge:

And let not any among you say that it is his own; for it shall not be called his, nor any part of it.

Doctrine and Covenants 104:70

What it sounded like from the pulpit

In Utah the idea stayed alive in sermons for twenty years before anyone acted on it again. Orson Pratt, preaching in 1855, worked through what consecration would actually cost him — and the specificity is the point:

I long for the time to come when I can consecrate everything I have got; all the cattle I have; I have got some first-rate cattle, the Lord has prospered them. I want the time to come when I can consecrate every hoof of them; also my books, and the right and title I have to publish my works, also my wearing apparel, and my houses; they are not mine, and not being mine, I have no business with this property, only as the Lord sees fit to let me have it.

Orson Pratt, Consecration, Journal of Discourses, Volume 2

Why Brigham Young waited

Young wanted to do it and said so publicly for years. The reason he gave for the delay is unusually candid, and it is not a spiritual one — it is a legal one. Preaching in 1873, he explained that the holdup was finding a legal structure that people who later left the church could not use to sue it apart:

…the only reason why we do not take up the subject and enter into the organization of Enoch, or a city of Enoch, is simply because we have not yet been able to find every item of law bearing upon this matter, so as to organize in a way that apostates cannot trouble us. This is the only reason.

Brigham Young, The Order of Enoch, Journal of Discourses, Volume 16

1874: the launch

The first United Order was organized at St. George on February 9, 1874, and by the end of that year more than two hundred had been organized across Utah, Idaho, Nevada and Arizona. In St. George, members marked the covenant the way converts mark baptism — applicants signaled their covenant pledges by being rebaptized.

What is striking about the sermons from that spring is how little anyone claimed to know. John Taylor, then an apostle and later church president, opened a discourse on the new order like this:

I am asked sometimes—"Do you understand it?" Yes, I do, no, I do not, yes I do, no, I don't, and both are true; we know that such an order must be introduced, but are not informed in relation to the details, and I guess it is about the same with most of you.

John Taylor, The United Order—We Want the Most Perfect Union, Journal of Discourses, Volume 17

Orderville

Most orders pooled some property and left the rest alone. Orderville, founded in Kane County in southern Utah in 1875, went the whole way, and it is the one people still visit. The church's own history describes what full communal living meant in practice:

In Orderville and Price, members of the order aimed for complete communal living; the board of managers instituted a work schedule, assigned labor, and regulated meals and barter exchanges.

United Orders, Church History Topics

Members ate in a common dining hall, drew clothing from a common store, and worked where the board assigned them. Orderville lasted about a decade, longer than almost any other.

How it ended

Brigham Young died in August 1877, three years after the launch, and most of the orders had already failed by then. The rest were finished off by something unrelated to economics: the federal anti-polygamy campaign of the 1880s put many of the men who ran them in prison or in hiding. The church's history states the outcome without ceremony:

By the 1890s, both the cooperative institutions and United Orders had either closed or transitioned into private business entities.

United Orders, Church History Topics

Where it stands

The law of consecration was never revoked. It is still in the Doctrine and Covenants, it is still referred to in the temple, and Latter-day Saints are still taught that it will be lived someday. What replaced it in practice is narrower and voluntary: tithing, fast offerings, and the church welfare system built in the 1930s.

So the honest answer to "what happened to the United Order" is not that the church abandoned the idea. It is that the church stopped asking people to do it, and never said when it would ask again. The revelations, the sermons, and the settlement records are all in this library.