Mormon Doctrine

Mormon Doctrine

An apostle's attempt to define Latter-day Saint belief from A to Z — unofficial, enormously influential, publicly corrected by his own leaders, and out of print since 2010.

What it is

Mormon Doctrine is a one-volume alphabetical encyclopedia of Latter-day Saint belief, written by Bruce R. McConkie and first published by Bookcraft in 1958. It runs from Aaron to Zion in flat, declarative entries, each ruling on what the church teaches about its subject and citing scripture for it.

McConkie was not an apostle when he wrote it. He was an Assistant to the Quorum of the Twelve; he would not be ordained an apostle until 1972. The book was published commercially, by a private press, and its title page carried no church imprimatur. Its author stated plainly that he alone was responsible for it.

None of that stopped it. For roughly fifty years Mormon Doctrine functioned as the reference book on the shelf of a great many Latter-day Saint homes, seminaries and mission apartments — the place you looked when you wanted to know what the church thought about something. Deseret Book let it go out of print in 2010.

The controversy

The 1958 first edition alarmed the church's leadership. President David O. McKay assigned two apostles to read it; their review identified over a thousand items that in their judgement needed correction, and the First Presidency decided the book should not be reprinted as it stood. It was nonetheless already circulating widely.

A revised second edition appeared in 1966. The most notorious first-edition passages were softened — the identification of the Roman Catholic Church as “the church of the devil” among them — but the book kept its structure, its tone, and its habit of answering questions the church itself had left open.

That is what makes it a genuinely useful historical document rather than merely a contentious one. It records what a confident, well-read Latter-day Saint leader believed the church taught in the middle of the twentieth century, including a good deal the church has since moved away from or never endorsed at all.

What we hold

The 1966 second edition, complete: 1,451 entries, each indexed as its own source, so an answer can cite the entry rather than the book.

The entries people actually search for are the contested ones — Evolution, Negroes, Church of the Devil, Adam-God Theory, Plural Marriage, Birth Control, Celestial Marriage, Pre-Existence — and all of them are here in full. Ten of them have a page of their own, with what the entry says, what changed between the two editions, and where the church stands now.

The entries by subject

Ten subjects have a page of their own. Each quotes what the entry says, sets the 1958 first edition against the 1966 second edition where they differ, and gives the church's current published position on the same question.

What authority it carries

None, formally. It is not canon, not correlated church curriculum, and not a First Presidency publication. It was a commercial book by a private publisher, written by a man who was not yet an apostle, and its first edition was reviewed by his own leaders and found to need substantial correction.

But treating it as marginal misreads how it was used. It sat in the homes; it was quoted in lessons and talks for decades; its author became an apostle and remained one until his death in 1985. A book can shape what a church believes without ever having been authorised to. Mormon Doctrine is the clearest case of that in Latter-day Saint publishing, which is exactly why it is worth being able to search.