Mormon Doctrine
Mormon Doctrine by subject
The entries people actually look up — what each says, what changed between the two editions, and where the church stands now.
Mormon Doctrine has 1,451 entries and they are wildly uneven. The median entry is about 1,902 characters — a paragraph and a scripture reference. The longest is 75,303. The book's weight sits in a few dozen long entries, and almost all of the argument people have about the book sits in a smaller set than that.
Each page below takes one of those and does three things: quotes what the entry actually 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 subject. Every quotation is attributed to entry and page and linked to the scan.
The entries
| Subject | What is on the page |
|---|---|
| What changed between the 1958 and 1966 editions | Fifteen entries in the first edition are absent from the second. Each one, with what it said. |
| The church of the devil | The first edition named the Catholic Church. The second named nobody. Both passages. |
| Race and the priesthood | Four entries, three versions of the book, and the teachings the church disavowed in 2013. |
| Evolution | A nine-point refutation, a 6,000-year earth, and a church that now has no position. |
| Birth control | The author cut his own condemnation from the second edition and imported a harder one. |
| Mother in Heaven | Argued from the fatherhood of God, unchanged between editions, taken up by the church in 2015. |
| Salvation by grace | Grace for immortality, obedience for exaltation — and the two words the revision removed. |
| Capital punishment and blood atonement | The deleted entry that said what the doctrine meant in law, and the one that kept the doctrine. |
| Sons of perdition | The only category in the book with no way out, and how hard the entry makes it to enter. |
| Secret combinations | Cain to the Cold War, with gangsters, communist governments and trade unions named. |
The longest entries in the book
Length is a fair proxy for how much McConkie thought a subject needed settling. The top three below are all about the end of the world, and between them they run to four times the length of the fourth, which is evolution.
| Entry | Page | Characters |
|---|---|---|
| Signs of the Times | p. 501 | 75,303 |
| Second Coming of Christ | p. 483 | 41,182 |
| Millennium | p. 351 | 39,712 |
| Evolution | p. 180 | 38,531 |
| Revelation | p. 454 | 28,929 |
| Melchizedek Priesthood | p. 341 | 28,855 |
| Faith | p. 190 | 27,083 |
| Prayer | p. 412 | 25,443 |
Page links open the Internet Archive's scan of a printing of the 1966 second edition revised after June 1978.
Elsewhere on this site
Several of these doctrines were preached from the pulpit in Salt Lake City fifty to a hundred years before Mormon Doctrine was written, and printed at the time. Where that is so, the Journal of Discourses page for the subject carries the sermons and this one carries the entry: the Adam-God doctrine, blood atonement, plural marriage, the Word of Wisdom and Lamanites and Indian relations.
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