Mormon Doctrine

The church of the devil

The first edition named the Catholic Church. The second edition named nobody. Both passages, side by side.

Church of the Devil is the entry that got Mormon Doctrine into trouble. In the 1958 first edition it identified the great and abominable church of Nephi's vision with a living institution, by name, in a sentence of one line. Six other entries in that edition pointed at it. In the 1966 second edition the sentence is gone and so are the six.

What the first edition said

The passage sits in the middle of the entry, after a list of Book of Mormon references to conditions in the last days.

It is also to the Book of Mormon to which we turn for the plainest description of the Catholic Church as the great and abominable church.

Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, “Church of the Devil”, 1958 first edition, p. 130

The paragraphs around it went further. The murders and persecutions Nephi saw were described as things that “historically have been part of this satanic organization”. John's vision in Revelation 17 was read as showing the church “ruling from Rome, the city built on ‘seven mountains’”. And the entry closed on a piece of Cold War prophecy — that “the contentions and entanglements between the Catholic Church and the communist forces could well lead to a fulfilment of this prediction.”

Elsewhere in the same edition, the entry headed Catholicism consisted of four words: See Church of the Devil. Mariolatry, Supererogation, Indulgences, Transubstantiation and Penance each carried a full entry, and each cross-referenced back here. All six were deleted in 1966.

What the second edition says

The same paragraph, in the printing this site indexes, reads:

Nephi saw the “church which is most abominable above all other churches” in vision.

Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, “Church of the Devil”, 1966 second edition, p. 100

No church is named anywhere in the revised entry. In its place the opening paragraph offers a definition broad enough to be about nobody in particular — and, read plainly, broad enough to be about almost everybody.

The titles church of the devil and great and abominable church are used to identify all churches or organizations of whatever name or nature — whether political, philosophical, educational, economic, social, fraternal, civic, or religious — which are designed to take men on a course that leads away from God and his laws and thus from salvation in the kingdom of God.

Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, “Church of the Devil”, 1966 second edition, p. 100

What the revision did not touch is the exclusivity underneath. The entry still holds that “there is no salvation outside this one true Church”, and it still ends on the four-part test from 3 Nephi 27 by which a reader is invited to sort one church from every other.

Where it stands

The reading that identifies the great and abominable church with any single denomination has been argued against in the church's own magazine. In the Ensign of January 1988, Stephen E. Robinson — then chairman of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University — set out the case that the identification does not survive its own chronology, since Roman Catholicism as an institution did not exist when the events Nephi describes were taking place.

No single known historical church, denomination, or set of believers meets all the requirements for the great and abominable church.

Stephen E. Robinson, “Warring against the Saints of God”, Ensign, January 1988

That article is now the reading carried in Latter-day Saint curriculum. The 1958 sentence has no standing at all: it was removed by its own author, at the direction of the First Presidency, from a book that never carried the church's endorsement in the first place. It is quoted here because it was printed, sold and read for eight years, and because people still quote it — usually without knowing which edition they are holding.