Brigham Young

Young is the principal nineteenth-century institutional builder and second-generation systematizer of LDS theology after Joseph Smith; the Utah settlement and the surviving Mormon institutional structures are largely his work.

"This is the place." (1847, on first seeing the Salt Lake Valley)

Although the LDS Church is theologically distinct from confessional Protestantism, Young preserved the revival-evangelical preaching style and the Restorationist register he had received from Smith and from his pre-Mormon Methodist background.

"Preach the gospel of repentance and faith in Jesus Christ; preach it to the heart of every man." (Discourses of Brigham Young)

LDS theology's doctrine of human-divine continuity ("As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become") is one of the principal nineteenth-century religious sources for the transhumanist intuition of human deification; Young developed this strand of Smith's teaching most fully.

"As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be." (Lorenzo Snow couplet, drawing on Smith and Young)

Young's teaching of the priesthood-and-temple ban on Black men of African descent (instituted under his leadership in 1852; not lifted until 1978) is sharply opposed to the liberation-theological tradition's reading of God's identification with the oppressed.

"Cain slew Abel, and God put a mark upon him." (Discourses of Brigham Young, the 1852 teaching used to justify the priesthood ban)

Young, like Smith, repudiated the Reformed doctrines of total depravity, unconditional election, and the closed canon; the LDS movement defined itself in part against Reformed Protestantism.

"There are some doctrines preached as Bible truth that I am not prepared to swallow." (Discourses of Brigham Young, against creedal Reformed orthodoxy)