mormonsphere
Index/The -Ites
a taxonomy · updated continuously

The -Ites

The Book of Mormon tells a single repeating story: a people warned against naming itself after its own factions, doing so anyway, and fracturing as a result. Nephites and Lamanites divide the text's central conflict. Smaller schisms, Amlicites, Zoramites, Amalekites, appear, gather around a leader, and dissolve or destroy themselves.

This page treats that pattern as a working description rather than an ancient curiosity. It has recurred at every fracture point in the tradition's real history, most visibly in 1844, and again, informally, in the present.

"Now there was not a whole soul among all the people... they were divided into classes... this was the cause of...their contentions... one against another."

Paraphrased from Alma's account of Zoramite division, Book of Mormon
Within the text

The canonical -ites

The Book of Mormon's narrators use "-ite" naming as a diagnostic. A group taking a leader's name, rather than a shared covenant name, is consistently framed in the text as a people already coming apart.

NephiteNamed for: Nephi, son of Lehi. The text's primary "faithful" lineage, though the label covers centuries of internal variation.
LamaniteNamed for: Laman, Nephi's elder brother. The text's primary rival lineage; used broadly enough to include groups with little direct connection to Laman himself.
AmliciteNamed for: Amlici, who sought to be made king and led a breakaway faction (Alma 2).
ZoramiteNamed for: Zoram, whose followers are described as departing from established worship practice (Alma 31).
Amalekite / AmuloniteNamed for: Amalekites and followers of Amulon, groups repeatedly described as antagonistic to the text's central religious claims.
1844–47

The succession schism

Joseph Smith was killed on June 27, 1844, without an unambiguous successor in place. Within three years the movement split into several competing organizations, each generally known, then and now, by the surname of the leader its members followed.

BrighamiteNamed for: Brigham Young, who led the largest faction west to Utah. Became, in effect, the mainstream LDS Church; the label itself fell out of common use as that church became simply "Mormon."
JosephiteNamed for: Joseph Smith III, the founder's son, who led what became the Reorganized Church, today's Community of Christ.
RigdoniteNamed for: Sidney Rigdon, a member of Smith's First Presidency who argued the church needed a "guardian" rather than a new prophet, and organized a rival church based in Pittsburgh.
StrangiteNamed for: James J. Strang, who produced a disputed letter of appointment and his own new scripture. A small Strangite church still exists today.
CutleriteNamed for: Alpheus Cutler, whose small following organized a distinct church in Independence, Missouri.
HedrickiteNamed for: Granville Hedrick, leader of the group that became the Church of Christ (Temple Lot), the only 1844-schism church to hold physical possession of Joseph Smith's original 1831 temple site, the subject of a five-year federal lawsuit against the RLDS Church that ended without a clear winner.
WhitmeriteNamed for: David Whitmer, one of the Three Witnesses to the Book of Mormon. This branch did not survive into the modern era.
1984 · 2000

Splits of a split

The pattern does not stop at one generation. One of the 1844 branches — the RLDS Church, today Community of Christ — produced its own major schism 140 years later, when a single recurring scriptural phrase, "all are called according to the gifts of God unto them," was applied to ordination regardless of sex. That schism then split again, sixteen years later, over how far back the line of legitimate authority should be drawn. The same phrase would be invoked twice more in the following decades, for different questions of access. See Race, Temple Access, and "All Are Called."

Restoration BranchesFormed in response to: Wallace B. Smith's April 1984 revelation calling for the ordination of women, canonized as Section 156. Independent congregations, no central authority, membership estimated between 10,000 and 40,000. See Restoration Branches & the Remnant Church.
Remnant ChurchNamed for: no single leader, though led from 2002 by Frederick N. Larsen, a documented descendant of Joseph Smith III. Formed April 6, 2000 from within the Restoration Branches movement, rejecting not only the 1984 ordination revelation but all RLDS revelation after the presidency of Israel A. Smith. Some members hold Larsen fulfilled an 1832 Smith prophecy naming a coming figure "one mighty and strong."
1990 · 2010–2018 · 2018

A dispute over the root word itself

The pattern above concerns naming factions after leaders. A related, later dispute concerns something more fundamental: whether "Mormon," the root word beneath every "-ite" this page catalogues, should be spoken at all. Two general conference addresses, six months apart in 1990, mark its documented beginning. A twenty-year, church-funded advertising campaign built on one man's resolution of the question follows. A fourth event, in 2018, reverses course with the authority of a sitting church president.

April 1990Elder Russell M. Nelson, then a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, delivers "Thus Shall My Church Be Called," citing Doctrine and Covenants 115:4 and calling "Mormon" "not an appropriate alternative" to the church's full name.
October 1990President Gordon B. Hinckley, then First Counselor in the First Presidency, opens his address by name-checking Nelson's talk directly: "Six months ago in our conference Elder Russell M. Nelson delivered an excellent address on the correct name of the Church... I commend to you a rereading of his talk." He states plainly that the church will likely never convert the world to the full name, and offers an alternative: "Mormon should mean more good." He traces the phrase to a missionary companion decades earlier who told him the effort was futile, "I've quit trying," and adopts that companion's resignation as his own public position.
2010–2018"I'm a Mormon", a worldwide media campaign commissioned by President Thomas S. Monson and produced by the church-owned firm Bonneville Communications, launches in 2010, two years after Hinckley's death, with television spots, billboards, and bus ads across the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia, reportedly at a cost approaching $300 million. Church materials promoting the campaign explicitly cite Hinckley's 1990 motto as their operating philosophy. In 2014, the church releases Meet the Mormons, a feature-length documentary profiling six members, widely described in coverage of the film as an extension of the same campaign. The campaign runs for eighteen years, ending only in 2018.
October 2018President Russell M. Nelson, now serving as prophet-president, returns to the same D&C passage in "The Correct Name of the Church" and states: "To remove the Lord's name from the Lord's Church is a major victory for Satan." He calls the church's full name "not negotiable" and directs members, media, and the church itself to stop using "Mormon" as an institutional name. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir is renamed within days; mormon.org is retired.
What the record shows

Both 1990 addresses cite the identical scriptural passage. Both call it a matter of real consequence rather than mere style. Hinckley advises members to reclaim and redeem a nickname he considers permanent. Nelson, in 1990 and again in 2018, calls for its elimination. Between those two Nelson addresses sits a twenty-eight-year gap in which the church did more than tolerate the word informally: it spent roughly two decades and a reported $300 million building a global advertising identity around it, explicitly grounded in Hinckley's own resolution of the question. Nelson's 2018 address does not reference the campaign, its cost, or its stated debt to Hinckley's talk.

1830–2026

What moved besides the name

Naming was not the only thing that shifted after 1844. The doctrine of God's own nature moved as well, in opposite directions, on the two largest branches of this schism, each branch treating its current position as continuous with the original revelation rather than a departure from it. Who was permitted to enter a temple, hold priesthood office, or be ordained moved on a separate but related track. See Race, Temple Access, and "All Are Called."

LDS ChurchDirection of movement: from language compatible with a single, undivided God in the 1830 Book of Mormon text toward a fully separate, embodied, formerly-mortal Godhead, formalized in the 1844 King Follett discourse. See The Shape of God, Part One.
Community of ChristDirection of movement: from a doctrine already rejecting LDS exaltation theology by the late 1930s, toward full institutional Trinitarianism, culminating in National Council of Churches membership in 2010. See The Shape of God, Part Two.
Access, both branchesDirection of movement: the LDS Church restricted both Black men and Black women from temple ordinances (not priesthood alone) from 1852 to 1978, the same year the territorial legislature that produced the priesthood restriction also legalized slavery; Community of Christ opened priesthood to Black members in 1865 and ordained women in 1984, citing the same "all are called" precedent named above. See Race, Temple Access, and "All Are Called" and Full Chronology.

On the name "Mormon"

Mormon is the prophet-editor credited within the Book of Mormon with compiling and abridging the record that bears his name. He is not a founder of any modern organization and stands outside the succession dispute the -ite pattern above describes. By the text's own account, he held sole editorial control over which prior records were quoted, summarized, or omitted. See Mormon: The Narrator's Position.

His name is the philological root of every term this index tracks: Mormon, Mormonism, Mormonite, and by extension the informal coinages listed here, naming the whole field without belonging to any faction within it.

Joseph Smith's own documented conduct — a failed bank founded on a claimed revelation, a translation independent Egyptology could not verify against its source text, and a newspaper press destroyed by his own mayoral order — is catalogued separately, on its own evidentiary terms, at Smith's Fruits: Conduct as Primary Evidence.

Read across a full page, the -ite pattern is a record of the same structural question asked repeatedly: who occupies the position of Speaker at a given moment, and who is left to decide whether the Room follows. See The Speaker and the Room for that structure named directly, and the Full Chronology for every date on this page set against the tradition's complete timeline.

Sources

  1. The Book of Mormon, Alma 2, Alma 31 (Amlicite and Zoramite accounts).
  2. "Succession Crisis (Latter Day Saints)," Wikipedia, citing Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (Knopf, 2005).
  3. "Rigdonite," Wikipedia, citing Messenger and Advocate, Jan. 1, 1845.
  4. "Death of a Mormon Prophet," By Common Consent, April 20, 2011 — on the six extant 1844-schism branches.
  5. Russell M. Nelson, "Thus Shall My Church Be Called," General Conference, April 1990.
  6. Gordon B. Hinckley, "Mormon Should Mean More Good," General Conference, October 1990, excerpted at margiesmessages.com.
  7. Church News, "'Mormon' name can bring luster, honor to Church," October 13, 1990.
  8. Deseret News, "Pres. Hinckley urges members to live so that 'more good' will shine from church's nickname," October 8, 1990.
  9. Russell M. Nelson, "The Correct Name of the Church," General Conference, October 2018, churchofjesuschrist.org.
  10. The Salt Lake Tribune, "Members 'offend' Jesus and please the devil when they use the term 'Mormon,' President Nelson says," October 7, 2018.
  11. "I'm a Mormon," Wikipedia — on the 2010–2018 campaign dates, cities, and executive director.
  12. Church Newsroom, "'I'm a Mormon' Campaign," churchofjesuschrist.org — on television, billboard, and bus advertising and the mormon.org platform.
  13. LDS Discussions, "Rebranding Revelation: Russell M. Nelson and the Word 'Mormon'" — on the campaign's explicit citation of Hinckley's "more good" motto.
  14. Deseret News, "'Meet the Mormons' takes 'I'm a Mormon' campaign to feature lengths," October 9, 2014.
  15. Faithwashed, "The Mormon-to-LDS Rebrand Through Free Labor & Influencer Campaigns" — on the campaign's commissioning under President Thomas S. Monson and reported cost.
  16. World Religions and Spirituality Project, "Community of Christ" — on the 1984 schism and the Restoration Branches movement.
  17. "Restoration branches" and "Remnant Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints," Wikipedia.
  18. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, "King Follett Discourse," churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics.
  19. "Comparison of the Community of Christ and the LDS Church," Wikipedia — on Trinity doctrine and Elbert A. Smith's tenure.
  20. Stephen J. Bedard, "Community of Christ and the National Council of Churches."
  21. Community of Christ, The Priesthood Manual, 2004 edition — on D&C 119:8b, "all are called."
  22. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Gospel Topics Essay, "Priesthood and Temple Restriction" — on the scope of the 1852–1978 restriction for both Black men and women.
  23. "Slavery in Utah," Utah Division of State History — on the 1852 territorial legalization of slavery.