Two Names at Once: Religious and Legal Naming
Both surviving branches of this tradition have changed their public, religious name more than once. Separately, and on a different schedule, the LDS Church operated for most of the 20th century under legal and corporate names that were not the church's religious name at all. That structure had real consequences for who could be sued, fired, and held liable, and for what.
This entry tracks both threads side by side: what each church called itself in worship and public identity, and what its actual legal person was called in courtrooms, filings, and contracts, at the same points in time.
A church can have one name it prays under and a different name it gets sued under. For most of a century, this one did — and the gap between the two was not an accident of paperwork, but a structure with real legal consequences.
Names at a glance
| Period | LDS religious name | LDS legal/corporate name | RLDS / Community of Christ |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1830–1834 | The Church of Christ | — | — |
| 1834–1838 | The Church of the Latter Day Saints | — | — |
| 1838–1916 | The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints | Trustee-in-trust (church president, personally) | — |
| 1860–1872 | — | — | The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (same name as LDS Church) |
| 1872–2001 | — | — | Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS) |
| 1916–2019 | The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints | Corporation of the Presiding Bishop and Corporation of the President (separate legal entities) | — |
| 2001–present | The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints | CPB / COP, then merged 2019 | Community of Christ (RLDS retained as legal name) |
| 2018–present | Full name only; "Mormon" and "LDS" discouraged informally | — | — |
| 2019–present | The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints | The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (legal name now matches religious name) | — |
Chronology
The Church of Christ
Organized formally in western New York, the name follows the Book of Mormon's own account of what Christ's church should be called (3 Nephi 27:8). This is the name recorded in the earliest revelations (D&C 20:1, D&C 21:11) and the 1833 Book of Commandments.
The Church of the Latter Day Saints
Adopted by unanimous conference vote on a motion made by Joseph Smith. The name drops "Christ" entirely. A contested claim, raised by later critics and not accepted by the church, holds the change was timed to coincide with a headquarters relocation, functioning partly to frustrate creditors pursuing the church's debts.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints
Announced at Far West, Missouri, via a revelation recorded as Doctrine and Covenants 115:4, the only one of the church's name changes attributed to direct revelation rather than a conference vote. It combines elements of both prior names. This name holds for the church's religious identity from 1838 forward, with the hyphenated, lowercase "Latter-day Saints" adopted later as a style convention rather than a renaming.
Reorganization, same name
At the Amboy, Illinois conference, Joseph Smith III accepts leadership of the reorganizing body, under the identical legal name the Utah church was already using: "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints." Two distinct organizations share one name for roughly the next twelve years.
"Reorganized" is added
The word is appended specifically to distinguish the Illinois/Missouri church from the Utah church, at a moment when the Utah church faced escalating federal scrutiny over plural marriage. See Polygamy and the Temple. "RLDS" holds as the church's name for the following 129 years.
The corporation splits from the church
Under President Heber J. Grant and Presiding Bishop Charles Nibley, both former businessmen, church operations formerly managed by the trustee-in-trust (the church president, holding property personally) are divided across separate corporate entities. The Corporation of the Presiding Bishop (CPB) is created in 1916 to manage charitable donations and buildings. The Corporation of the President (COP) follows in 1923, overseeing all other church assets used for religious purposes. A third entity, Zion Securities Corporation, manages taxable, non-ecclesiastical property.
From this point forward, the institution acts in a legal capacity, signing contracts, holding title to meetinghouses and temples, appearing in court, as one of these corporations. Neither is named "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."
Separating charitable/building assets (CPB) from religious-purpose assets (COP) and taxable business holdings (Zion Securities) is a standard nonprofit and religious-corporation technique: it limits which assets are exposed if a specific entity is sued, and allows different governance and liability rules to apply to different categories of church property. A plaintiff suing over an incident at a church-owned gymnasium, hospital, or business sues a specific corporation with a specific, bounded set of assets, not the whole of "the church" and everything it owns.
Corporation of the Presiding Bishop v. Amos
Arthur Frank Mayson, a building engineer at the church-operated Deseret Gymnasium in Salt Lake City, is fired in 1981 after failing to qualify for a temple recommend. See What a Temple Is. Mayson sues under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, arguing the religious-employer exemption from anti-discrimination law should not extend to a secular job like building maintenance. A federal district court agrees, finding the exemption unconstitutional as applied to non-religious activity.
The U.S. Supreme Court reverses, 9–0. Justice Byron White's majority opinion holds there is "ample room under [the Establishment] Clause for benevolent neutrality which will permit religious exercise to exist without sponsorship and without interference," and that Congress could rationally exempt religious organizations' nonprofit activities generally, without a case-by-case test of whether a given job was religious in character.
The named defendant throughout — trial court, appeal, and Supreme Court caption — is not "the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." It is the Corporation of the Presiding Bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The 1916 corporate split is why the case is captioned that way, and why the entity found immune from Title VII liability was a specific corporation rather than the religious institution as commonly understood.
Legal scholarship on church corporate structure (Nathan Oman, writing in the Journal of Law and Religion) treats entities like the CPB as an ordinary and well-precedented feature of American church-corporate law, not evidence the underlying religious community is somehow fictitious. Critics of the church have at times argued the opposite: that the corporate structure means "the church" in a colloquial sense has not existed as a single legal person since the early 20th century, and that what functions today is fundamentally a trademark and copyright held by corporate entities. Both readings agree on the underlying fact. The religious name and the legal name identified two different things for over a century.
Community of Christ
Adopted after two earlier attempts failed at church-wide votes in 1996 and 1998. "Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints" is deliberately retained as a legal name even after the public rename, specifically to prevent outside parties from registering or using it, a trademark-defensive posture functionally similar to the LDS Church's own approach to "Mormon."
Nelson's style directive
President Russell M. Nelson announces that "Mormon" and "LDS" should no longer be used to refer to the church, calling the full name "not negotiable" and describing the change as revelation. See Who Owns Mormon (chronology) and The -Ites for this event in full detail, including its relationship to Nelson's own 1990 address and Gordon B. Hinckley's reply.
The legal name and religious name merge
Nelson directs the merger of the Corporation of the Presiding Bishop and the Corporation of the President into a single legal corporation, formally renamed The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For the first time since 1916, the entity's legal name matches its religious one. The merger follows the 2018 style directive by roughly twelve months. Neither public statement references the other.
Reading the two threads together
The religious-name chronology and the legal-name chronology run on entirely different clocks, driven by entirely different pressures. Religious renamings, 1834, 1838, 1872, 2001, and the 2018 style directive, were each responses to a problem of identity: distancing the institution from a rival claimant, from a derogatory nickname, or from an association the leadership wanted to shed. The legal-name structure was built and maintained for a different reason: to manage which corporate entity, holding which bounded set of assets, would answer for a given liability.
The two threads converged only once, in 2019, and only partially. The 2019 merger consolidated the CPB and COP; it did not eliminate the broader practice of holding church assets, including, elsewhere on this site, funds routed through the Office of Risk Management's abuse help line, through structures designed to bound liability rather than expose the whole institution to it. See The Help Line: Theology, Statute, and Duty for that mechanism in detail.
Sources
- "Church of Christ (Latter Day Saints)," Wikipedia — on the 1830, 1834, and 1838 name changes.
- MormonThink, "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints: Origins of the name."
- FAIR, "Mormonism and church organization/Changes in the name of the Church."
- The Joseph Smith Papers, "Church of Christ" glossary topic — on D&C 20:1, D&C 21:11, and D&C 115:4.
- "Name of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints," Wikipedia.
- Beliefnet, "Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints Gets New Name," on the 2001 rename and the 1996/1998 failed votes.
- "History of the Community of Christ," Wikipedia — on the 1860 Amboy conference and the 1872 addition of "Reorganized."
- Wheat & Tares, "Still Claimed by a 'New' Name," April 6, 2021 — on RLDS retained as a legal/trademark name after 2001.
- Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, "Church Incorporation" and "Church Finances," churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics — on the 1916 CPB, 1923 COP, and 2019 merger.
- Corporation of the Presiding Bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints v. Amos, 483 U.S. 327 (1987), Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School.
- Nathan B. Oman, "'Established Agreeable to the Laws of Our Country': Mormonism, Church Corporations, and the Long Legacy of America's First Disestablishment," Journal of Law and Religion 36, no. 2 (2021): 202–29.
- By Common Consent, "Incorporated," April 30, 2021 — on corporations sole and critical readings of church corporate structure.