# Brigham Young *1801–1877* **Brigham Young** (1801–1877) was the second president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the architect of the Mormon migration to the Great Basin, and the founding governor of Utah Territory. As the organizing genius behind the settlement of the American West, he directed the colonization of more than 300 towns, established institutions of commerce and education, and shaped a distinctive religious civilization from the desert floor. Born in Whitingham, Vermont, Young converted to the restored church in 1832 after years of searching among the Methodist and Reformed faiths. He rose quickly through the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, led the harrowing evacuation of Nauvoo following Joseph Smith’s martyrdom in 1844, and guided an exodus of tens of thousands across the plains to the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. As church president for thirty years, he presided over the construction of the Salt Lake Temple, founded the University of Deseret, championed the Perpetual Emigration Fund to gather converts from Europe, and negotiated—not always successfully—the church’s uneasy relationship with the federal government. What the historical record reveals, and what Young’s own sermons confirm at every turn, is a mind constitutionally unwilling to divide the sacred from the natural. He taught that God operates by law, that miracles are simply “results or effects of causes hidden from our understandings,” and that every discovery in science and art has been “given by direct revelation from God.” The telegraph, the steam engine, the plow—all were, in his view, eternal principles progressively disclosed to a humanity climbing upward from its infancy. Science and religion were not rivals in his theology but two names for the same structured reality: “there is no true religion without true science, and consequently there is no true science without true religion.” This integration carried moral weight. Young urged the Saints to become a *thinking* people, warning against the spiritual danger of surrendering judgment to leaders rather than seeking personal revelation—a remarkable insistence on epistemic independence from a man who wielded considerable institutional authority. His vision of human destiny was correspondingly expansive. He affirmed that God “was once a man in mortal flesh as we are” and that humanity is “organized to become Gods,” called to exercise creative authority over matter across eternal worlds. He taught that identity—the preservation of the self through resurrection and exaltation—is “the greatest gift that God can bestow,” and he framed mortality as the school in which that self is forged through trial, independent thought, and disciplined living. His counsel to “prepare to live” rather than merely to die, and to extend healthy life by understanding natural law, anticipates a tradition of practical, body-affirming faith that takes seriously both the present body and its glorified future. Young remains a towering, complicated figure whose earthly administration included serious moral failures; yet his theological instinct—that intelligence, technology, and theosis belong to a single continuous story—endures as one of the most generative ideas in the Latter-day Saint tradition. ## Quotations - What a pity it would be if we were led… - How easy it would be for your leaders to lead… - I do not wish any Latter-day Saint in this world… - The origin of life whether human or inferior, must be… - Be wise: be as wise as the generations of this… - [For] the intelligence that is in me to cease to exist… - You have the words of eternal life in your possession. - You believe Adam was made of the dust of this… - I have heard ministers of the gospel declare that they… - The idea that the religion of Christ is one thing,… - It is my highest delight and pleasure to serve God… - Our religion embraces chemistry; it embraces all the knowledge of… - We talk to the Latter-day Saints a great deal, and… - Now about the rib: as for the Lord taking a… - Should the Lord Almighty send an angel to re-write the… - If the days of man are to begin to return,… - Every discovery in science and art, that is really true… - My religion is natural philosophy. - Yet I will say with regard to miracles, there is… - You may go to some people here, and ask what ails them, and they answer