"It was seldom that I attended any religious meetings, as my parents had not much faith in and were never so unfortunate as to unite themselves with any of the religious sects"
About this Quote
A memory of scarce churchgoing becomes a verdict on the sectarian tumult that surrounded Orson Pratt’s youth. Growing up in upstate New York during the Second Great Awakening, he lived amid camp meetings, fiery sermons, and proliferating denominations that earned the region the name Burned-over District. Calling affiliation with a sect “so unfortunate” turns the usual assumption on its head. Instead of seeing membership as a spiritual safeguard, he treats it as a misstep, implying that the competing creeds offered confusion rather than truth.
The phrasing carries irony and distance. “Seldom attended” suggests not only a lack of habit but a deliberate stance inherited from parents who “had not much faith” in organized bodies. That detachment becomes a source of luck, preserving him from the partisan loyalties and prejudices that, in his view, clouded judgment. Later, as a Latter-day Saint apostle and one of the movement’s most articulate defenders, Pratt would champion the Restoration’s claim to transcend sectarianism through new revelation. Joseph Smith’s message that the churches were divided and corrupted harmonized with the anti-sectarian sensibility he learned at home.
The sentence also reveals a broader cultural tension of early American religion: energetic voluntarism generating both spiritual fervor and anxiety about fragmentation. By speaking of “religious sects,” Pratt adopts the pejorative vocabulary common among early Latter-day Saints, who rejected denominational labels in favor of a singular, restored church. His memory positions him as an uncommitted seeker when he encountered Mormonism in 1830, free to evaluate its claims without inherited allegiance.
Read this way, the line is part autobiography, part polemic. It sketches a childhood shaped by skepticism toward institutional religion while foreshadowing the conviction that only a divine restoration could cut through the Babel of sects. The misfortune, for Pratt, was not unbelief but settling for a faction when one could wait for truth revealed anew.
The phrasing carries irony and distance. “Seldom attended” suggests not only a lack of habit but a deliberate stance inherited from parents who “had not much faith” in organized bodies. That detachment becomes a source of luck, preserving him from the partisan loyalties and prejudices that, in his view, clouded judgment. Later, as a Latter-day Saint apostle and one of the movement’s most articulate defenders, Pratt would champion the Restoration’s claim to transcend sectarianism through new revelation. Joseph Smith’s message that the churches were divided and corrupted harmonized with the anti-sectarian sensibility he learned at home.
The sentence also reveals a broader cultural tension of early American religion: energetic voluntarism generating both spiritual fervor and anxiety about fragmentation. By speaking of “religious sects,” Pratt adopts the pejorative vocabulary common among early Latter-day Saints, who rejected denominational labels in favor of a singular, restored church. His memory positions him as an uncommitted seeker when he encountered Mormonism in 1830, free to evaluate its claims without inherited allegiance.
Read this way, the line is part autobiography, part polemic. It sketches a childhood shaped by skepticism toward institutional religion while foreshadowing the conviction that only a divine restoration could cut through the Babel of sects. The misfortune, for Pratt, was not unbelief but settling for a faction when one could wait for truth revealed anew.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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