Mormonism
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49 free Mormonism trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Mormonism began with a teenage farm boy in western New York who said God told him every existing church was wrong. Two centuries on, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints counts more than 17 million members, over 200 temples and 109,000 missionaries, and the faith's history reads like an American epic: golden plates on a hill near Palmyra, a tar-and-feathering in Ohio, an extermination order in Missouri, a murder in an Illinois jail and a 1,300-mile exodus to a desert valley. These 49 questions cover the founding story and the church it built: the First Vision, the angel Moroni, the Three Witnesses, Kirtland and Nauvoo, the Nauvoo Expositor and Carthage, Brigham Young's 56 wives and 29-year presidency, the Salt Lake Temple's 40-year build, the Word of Wisdom's 'hot drinks', the 1890 Manifesto that ended plural marriage, the 1978 priesthood change and the choir that dropped 'Mormon' from its name in 2018. Every answer is cited to a page we checked and each explanation adds one more detail. Play it solo or print it for a study group.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Joseph Smith founded the movement during which period of American religious revival?
Second Great Awakening
Second Great Awakening. Rival preachers competing for converts around his home in western New York left the teenage Smith troubled over which denomination was right.
Q 02In which US state was Joseph Smith born in 1805?
Vermont
Vermont. A run of failed harvests drove his family west to Palmyra, New York, in 1816; Brigham Young was born in Vermont too.
Q 03In his First Vision at age 14, Joseph Smith said God told him to do what?
Join none of the churches
Join none of the churches. He said he had gone into the woods to pray over which sect was right and was told that all of them had strayed from the truth.
Q 04Witnesses said Joseph Smith dictated the Book of Mormon while looking at a seer stone placed in what?
A hat
A hat. He pressed his face into it to shut out the light and spoke the words aloud to a scribe, rather than reading directly from the plates.
Q 05Latter-day Saints call the New York hill where Smith said he dug up the golden plates by what name?
Cumorah
Cumorah. Smith said he was turned away on his first visit and had to come back to the hill on the same September day each year for four years before he could take the plates.
Q 06What did Joseph Smith say became of the golden plates after he finished translating them?
He returned them to the angel
He returned them to the angel. So nobody can examine them today, though witnesses who said they had handled them described thin metal leaves bound by three rings.
Q 07The Book of Mormon says it was written in which otherwise unknown script?
Reformed Egyptian
Reformed Egyptian. A follower took a copied sample of the characters to the Columbia scholar Charles Anthon, who later denied that he had ever vouched for them.
Q 08The Book of Mormon's story opens around 600 BC with which prophet leading his family out of Jerusalem?
Lehi
Lehi. Told in a dream to flee before the city is destroyed, he takes his family into the wilderness and on to the Americas by ship; his son Nephi narrates the journey.
Q 09Which prosperous neighbour helped pay for Joseph Smith's 1827 move to Pennsylvania?
Martin Harris
Martin Harris. He later borrowed the first 116 pages of the manuscript to win over his doubting wife and lost them, and that part of the book was never translated again.
Q 10Who were the Three Witnesses to the golden plates?
Cowdery, Harris and Whitmer
Cowdery, Harris and Whitmer. All three later broke with Smith and left his church, yet each was still affirming his testimony of the plates late in life.
Q 11How was the first printing of the Book of Mormon paid for in 1830?
A follower mortgaged his farm
A follower mortgaged his farm. Copies sold slowly around Palmyra at first, and he ended up selling off farmland to clear the $3,000 debt.
Q 12Which American author mocked the Book of Mormon as 'chloroform in print'?
Mark Twain
Mark Twain. He carried a copy away from Salt Lake City on his stagecoach journey west and reviewed it in Roughing It as 'such an insipid mess of inspiration'.
Q 13In which town did the Latter-day Saints dedicate their first temple in 1836?
Kirtland
Kirtland. Members built the Ohio temple with their own labour, and children collected broken china and crockery to be ground into the stucco on its walls.
Q 21Which of Joseph Smith's brothers was killed with him in 1844?
Hyrum
Hyrum. As assistant president he was the man many expected to lead the church next, so the same attack left it with no agreed successor.
Q 22After Joseph Smith's death in 1844, Brigham Young claimed leadership of the church as head of which body?
Quorum of the Twelve
Quorum of the Twelve. Smith had named no clear successor, and Young persuaded most of the Saints in Nauvoo that the apostles should lead; three years later he was church president.
Q 23When Brigham Young's wagons reached the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, which country claimed the land?
Mexico
Mexico. The Saints had gone looking for a home beyond the borders of the United States, but within months the treaty ending the Mexican-American War handed the region to the US.
Q 14What did a mob do to Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon on 24 March 1832?
Tarred and feathered them
Tarred and feathered them. The mob pulled both men from their beds at night and beat them; Rigdon, dragged by his heels over frozen ground, was raving when Smith found him the next morning.
Q 15Governor Lilburn Boggs's 1838 'extermination order' was meant to drive the Mormons out of which state?
Missouri
Missouri. The order said Mormons 'must be exterminated or driven from the State', and it stayed on the books until another governor formally rescinded it in 1976.
Q 16By 1844 the Mormon river city of Nauvoo had grown to rival which other city in size?
Chicago
Chicago. Smith's followers had bought swampy Mississippi bottomland around a village called Commerce only five years earlier; two years later most of them were gone.
Q 17As head of the Nauvoo Legion, Joseph Smith took the rank of lieutenant general, last held in the US Army by whom?
George Washington
George Washington. Illinois let the city raise its own militia, and once its first mayor was expelled from the church Smith was mayor and commanding general at once.
Q 18Which newspaper's press did Joseph Smith and his city council order destroyed in June 1844?
Nauvoo Expositor
Nauvoo Expositor. Its only issue, put out by former followers, accused Smith of secretly practising polygamy, and wrecking the press brought the charges that put him in jail.
Q 19In which Illinois town's jail was Joseph Smith killed by a mob in 1844?
Carthage
Carthage. He was awaiting trial on a treason charge when an armed mob stormed the jail; shot as he reached an upstairs window, he fell to the ground outside.
Q 20What office was Joseph Smith campaigning for at the time of his death?
The US presidency
The US presidency. He ran after five likely candidates would not promise to protect his followers, on a platform that included freeing enslaved people with money from federal land sales.
Q 24On first seeing the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, Brigham Young is said to have declared what?
This is the right place
This is the right place. Laid low by mountain fever, the leader of the trek reached the valley on 24 July, days behind his own advance party; the date is still a state holiday, Pioneer Day.
Q 25Which nickname likens Brigham Young to a biblical leader?
American Moses
American Moses. It fits a man who led his people across a wilderness to a promised land of their own; his other nickname was the Lion of the Lord.
Q 26Brigham Young was the first governor of which territory?
Utah
Utah. Congress turned down the settlers' own proposed state and made a territory instead, and full statehood then waited until 1896, after the church had given up polygamy.
Q 27The 1857 killing of the Baker–Fancher wagon train by Mormon militia is known by what name?
Mountain Meadows Massacre
Mountain Meadows Massacre. The emigrants gave up their guns to militiamen who came under a white flag, and about 120 were then killed; only one man, John D. Lee, was ever tried for it.
Q 28The Salt Lake Temple took 40 years to build; why were its foundations buried in 1858?
To hide them from the Army
To hide them from the Army. With federal troops approaching, the Saints covered the site to look like a ploughed field; when it was dug out again, damaged stone had to be replaced.
Q 29Pioneer tradition says which birds saved the Saints' 1848 crops in the Salt Lake Valley by devouring swarms of crickets?
Seagulls
Seagulls. Farmers at first feared the flocks were a second plague, then watched them gorge on crickets, drink, bring up the husks and come back for more; the story became the miracle of the gulls.
Q 30Whose statue stands atop the Salt Lake Temple's central east spire?
The angel Moroni
The angel Moroni. The gilded copper figure with a trumpet went up in 1892, and statues of the same angel now top most of the church's temples.