In the vast community of Christian churches and ministries, a tremendous range of beliefs and doctrines somehow manage to co-exist. Perhaps one of the strangest variants is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. In recent years the LDS Church has widely expanded its proselytizing initiative, sending scores of missionaries around the world to conduct aid missions and spread the word of their faith. A number of influential figures, including high-ranking senators and presidential hopefuls, have come out of this sect of Christianity, yet understanding of the origin and beliefs of this group is largely lacking in modern Americans, leading to a belief that Mormonism is not Christian.
Mormonism, which grew up in the United States in the 1800s, is just one of the several Christian movements to come out of the Second Great Awakening, a period of great expansion and revivalism of Christianity in the United States. The Second Great Awakening lasted from roughly 1820 to 1870 and marked the appearance of a new form of Christianity, one largely separate from Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant variants. It showed itself as different from previous iterations of Christianity by asserting itself as restorationism, or Christian primitivism. This version of Christianity wished to return the faith to the most basic state possible by emulating the early church of the 1st century.
Restorationism stressed that other denominations had lost the pure Christian model and that the only way to attain such a state again was to throw away all the derisive elements that had caused the endless schisms and splits that plague Christian thought. Restorationist leaders believed that these endless schisms were counterproductive and that at the core Christianity there were some beliefs that all denominations could agree upon. The Church of Latter Day Saints might have had one of the more unique ideas on how exactly this could take place.