“What Is Zion?” Liahona, June 2021
Come, Follow Me
What Is Zion?
June 7–20
At various times in the Doctrine and Covenants, the word Zion is used to designate a physical gathering place for the Saints (the city of Zion, for example) or as an identifier of the Lord’s people—“the pure in heart” (Doctrine and Covenants 97:21). Knowing more about these different definitions can enhance our understanding of where Zion is and who inhabits it.
The City of Zion
Through the Prophet Joseph Smith, the Lord asked the Latter-day Saints in 1831 to gather and build Zion in Independence, Missouri (see Doctrine and Covenants 62:2–4; 63:24–48). Here are some descriptions of it at the time:
It was in a region containing only “two or three merchant stores, and fifteen or twenty dwelling houses, built mostly of logs hewed on both sides.”1
Another described Independence as “full of promise” but containing only “five or six rough log huts, two or three clapboard houses, two or three so-called hotels, alias grogshops; [and] a few stores.”2
Eliza Lyman described how little her family had after moving there: “We … occupied a small brick house which my father had rented for the winter, as he had not yet had time to build. We lived very poor that winter, as the people of that country did not want much but corn bread [and] bacon and raised but very little of anything else; consequently there was but very little to be bought, but I remember we had a barrel of honey and what vegetables we could get, but no wheat bread, as wheat was not to be bought in the land.”3
From these humble beginnings, the Saints built a bustling community of 1,200 individuals by July 1833. However, later that fall, mobs expelled them from the county and then, in 1838, from the entire state of Missouri.