According to the Mormon church, their prophet, Joseph Smith, had the most marvelous theophany in the world’s history since Christ’s Resurrection. Their current prophet, the President of the Mormon church, holds the divine keys directly from Joseph Smith; and Smith received his authority from his First Vision. Said Prophet Gordon B. Hinckley in 2005: “This grand theophany is, in my judgment, the greatest such event since the birth, life, death, and Resurrection of our Lord in the meridian of time. We have no record of any other event to equal it." This miraculous revelation was especially supernatural because the biblical prophets were only visited by one person of the Trinity; however, in Joseph Smith’s First Vision, both God the Father and God the Son appeared to him personally.
Despite the earth-shattering importance of this First Vision, Smith only mentioned it years later in several inconsistent and evolving accounts. However, the central teaching of the First Vision was that all other Christian churches had apostatized and that God anointed Smith to found “the one true church.”
For example, According to President Henry B. Eyring, First Counselor in the First Presidency:
“This is the true Church, the only true Church, because in it are the keys of the priesthood. Only in this Church has the Lord lodged the power to seal on earth and to seal in heaven as He did in the time of the Apostle Peter. Those keys were restored to Joseph Smith, who then was authorized to confer them upon the members of the Quorum of the Twelve.”
In other words, the current president/prophet of the Mormon church derives his divine authority directly from the keys “restored to Joseph Smith” directly from God the Father and Christ the Son during this First Vision, certifying the truth that all other Christian churches became heretical and that Mormonism is the one and only true church. This is the origin of Mormon’s “special” doctrines such as celestial marriages, polygamous marriages, that men could evolve into gods, and that the current Mormon President gets revelations, (like the 1970s revelation abandoning divine support for racial segregation in the highest Mormon caste of priests).
Since the founding of the Mormon church, historical Christian churches considered the Mormon church to be a sect and its reputed founder and prophet a charlatan. In fact, the Mormons would like Americans to forget that in 1856 the Republican Party’s platform condemned both slavery and polygamy; and that only after the U.S. Army fought a war with the Mormons did the current Mormon prophet get a revelation recommending that Mormons abandon polygamy. Thus, for decades, the Mormon church has struggled to present itself as part of "regular" Christianity, part of the mainstream. In America, nothing succeeds like success, and by all statistical measures, the Mormon church and Mormons have been a success. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has certainly been a financial success and winning the presidency will win the ultimate prize in respectability--on a par with the first mulatto president.
Thus, one tends to forget that while Christendom held its nose at the birth of Mormonism, Mormonism came into existence predicated on the belief that all of Christendom was polluted with the stench of apostasy and that Joseph Smith founded the "only true Church."
Indeed, the highest authorities in the Latter-day Saints (LDS) Church currently claim that all the other evangelical and Catholic churches have lapsed into apostasy and that their church is the "only true church."
The Mormon church is a fantastic case study in how and why millions of people today could come to believe that what the vast majority of Americans in the 1830s considered to be a ludicrous and dangerous masquerade was actually the true church sealed by the keys of a special priesthood as restored to Joseph Smith.
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