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Latter Day Saints trace their religious heritage through Joseph Smith, Jr., who claimed to have restored the original " Church of Christ", which, he asserted, had disappeared from the earth after a period of apostasy. Latter Day Saints consider themselves to be " saints" in the original sense of the word, meaning members of the original Christian church established in the First Century, AD.
Latter Day Saints are sometimes referred to as Mormons (a nickname taken from the title of the Book of Mormon). The dwarfing dominance of the LDS church in the Latter Day Saint movement and significant differences of doctrine and practice between it and the next largest branch ( Community of Christ), have led to the terms Mormon (as a noun or adjective) and Mormonism being generally understood as applying only to the LDS church, or less so to its 20th century schisms. The leaders of the LDS Church have strongly preferred applying the term solely to the LDS Church while at the same time encouraging the increased use of historic self-designations such as "Latter-day Saints", "Saints", "LDS", "LDS Church", and "Church of Jesus Christ" instead of Mormon. (See [1]). Though the use of "Mormon" to describe the church and its members was once a pejorative reference to the isolated [polygamy|polygamist] church of Utah, it has generally lost that sense for most people, and nearly all Latter Day Saints today renounce polygamy.