The LDS Church is one of many religions that were begun in the United States. A quick survey of other religious buildings within a walk of Baldwin Park will show that religious movements pop up all the time. The next series of photos will show some institutions that Philadelphians have walked past  that, like the LDS, have relatively recent origins. The religion itself is in bold font. The birth is the year generally accepted as the start of the religion. The worldwide estimate of membership is the generally accepted number.

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First, however, a word about the word "religion." The difference between a cult and a religion is nebulous. Jim Jones founded the People's Temple in 1954 and the religion exterminated itself by mass suicide in Guyana in 1978. The General Association of Davidian Seventh-Day Adventists, founded in 1955 in southern California, was taken over by David Koresh in 1981 and likewise self-extinguished in a fire in Waco, Texas, in 1993. Marshall Applewhite founded Heaven's Gate in 1974 and annihilated the membership by a mass suicide in 1997 as Comet Hale-Bopp approached to pick them up. Many commentators will regard these three as cults. Pairs of young LDS members on their two-year missions are not allowed to search the internet, and they must always be in one another's presence. Social and information isolation are tools of cults, as is group shunning of apostates. Some organizations, although having achieved tax-exempt status as a religion, are still considered business ventures, cults, or outright scams. The reader is left to decide which of the following fit into which categories.