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Every Latter-day Saint knows the date. Far fewer know why it is that date, and the honest answer has more open questions in it than most people expect.
What happened that day
On Tuesday 6 April 1830, a small group met and formally organised the Church of Christ, as it was then called. Joseph Smith was twenty-four.
The meeting included the sacrament, the ordaining of Joseph and Oliver Cowdery to their offices in the new organisation, and baptisms. Somewhere between thirty and sixty people were present; accounts differ, and only six were formal incorporators.
The revelation now printed as Doctrine and Covenants 20 was recorded in connection with the organisation. It opens: "The rise of the Church of Christ in these last days, being one thousand eight hundred and thirty years since the coming of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in the flesh, it being regularly organised and established agreeable to the laws of our country, by the will and commandments of God, in the fourth month, and on the sixth day of the month which is called April."
That sentence is the centre of everything argued about below. Read one way it is a date. Read another way it is a claim about the calendar.
Where, and why that is argued about
The traditional site is the Peter Whitmer log home at Fayette, New York, and that is where the Church has long commemorated it.
Some historians have made a case for the Smith family farm at Manchester instead, on the grounds that several early accounts point that way and that Fayette becomes the settled answer only later. The argument turns on the reliability of reminiscences written down decades afterwards.
It is a genuine historical question and not a settled one. It also does not affect the date, which nobody disputes.
The six members
The figure of six is the one detail almost everyone remembers, and the reason usually given for it is shakier than the figure itself.
It is commonly said that New York law required six people to incorporate a religious society. Historians who have gone looking for that requirement in the statute have not found it in the form usually stated, and the point is now treated with caution.
What is certain is that six men were named as the organising members. Others present were baptised that day or soon after, and the congregation was larger than six from the start.
Did anyone choose the date?
This is the question underneath the question, and the sources do not answer it directly.
The plain reading is that the Church was organised when it was ready to be. The Book of Mormon had gone on sale eleven days earlier, on 26 March. The organisation followed as soon as the book existed and people could be gathered.
There is no recorded instruction naming 6 April in advance. Doctrine and Covenants 21, given at the organisation, refers to the day but does not explain the choice of it.
So the straightforward account is: the book came out, a meeting was arranged, and it happened on the first convenient Tuesday. That is unremarkable, and it may well be all there is to it.
The birthday tradition
A second account grew up alongside it, and it is widely held.
On this reading, the phrase in D&C 20:1 — "one thousand eight hundred and thirty years since the coming of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in the flesh" — is not a loose way of saying "in the year 1830". It is a precise statement that the day itself marked exactly 1,830 years since the birth of Christ. On that reading, 6 April is the anniversary of the Nativity, and the organisation was deliberately placed on it.
James E. Talmage argued this in Jesus the Christ, and the view was repeated by later apostles including Harold B. Lee and Bruce R. McConkie. It has been taught in Church manuals and is familiar to most members.
President Russell M. Nelson's bicentennial proclamation, read in April 2020, was issued on the 6th and connected explicitly to the founding anniversary, though it did not make a claim about the Nativity.
The case against it
The counter-argument is not obscure and it has been made by Latter-day Saint scholars, not only by outsiders.
First, the phrasing. Dating documents by the year of Our Lord was ordinary nineteenth-century usage. "Being one thousand eight hundred and thirty years since the coming of our Lord" reads naturally as a formal way of writing 1830, of a piece with the legal language elsewhere in the same sentence about the laws of our country.
Second, the arithmetic does not survive contact with the evidence. A birth on 6 April in the year 1 requires Herod the Great to have been alive then, and Herod died in or around 4 BC. If Jesus was born before Herod's death, as Matthew requires, the year cannot be 1, and an exact 1,830-year count from it does not work. That problem is set out in when was Jesus actually born.
Third, there is no contemporary record of anyone in 1830 understanding the date that way. The interpretation appears later.
Fourth, and most simply: the Church has never made it a matter of doctrine. It is a widely held view held by prominent leaders. That is not the same thing as an official position, and Church materials in recent years have tended to describe the birth date as unknown.
Where it stands
Two things are true at once, and it is worth holding both.
6 April 1830 is a firm date. It is recorded in scripture, it was recorded at the time, and nothing about it is in doubt.
Why it fell on that day is not established. It may be that a meeting was arranged as soon as the book was printed. It may be that the day was chosen for the reason tradition gives. The sources from 1830 do not say, and the interpretation of D&C 20:1 that would settle it is exactly the thing in dispute.
On this site the founding appears as a fixed date, because it is one. The birthday reading appears as what it is: a long-held interpretation, attributed, and not presented as settled.
That is the same rule applied everywhere here. Show the source, and show the doubt. A tradition held by good people for a century deserves to be reported accurately, which means reporting that it is a tradition.
The run-up to the date is in the Restoration decade, 1820 to 1830, in order.