Last Days

The Last Days are the anticipated final period before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, when the faithful expect divine promises to be fulfilled and the existing order to give way. In the book, this expectation is not a single fixed timetable: it appears as a founding promise of Mormonism, a reason for preparing refuge and resources, and a means by which religious leaders demand obedience. When prophesied upheaval does not arrive, the delay can itself be explained as a test of the believers.## Scriptural FoundationsThe expectation of the Last Days is built into the founding story of Mormonism. Joseph Smith presented The Book of Mormon as a restoration of the true church and taught that his followers were the Lord’s chosen people, called to prepare the earth for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. The coming Millennium was therefore not a remote abstraction: Latter-day Saints were assigned a role in the events leading up to it. This sense of a divinely appointed future gave the community both a shared purpose and a sharp boundary between those understood to belong to God and those cast as opponents.The book’s stark moral division between the church of God and the church of the devil reinforced that boundary. Joseph Smith’s teaching of individual choice did not make the consequences of choosing seem morally neutral: those who knowingly rejected the Saints’ account of God’s plan were represented as undeserving of sympathy. In this framework, future judgment helped organize present identity. The faithful were not simply waiting for history to end; they believed their decisions and collective conduct were part of a sacred history approaching its climax.## Competing Claims to the FutureAfter the LDS Church rejected plural marriage and accommodated itself to American politics, Mormon Fundamentalists treated that change as a betrayal of revealed doctrine. They appealed especially to Section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants, while Section 85 supplied a further expectation: that one mighty and strong would come to set the house of God in order. Some fundamentalists believed this figure was already among them and would restore the church to what they regarded as its proper path. Their understanding of the Last Days thus became inseparable from a dispute over who had the authority to define true religious continuity.The expectation also intensified conflict over who could receive revelation. In the mainstream LDS Church, major revelations were supposed to come through its president; in fundamentalist communities, rival prophets claimed authority to interpret the same sacred past and announce what the approaching future required. Onias, a believer in the Dream Mine prophecy, came to regard himself as a prophet charged with warning church leaders. In late 1983, after bringing Onias together with several Lafferty brothers, Bernard Brady helped create a setting in which the group joined its religious and political convictions to an expectation of imminent change. The brothers helped print and send more than fifteen thousand pamphlets warning LDS leaders to confess their errors and yield control to the chosen prophet. To them, Onias’s message offered an ally in restoring the church and preparing for Christ’s return.The Last Days also shaped the group’s practical ambitions. After their break with the School of the Prophets and their unsuccessful effort to take control of the Dream Mine, Ron and Dan Lafferty continued to pursue a City of Refuge on land below it. On a western road trip, they sought support from prominent polygamists. At John W. Bryant’s commune, Ron preached about the refuge’s future role in the Last Days. These actions translated an expectation of catastrophe into a concrete project: the group sought a place and a community that, in its view, could endure the coming crisis.## Preparation, Control, and SurvivalThe Dream Mine offered an especially tangible version of preparation. Its founder, John Hyrum Koyle, said that the angel Moroni had shown him caverns filled with Nephite gold. The wealth, Koyle believed, would remain hidden until the Second Coming was imminent and the world’s great civilizations had collapsed into widespread strife. Then the gold would provide for the faithful. Koyle began digging in 1894 and investors bought shares, even though no gold had been found by the mid-1940s. In the logic of the prophecy, the absence of immediate results did not disprove the promise: the treasure was not supposed to emerge before the appointed crisis. LDS authorities rejected Koyle’s authority and eventually excommunicated him, but many followers continued to believe that the prediction would be fulfilled.Onias extended that expectation into a settlement plan. After buying shares in the mine, he said he received revelations directing him to acquire land at its base and build a City of Refuge where the righteous could shelter when the Last Days brought disaster. The proposed refuge joined prophecy to property and collective organization: survival depended not only on believing that the crisis would come, but also on preparing a place for those who believed they were meant to withstand it.In Colorado City, the expectation of deliverance could also support strict control over daily life. Under Rulon Jeffs, residents were forbidden to watch television or read newspapers and magazines, and were discouraged from contact with outsiders, including family members who had left the community. DeLoy Bateman described cycles in which members secretly acquired satellite dishes, Jeffs preached against television, and dishes were then dumped before gradually reappearing. Restrictions on information and outside relationships thus operated alongside the promise that the faithful would soon be lifted to the Celestial Kingdom. Together, they reinforced a closed community whose members were taught to look to its prophet for the meaning of both current events and the approaching end.## Failed Predictions and Renewed ObedienceIn the late 1990s, as the year 2000 approached, Rulon Jeffs assured followers that they would soon be lifted up while pestilence, hail, famine, and earthquakes swept the wicked from the earth. Fearing that unmarried women would be left behind, he arranged marriages between teenage girls and older men who were already married. Ruth Stubbs was among the brides. The prophecy shaped immediate decisions about marriage by presenting participation in what the community called the Principle as protection against exclusion from salvation.The year 2000 passed without Armageddon or the promised lifting up. Jeffs explained the failed expectation by blaming the people’s insufficient obedience; the residents, in turn, promised to live more righteously. DeLoy Bateman observed that a prediction of the end could be turned into a continuing instrument of authority: if disaster did not arrive, leaders could attribute the delay to the community’s own failings and renew demands for compliance. The prediction’s failure therefore did not end the expectation. It changed the explanation, preserving the prophet’s authority while placing responsibility on the followers.## Prophecy as a Recurrent Political and Social ForceThe book sets these predictions beside Brigham Young’s expectation that Native Americans would join the Saints in the struggle leading to the Great and Dreadful Day of the Lord. Drawing on The Book of Mormon’s account of the Lamanites and their eventual redemption, Young believed the alliance would help fulfill prophecy and prepare for Christ’s return. Native people did not necessarily accept the role assigned to them in this sacred history; Young nevertheless sought to enlist them in his campaign against the Gentiles. The episode shows how an anticipated future could shape political strategy as well as religious belief, and how a prophetic account might impose a destiny on people who did not share it.Across these examples, the Last Days are both an expected end and a present-day organizing principle. They authorize claims that a community is chosen, that rival authorities have corrupted the faith, and that believers must prepare for a crisis others do not recognize. They can motivate investments, pamphlet campaigns, settlement schemes, political alliances, and changes in family life. When the expected event fails to occur, explanations of delay can redirect blame toward the faithful rather than discredit the prophecy. The recurring tension is between a future promised as imminent and a present that continues: the promise can remain powerful precisely because its arrival is repeatedly deferred.