Millenarian expectation

Millenarian expectation—the belief that the present world is nearing a divinely appointed crisis and a transformed sacred age—runs through the book as both a recurring feature of American religious life and a force that can organize daily conduct. Its decisive significance lies in the reversal built into prophetic prediction: the promised end may not arrive, yet the authority of the prophet can survive the failure if the community is told that its own shortcomings delayed fulfillment. In the account of Colorado City, expectation of imminent deliverance becomes not only a vision of the future but a means of disciplining the present.

A recurring American expectation

The book resists treating extreme religious ideas as merely marginal. It describes millenarian strands as powerful within American fundamentalist evangelicalism and places the expectation of coming judgment near the center of American religious thought across generations. Believers who feared the wrath to come sometimes sought safety by withdrawing from the surrounding society, even at the cost of conflict with law, neighbors, or family. Such separatism could accompany a prophetic leader’s claim to divine revelation and a rejection of conventional assumptions about property, family life, and sexuality.

The book sets the followers of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young alongside earlier separatist communities such as the Shakers, the Ephrata community, Oneida, and Amana. The comparison emphasizes a recurring pattern rather than treating each group as identical: religious communities imagine themselves set apart from a failing world, look to prophetic authority, and anticipate a coming sacred order. The pattern helps place Mormon expectation within a wider American history of apocalyptic concern, rather than presenting it as an isolated or inexplicable fringe.

The Last Days in early Mormonism

The religious ferment of the Second Great Awakening forms the historical setting for Joseph Smith’s emergence. In western New York, near Palmyra, competing religious claims flourished amid an atmosphere in which many people expected the Millennium soon; one historian cited in the book describes an expectation that it might arrive within twenty years. The book connects that climate of urgency to the faith Joseph Smith founded, while also describing his own intellectual curiosity and imaginative gifts as part of his rise as a religious leader.

Revelation gave this expectation a continuing institutional form. The book presents personal communication from God as a central promise of Mormonism, and ongoing revelation as a principle by which commandments could be revised or changed. The resulting scriptures, including the Doctrine and Covenants, recorded that continuing guidance. Joseph Smith’s declared mission was to restore the Lord’s one true church and prepare the earth for the Second Coming. His followers were taught that they were God’s elect, a peculiar people with a crucial part to play in the Last Days before the Millennium. In this account, the anticipated end was not simply a distant prediction: it gave the community a sacred identity and made its members’ present choices part of an unfolding divine history.

Prophecy as a system of present obedience

The Colorado City chapters show how expectation of the end could intersect with concentrated authority over ordinary life. Under Rulon Jeffs, members were forbidden to watch television or read newspapers and magazines, and were also barred from contact with people outside the United Effort Plan, including relatives who had left the faith. The book presents these restrictions as part of a wider structure in which the prophet’s authority reached into civic institutions and personal relationships. Its account of religious obedience also stresses the patriarchal rule that men alone held priesthood authority and that prophetic revelations could govern the faithful’s conduct.

The same structure shaped the treatment of apostasy. Departing the community could be represented as a spiritual betrayal with consequences extending beyond this life; those warnings made separation from the group appear perilous as well as socially costly. The book also describes the priesthood as claiming authority over wives and children, who could be reassigned to another man. These facts do not make every restriction a direct product of millenarian belief. They show, rather, how prophetic authority operated within a community where eternal destiny, loyalty, and obedience were closely bound together. In that setting, the promise of rescue for the faithful and destruction for the wicked could reinforce the boundary between the chosen community and the outside world.

The failed date and its reinterpretation

As the year 2000 approached, Rulon Jeffs assured followers that they would soon be lifted to the Celestial Kingdom while pestilence, hail, famine, and earthquakes swept the wicked from the earth. Concern that unmarried women would be left behind in the coming catastrophe contributed to the marriage of a number of teenage girls to older men who were already married. Ruth Stubbs was among these brides. The prediction thus reached beyond belief about the future: anticipation of the apocalypse helped shape decisions about marriage in the present.

When 2000 passed without Armageddon or the promised lifting up, Rulon Jeffs attributed the failure to the followers’ insufficient obedience. Rather than abandon the expectation, residents responded with contrition and promised to live more righteously. DeLoy Bateman, an apostate who had been raised in the faith, identifies the structure of this response: if a predicted catastrophe does not happen, the prophet can blame the people’s iniquity and use that explanation to intensify control. The failed date therefore did not simply close a chapter in the community’s beliefs. Its reinterpretation preserved the prophecy’s authority while shifting responsibility for nonfulfillment onto the believers themselves.

Meaning and consequence

The book’s treatment of millenarian expectation moves between collective hope and human cost. A promise that the faithful will be saved can offer a community a powerful sense of purpose, especially when members understand themselves as God’s chosen people in a hostile world. But when a leader controls the interpretation of both prophecy and failure, the anticipated future can also turn disappointment into a demand for greater obedience. The end remains imminent, while the standard by which the community is judged can be moved after the prediction fails.

This tension connects the book’s historical and contemporary material. The expectation of the Millennium helped define early Mormonism’s mission and its followers’ place in sacred history; in Colorado City, apocalyptic assurance became a means of explaining who would be saved, who would be condemned, and why the promised deliverance had not yet occurred. Millenarian expectation is therefore presented neither as a mere date on a calendar nor as an abstract doctrine. It is a framework for interpreting crisis, marking the boundary between insiders and outsiders, and organizing present-day obedience around a future that remains just ahead.