Millennium

The Millennium is the promised future era that gave Mormon restorationism its sense of urgency: the earth was to be prepared for the Second Coming, after which Christ’s reign would fulfill expectations of a divinely ordered world. In the book’s account, this was more than a distant doctrine. It shaped how believers understood their place in history, the authority of revelation, and the moral divide between the chosen and the excluded.

A future expected soon

The Millennium belonged to a nineteenth-century religious climate in which many Americans anticipated the end of the present age. During the Second Great Awakening, apocalyptic expectation was unusually intense; the Mormon historian Hyrum L. Andrus described people as looking toward the Millennium with the hope that it might arrive within twenty years. Joseph Smith came of age in this atmosphere, and the book presents the emerging Mormon faith as a product of a period when religious innovation and expectation of the end times reinforced one another.

For Joseph’s followers, the anticipated era gave their religious mission a place in sacred history. Joseph taught that his task was to restore the Lord’s One True Church and prepare the earth for the Second Coming of Christ. He described the Saints as God’s chosen people, destined to play a crucial role in the Last Days before the Millennium. The prospect of a coming transformation thus made the present consequential: believers were not simply awaiting a future age but understood themselves as participants in the events leading toward it.

A restored faith and a divided world

The Book of Mormon supplied a sharp moral map for this expectation, dividing the world between the church of the Lamb of God and the church of the devil. The book’s American setting strengthened the sense that sacred history and the future return of Christ were bound to the continent. In its narrative, Jesus Christ visited the New World after his resurrection, and Joseph taught that Christ would return to the same corner of America. The promised future was therefore both cosmic in scale and located within the landscape of the new faith.

That division also shaped the Saints’ understanding of outsiders. When Mormons gathered in Jackson County to build a New Jerusalem, they claimed a divine right to the region as God’s chosen people. Their conviction intensified conflict with residents who regarded the newcomers’ political unity, communal separation, and claims to the land with suspicion. In the book’s account, millennial expectation did not dissolve ordinary political disputes; it could give them sacred stakes by casting settlement and community-building as part of God’s plan.

Revelation, authority, and sacred time

The Millennium was linked to the ongoing revelation that Mormonism treated as a foundation of religious life. Joseph taught that God continued to communicate commandments, and revelations were gathered in The Doctrine and Covenants. This continuing authority meant that the anticipated future could be interpreted through new instructions in the present. In both the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and fundamentalist communities, the authority to receive revelations governing the faithful’s conduct belonged to prophets; dissent from religious authority was treated as a challenge to faith.

The book also shows how sacred expectation could be carried through ritual and collective memory. In the aftermath of Joseph Smith’s murder, Brigham Young called for church authorities to institute an Oath of Vengeance, which became part of the temple endowment ceremony. Participants pledged to continue praying for vengeance across generations. The oath was removed from the ceremony in 1927, after it became public and provoked an outcry. Though not itself a description of the Millennium, this history illustrates how ritual could make religious interpretations of history durable, binding present believers to an inherited account of past violence and future divine justice.

Reproduction, succession, and the promised future

The expectation of a divinely ordered future also intersected with disputes over religious succession and the continuation of plural marriage. At a meeting convened by John Taylor after a revelation, trusted Saints covenanted to defend plural marriage and consecrate their lives, liberty, and property to the principle. Taylor warned that some would be ostracized or might lose their lives, then authorized five men to perform celestial marriages and ordain others to do so. The stated aim was to ensure that children would continue to be born in plural marriage. He also foretold that during the seventh president’s tenure the Church would enter temporal and spiritual bondage, and that the One Mighty and Strong would come.

This episode places future expectation alongside institutional continuity: the covenant, marriage authority, and succession prophecy all looked beyond the immediate meeting toward a later religious order. The book presents such claims as contested; the authenticity of Taylor’s meeting has been disputed by LDS General Authorities. The Millennium therefore appears not as a single, uncontested timetable, but as part of a larger field of prophetic claims in which communities argued over who could speak for God and how the faithful should prepare.

A doctrine with consequences in daily life

In Colorado City, the belief that the earth was seven thousand years old and that humans had never walked on the moon existed alongside restrictions on television, newspapers, and contact with people outside the United Effort Plan, including relatives who had left the religion. These rules were enforced within a community where the prophet’s authority extended into civic life. The book connects such conditions to a worldview of chosen status and religious separation, though the restrictions themselves are not presented as a direct consequence of the Millennium doctrine.

The cost of crossing the boundary could be immediate and familial. When DeLoy Bateman left the Work, the community’s leadership ordered his wives and children taken from him, treating them as belonging to the priesthood rather than to the family. His wives refused to leave, and most of the children also became apostates. The episode shows how the language of chosen faith and apostasy could make religious allegiance a matter of family belonging as well as belief. Across the book, the Millennium gives this allegiance its horizon: an expected divine future that can inspire collective purpose, while also intensifying the authority claims and divisions through which communities define who belongs.