Millenarianism and Apocalyptic Belief

Millenarianism and Apocalyptic Belief is the recurring expectation that history is nearing a divinely appointed crisis, after which the righteous will be saved and the world remade. In the book, this expectation is not merely a timetable for the Second Coming: it organizes communities, marks boundaries between insiders and outsiders, and gives religious leaders a language for directing everyday life. Its prophecies repeatedly meet the resistance of ordinary events, yet that collision can strengthen the authority of a prophet when disappointment is explained as a failure of the faithful.

An American religious inheritance

The book places apocalyptic expectation within a broad American tradition rather than treating it as an isolated fringe. Separatist believers have repeatedly sought refuge from a coming judgment, sometimes breaking with civil authority, neighbors, and relatives. Such groups have gathered around prophetic figures and religious arrangements that challenge conventional assumptions about property, family, and sexuality. The followers of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young appear within this larger history of communities that distinguish themselves from the surrounding world.

That expectation was especially intense during the Second Great Awakening. In western New York, where Joseph Smith came of age, religious competition and experimentation fed a sense that the end of the existing order might be close. The book describes the Millennium as widely anticipated within a horizon of roughly twenty years. Against this background, Smith’s emerging religion presented its scriptures and continuing revelations as preparation for the Second Coming. Followers were cast as God’s chosen people, with a consequential role in the Last Days before the Millennium.

This framework gave Mormon belief both an expansive promise and a sharp division of humanity. The Book of Mormon presents existence as a struggle between the church of God and the church of the devil, while its sacred history gives the American continent a central place in the events of salvation. The promise of personal revelation further made divine guidance feel immediate: God could communicate with believers, and new revelations could revise religious obligations. Apocalyptic expectation thus joined a grand historical future to claims about how the faithful should live in the present.

Prophecy as a social order

The book shows how belief in the approaching end can make authority appear urgent. In the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints community in Colorado City, prophetic leadership governed not only worship but also information, relationships, and family life. Residents were forbidden to watch television or read newspapers and magazines, and contact with outsiders or former members was prohibited. These restrictions were reinforced by a worldview in which the outside world was spiritually dangerous and the faithful were a chosen remnant.

Under Rulon Jeffs, apocalyptic expectation became a justification for specific decisions. In the late 1990s, as the year 2000 approached, he assured followers that they would soon be lifted up to the Celestial Kingdom while calamities swept the wicked from the earth. Concern that unmarried women might be left behind led him to arrange marriages between teenage girls and older men who already had wives. Ruth Stubbs was among those married in this period. The prophecy therefore did not remain an abstract account of the future: it shaped present marriages and the community’s understanding of who might be prepared for salvation.

When the year 2000 passed without Armageddon or the promised lifting up, Rulon Jeffs attributed the failure to insufficient obedience among the believers. They responded with contrition and promises to live more righteously. DeLoy Bateman, who had left the faith, identified the self-renewing logic of the prediction: if the disaster does not occur, the prophet can blame the people’s iniquity and make the failed expectation a continuing instrument of control. The prediction’s apparent failure therefore did not automatically dissolve belief; it could be recast as evidence that greater obedience was still required.

The costs of belonging and departure

This apocalyptic division between the righteous and the condemned also shaped how the community treated dissent. In Colorado City, apostates were represented as especially wicked, while those who abandoned the faith were warned of damnation and degradation. Such teaching gave departure a cosmic meaning: leaving was not simply a change in affiliation but a betrayal of the priesthood and a movement onto the side of evil. The prospect of being cut off from family and community made that boundary tangible.

DeLoy Bateman’s experience shows how prophetic authority could reach into kinship. After he decided to leave the Work and missed a weekly priesthood meeting, Rulon Jeffs sent someone to take his wives and children, declaring that they should be given to a more worthy man. Under the community’s doctrine, wives and children belonged to the priesthood rather than exclusively to husbands or parents. Both wives refused to leave DeLoy, and all but the three oldest children became apostates as well. The episode exposes a tension between the promised protection of the chosen community and the costs imposed on people who challenge its authority.

The same structure of righteous insiders and condemned outsiders recurs in the book’s account of Joseph Smith’s followers in Missouri. The Saints claimed a divine inheritance and understood their gathering in Jackson County as part of the preparation for Christ’s return. Their certainty that they were God’s chosen people, and their stark judgment of those who rejected their claims, intensified conflict with existing residents. Millenarian hope could bind a community together, but it could also make compromise seem like betrayal and opposition seem like proof of the world’s hostility.

Prophecy after disappointment

The Dream Mine story presents another form of apocalyptic expectation: the promise that a future catastrophe would reveal hidden resources for the faithful. In a dream in 1894, John Hyrum Koyle said that the angel Moroni showed him nine caverns filled with Nephite gold. The gold, according to the prophecy, would remain concealed until just before the Second Coming, when social collapse and strife would make it necessary to provide for believers. Koyle began digging near Salem that September. By the mid-1940s, a shaft extended 3,400 feet into the mountain, although no gold had been found. Investors continued to believe that its discovery belonged to the appointed future, not the present.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints rejected Koyle’s authority to receive revelations of this magnitude, repeatedly calling him a false prophet and warning members not to invest. He was excommunicated in 1948 and died the following year, but many followers continued to expect the prophecy to come true. The dispute reveals an enduring institutional question: not only whether the end is near, but who has the authority to say what God has disclosed about it.

Across these episodes, apocalyptic belief gives present hardship a place within a promised future and offers a community an account of why it is set apart. It can sustain hope, organize collective identity, and encourage mutual loyalty. But the same framework can authorize strict control, stigmatize dissent, and turn a failed prediction into a demand for still greater submission. The book’s recurring pattern is not simply that believers expect the world to end; it is that the expectation helps determine who belongs, who commands, and what must be endured before the promised world arrives.