Second Coming

The Second Coming is not merely a future event in the book’s account of Mormon belief: it is a promise that gives particular places sacred importance, makes prophetic authority decisive, and divides the present into a struggle between the chosen and the condemned. Its meaning shifts across the narrative, from Joseph Smith’s geographic prophecies to the millennial conviction of Dan Lafferty, while remaining a measure by which believers understand history and their own roles within it.

A promised return in a chosen land

In the early history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Joseph Smith taught that Christian doctrine had gone astray after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The Book of Mormon, he said, restored the true church and sacred history. This account of religious restoration was also distinctly American: the book’s narrative centered on the American continent, Jesus Christ visited its people after the Resurrection, and Joseph Smith’s revelations located the Garden of Eden in America. The promised return of Jesus Christ, too, was associated with that same part of the world.

The association became more specific in 1831. A revelation identified northwestern Missouri as the land appointed for the gathering of the Saints, locating the Garden of Eden in Jackson County, near Independence. It also promised Christ’s triumphant return there before the nineteenth century ended. Joseph Smith directed his followers to assemble in Jackson County and build a New Jerusalem. The prophecy therefore joined an end-time expectation to an immediate project of settlement: believers were not only waiting for the return but were gathering in a place they understood to be sacred and destined for it.

That claim intensified conflict with residents already living in the region. Many Missourians distrusted the newcomers’ political and economic influence, but the Saints’ conviction that they were God’s chosen people, entitled to claim the land as Zion, sharpened the divide. Joseph Smith’s teaching of free agency gave people a choice between serving the Lord and turning away; those who chose wrongly, however, were not considered deserving of mercy. The expected divine future thus cast present disagreement in absolute terms, leaving little room for a neutral outsider.

Prophetic authority and the boundaries of belief

The Second Coming belongs to a religious system in which revelation can direct both collective history and ordinary conduct. Joseph Smith encouraged followers to seek personal communications from God, and divine revelation became foundational to the religion. Later forms of Mormon authority narrowed who could receive revelations that governed the faithful: men held the priesthood and positions of ecclesiastical power, and prophets alone were authorized to receive instructions for the community. In the fundamentalist communities described in the book, this hierarchy was taken to an especially strict degree.

The consequences are visible in the rule of Rulon Jeffs’s Colorado City community. Its members were taught that the earth was seven thousand years old and that human beings had never walked on the moon; television, newspapers, and magazines were prohibited, as was contact with people outside the United Effort Plan, including relatives who had left the religion. These doctrines and restrictions are not presented as a direct prediction of when Christ would return. Rather, they show a religious world organized around obedience to prophetic authority and separation from outside accounts of reality—conditions that make an end-time division between the faithful and the wider world especially potent.

The community’s treatment of apostasy made that division personal. When DeLoy Bateman decided to leave the Work, Rulon Jeffs ordered that his wives and children be taken from him and given to another man. Both wives refused to leave, and most of the children became apostates with them. Their break with the priesthood was not simply a change of religious affiliation: it altered their family status and placed them among those whom the community’s teachings condemned. The book describes apostates as being ranked below Gentiles and mainstream Mormons in spiritual standing, a judgment later expressed by Warren Jeffs in a sermon. In this setting, the anticipated judgment at the end of history has a present-day analogue in the boundary drawn between those who obey the prophet and those who depart.

Millennial expectation and the forerunner

The book also follows the Second Coming into Dan Lafferty’s evolving religious beliefs. Dan’s independent study had made him a forceful Mormon fundamentalist. He regarded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as having gone astray when Wilford Woodruff ended the practice of plural marriage under pressure from the federal government. The underlying conviction—that the true church had been corrupted and must be restored—resembled the restorationist framework associated with Joseph Smith, though Dan developed his beliefs outside an established fundamentalist church at first.

Later, Dan described a new identity: he believed he was Elijah, the biblical prophet whose task was to precede Christ. He cast himself as a forerunner preparing the way for the Second Coming, in a role comparable to John the Baptist’s preparation for the First Advent. The belief gave Dan a specific place within sacred history. Rather than wait passively for Christ’s return, he understood himself as appointed to announce it in the Final Days.

Dan’s account of humanity likewise placed the present within a cosmic timetable. He believed that people were divided into children of God and children of the devil, and that this distinction could not be changed. In his telling, the children of God possessed love, while the devil’s children were characterized by greed, hatred, envy, and jealousy. He described a promised thousand-year celebration with Christ after a period in which the earth would become hell under the devil’s influence. This millennial expectation gave hardship and conflict a place in a long divine sequence: the present was the ordeal before the promised reign. Colorado City’s teaching that the earth was seven thousand years old provides a different but related example of time understood through a sacred, bounded chronology; the book does not present these communities as holding an identical timetable.

The Second Coming as a narrative threshold

The book’s presentation moves from historical claims about a return in Missouri to modern prophetic and personal claims about preparing for it. That movement changes the scale of the expectation. In Joseph Smith’s revelations, the return helps explain why a community should gather in a particular landscape. In Dan Lafferty’s account, it supplies an individual mission and a way to sort humanity into opposing spiritual kinds. In the Colorado City material, strict boundaries around information and association show how the separation of the faithful from outsiders can be enforced in daily life, even when no date for the event is given.

A poetic passage marks another shift in register. The words announcing that the Second Coming is at hand lead into an image of a vast presence rising from the world’s collective spirit. The passage does not establish a date or describe a particular return as having occurred. Instead, it makes expectation feel like an approaching rupture: the language of prophecy, previously attached to settlement, authority, and personal vocation, becomes a literary signal that the inherited order may be ending.

Across these different settings, the Second Coming is powerful because it makes the future interpret the present. A promised return can consecrate a landscape, authorize a prophet, intensify conflict with outsiders, or give an individual a role in sacred history. The book’s examples also reveal the costs of that certainty: once the world is divided into the chosen and the condemned, dissent can be treated not as disagreement but as proof that someone has crossed to the wrong side of an ultimate boundary.