Second Coming of Jesus Christ

The Second Coming of Jesus Christ is more than a distant theological promise in the book: it supplies a destination for sacred history and a framework for interpreting American land, political conflict, and religious authority. The account follows the expectation across distinct periods and communities, showing how a promised return could be attached to a specific geography, used to interpret relations with outsiders, and recast as a personal mission. These episodes do not present every Mormon community as holding one uniform expectation; they show the varied uses to which the prophecy was put.

A return located in sacred history

The Book of Mormon places Jesus Christ’s post-resurrection appearance in the New World and gives America a central place in sacred history. Its restoration narrative also presents the existing Christian world as having departed from the original church. Against that division, the book describes a stark moral map of two churches, one belonging to the Lamb of God and the other to the devil. The promise of Christ’s return belongs to this larger account of restoration and judgment: history is not an open-ended sequence, but a contest with an anticipated divine resolution.

The American setting makes the prophecy unusually concrete. The account describes Jesus Christ as having promised Joseph Smith that His return would take place in the same part of America associated with the book’s sacred events. In 1831, a revelation further identified Jackson County, near Independence, as the site of the Garden of Eden and the place where Christ would return before the century was out. The Saints were directed to gather there and build a New Jerusalem. The expectation therefore attached the end of history not only to a future moment, but to a particular landscape that believers were being told to occupy.

Prophecy, territory, and political expectation

The gathering in Jackson County brought the prophecy into direct contact with people already living there. Mormon settlers described the region as a divinely appointed inheritance and understood themselves as God’s chosen people. Many local Missourians, meanwhile, viewed the rapid immigration, the purchase of land through church funds, trade within the community, and coordinated voting as threats to local power. The claim that the land was promised to the Saints made those changes more than ordinary settlement: it gave territorial ambition a sacred warrant.

The same moral division could make disagreement appear spiritually consequential. Joseph Smith’s teaching of individual choice did not, in the book’s account, require sympathy for those who rejected the Saints’ understanding of God’s plan. A revelation referring to Missouri as both the Saints’ inheritance and the land of their enemies sharpened this conflict. The Second Coming thus stands in a charged relation to earthly politics: expectations of a future divine triumph could lend urgency to present claims over land and reinforce the boundary between the faithful and those cast as opponents.

Brigham Young later read events in Utah through another scriptural expectation. The Book of Mormon identified Native peoples as descendants of the Lamanites and prophesied their conversion and redemption before Christ’s return. In that account, the Lamanites would join the Saints against the Gentiles, helping usher in the Great and Dreadful Day of the Lord. Brigham believed the Saints’ arrival in the Great Salt Lake Valley, among the people he associated with that prophecy, meant the promised alliance was close at hand. The people in question did not share his interpretation of their role: they did not regard the Saints as prophetic allies, and cooperation could depend on the spoils being offered. The distance between Brigham’s expectation and their own view exposes a recurring tension in the book: a prophecy may organize a believer’s political imagination without being shared by the people it assigns a part in sacred history.

Prophetic authority and everyday life

The expectation of divine intervention also appears alongside a strong emphasis on prophetic authority. The book describes a patriarchal order in which men alone hold priesthood offices, prophets receive revelations, and those revelations may govern details of daily life. Fundamentalist communities take such rules further than the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, according to the account. The authority to interpret God’s will therefore becomes a practical power over conduct, not simply a doctrine about the future.

In Colorado City, members of the United Effort Plan were prohibited from watching television or reading newspapers and magazines, and from contact with people outside the community, including relatives who had left. DeLoy Bateman described a recurring pattern: members secretly acquired satellite dishes, a sermon warned that the leader knew who had them and that their souls were in jeopardy, and dishes were then discarded in the desert. The prohibition would hold for a few years before secret viewing began again. The episode shows how spiritual consequences could be invoked to enforce a rule in the present, even when the rule was repeatedly evaded.

The stakes of leaving were also expressed through family and community status. DeLoy’s departure led the United Effort Plan leadership to order that his wives and children be reassigned, on the premise that they belonged to the priesthood rather than to him. Both wives refused to leave, and most of the children also became apostates. The book presents this rupture alongside teachings that cast apostates as especially wicked and warnings that those who left would be condemned. These are not simply descriptions of the Second Coming; they show how claims about salvation and judgment could shape the immediate consequences of dissent.

A personal mission and a divided world

The account returns to the Second Coming through Dan Lafferty’s later religious beliefs. After finding that fundamentalism did not resolve the contradictions he saw, Dan came to identify himself with Elijah, the biblical forerunner who prepares the way for Christ. He understood his task to be announcing the return of the Son of Man in the Final Days. In this version of the prophecy, the expectation of Christ’s return is not only a communal hope: it is a role Dan assigns to himself.

Dan’s account retains a severe division between the righteous and the wicked. He believed that humanity consisted of those chosen as children of God and those who were children of the devil, and that this distinction could not be changed. The book places this outlook beside testimony about Ron Lafferty: Dr. Gardner distinguished Ron’s revelations, which had been considered within a group of believers, from psychosis, while also describing symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder. The juxtaposition keeps two questions separate: how a community validates revelation, and how an individual’s psychological condition may be assessed. It also shows the danger of treating an apocalyptic framework as self-explanatory. The same broad expectation of divine judgment can be embedded in communal doctrine or claimed as an individual commission, with very different implications.

Across these episodes, the Second Coming links restoration scripture, sacred geography, political conflict, and personal religious identity. Its power in the book lies not only in the anticipated end of history, but in the present-tense authority people derive from believing they know where history is going, who belongs among the chosen, and what duties that knowledge places upon them.