Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: In the earliest published account of Joseph Smith's first visions, it is reported that when Smith was first visited by an angel named Moroni, he was told that "the great preparatory work for the second coming of the Messiah, was speedily to commence; that the time was at hand for the gospel, in its fulness, to be preached in power unto all nations; that a people might be prepared with faith and righteousness, for the Millennial reign of universal peace and joy." 1 This statement highlights the essential link between what early Latter-day Saints considered the raison d'etre of Mormonism and the millennial dream. 2 That simple acknowledgment, however, gestures toward a rich and fascinating realm of thought that can only begin to be explored in the short compass of a single article.In the first place, the millennial hope is a malleable one, and people "can extrapolate a dismal or optimistic view of history, encompassing temporal disaster or progress, or both. . . .Efforts to seize the Kingdom by violence, passive Grant Underwood is the Evans Professor of Religious Understanding at Brigham Young University.He is the author or editor of a number of books and articles pertaining to Mormonism, including The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism, and most recently, The Joseph Smith Papers: Documents, Volumes 1-3 (Salt Lake City: Church Historian's Press, 2013-2014).Additionally, he was the founding codirector of the American Academy of Religion's Mormon Studies Group.Professor Underwood delivered the keynote address at the opening plenary session of CSA's 2015 conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, in October 2016.We are pleased to publish this essay based on that address. Orson Pratt, A[n] Interesting Account of Several Remarkable Visions, and of the Late Discovery of Ancient American Records (Edinburgh: Ballantyne and Hughes, 1840), 7.2 Mormonism refers to the faith of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the church founded by Joseph Smith in 1830 that today numbers over fifteen million adherents worldwide.Church members are known both as Mormons and as Latter-day Saints.Throughout this article, Mormon and Latter-day Saint (or simply LDS) will be used interchangeably.3 James H. Moorhead, American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and Civil War, 1860-1869 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 8. 4 Similar affirmations are found in all the earliest Christian "rules of faith" and baptismal creeds, including the normative Nicene and Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creeds.
Source: Communal Societies
Author: Grant Underwood
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2952922089