Joseph Smith portrayed his visit from Moroni as an experience of being lectured by an angel about the Last Days, and, as Blythe put it: “The Book of Mormon is filled with apocalyptic material and details the destructions of several civilizations.” While we “spend much less time talking about apocalyptic events in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries than we did in the nineteenth,” it is still a part of our thought today. Latter-day Saints have been apocalyptic in outlook from the start. But, in the case of his book title, Blythe was invoking both the genre and eschatology, though he focuses “more on prophecies predicting the downfall of the United States and less on the millennium that comes after” while discussing “a lot of Latter-day Saint visionary accounts.” … In popular usage, the apocalypse is the end of the world.” The genre of literature is, first and foremost, “the story of a visionary being brought into otherworldly realms often with the aid of an angelic guide,” and not necessarily a discussion of the end of the world.

It’s also a genre of scriptural literature, which is best represented in the Bible with the Book of Revelation. What follows here is a co-post to the interview (a short discussion with quotes from the interview), but the full interview is available here.Īs Blythe put it, an apocalypse is “literally an unveiling-a revelation.

He recently had an interview with Kurt Manwaring to discuss his research and book. These types of discussions interested Christopher Blythe, who has “always had a deep interest in apocalypticism” and felt that “much of the scholarship on Latter-day Saint last days beliefs seem to focus on official doctrine rather than the conversations occurring among lay Latter-day Saints.” His recently-published book Terrible Revolution: Latter-day Saints and the American Apocalypse(Oxford University Press, 2020) focuses on “how lay Latter-day Saint beliefs intersect with the official doctrine of the faith” by examining the full span of apocalypticism among Latter-day Saints in the nineteenth century. It is not an uncommon topic of conversation among Latter-day Saints that I have known, including the occasional discussion of dreams or visions about the End Times.

Perhaps it is because of that drama that the idea has captured the imagination of human beings for thousands of years and continues to do so today. The end of the world is a pretty dramatic scene.

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