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BYU Studies Quarterly

BYU Studies Quarterly

Authors

Tona Hangen

Keywords

Captain Moroni, revolution, Church of Jesus Christ culture, Catherine Wessinger

Abstract

When a costume-clad man wielded a Captain Moroni “title of liberty” flag at the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021, it was a notable reminder that revolutionary end-times ideology has a long and evocative presence in the culture of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and adjacent religions. Christopher Blythe’s timely and wide-ranging book explores these themes across time, geography, and even denominational boundaries. He defines apocalypticism both as a distinct Jewish- Christian scriptural literary form found in Hebrew and Christian texts and malleable perfectionist ideology embracing “catastrophic millennialism,” to borrow Catherine Wessinger’s coinage. In brief, apocalyptic rhetoric exhibits “the belief that society [i]s headed toward cataclysmic events that would uproot the current social order in favor of a divine order that would be established in its place” (2–4). This is a capacious enough definition that many different threads can be explored under its rubric, and indeed at times in the book it might prove daunting for readers without extensive prior understanding of Latter-day Saint history and theology to connect all the dots on their own.

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