Most people who have ever spent much time in a Latter-day Saint congregation have at some point listened to a sacrament meeting talk or Sunday School lesson about the signs of the times. I vividly remember a high councilman rhapsodizing about “rivers of blood” flowing in the streets of Jerusalem at the time of Jesus's Second Coming—and privately wondering on more than one occasion how exactly the various prophesied plagues, pestilences, natural disasters, and wars would discriminate so carefully as to target only the wicked.
“The Latter-day Saints of the nineteenth century belonged to an apocalyptic tradition,” argues historian and folklorist Christopher Blythe in his highly informative book Terrible Revolution. Most twentieth- and twenty-first-century Saints, rather less so. Blythe charts the rise and fall of Mormon apocalyptic discourse over the two-hundred-year history of the Restoration. He defines “apocalyptic” as “the belief that society was headed toward cataclysmic events that...
