For too long, many scholars have argued that Christian groups obsessed with a coming apocalypse are so other-worldly focused that they have little impact on the politics or cultures around them. Those scholars are wrong. Rather than fostering a sense of indifference regarding the coming of an inevitable end of days, apocalypse-obsessed Christians have used their beliefs as a call to battle rather than a justification for withdrawal. God, they insist, has given them much to do and very little time in which to do it. Positive that Jesus is coming soon, they have sought converts and engaged directly and aggressively with their cultures, preparing themselves and others for what is to come. Christopher James Blythe's Terrible Revolution shows us that this is especially true of those within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.Since the time of Jesus, Christians have at times obsessed over the Bible's predictions of a coming Armageddon and its promises of a millennium of peace and prosperity. Millions of Christians have tried to make sense of local, national, and global events through the lens of biblical prophecy. In the United States, various groups have offered a complicated and convoluted reading of the biblical books of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation, which they read in conjunction with one another and overlay with some of Jesus's and Paul's New Testament statements. The result is a plan of the ages that tells us what signs to look for, and what those signs reveal about where we are on God's cosmic timeline. Such readings offer a kind of secret knowledge to those anxious about everything from their own personal problems to the most complicated challenges faced by their generation. The Bible, these Christians believe, provides the key to understanding ages past, present, and to come.Among the most original and influential American apocalyptic groups is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Blythe's Terrible Revolution offers a smart, original, and compelling analysis of the evolving role of apocalyptic thinking in the LDS Church. In this impressively researched and important book, Blythe has marshalled thousands of sources, some long hidden away in obscure places, and diligently connected them to larger social and political trends. He demonstrates that we cannot understand the rise, growth, and success of Mormonism without taking seriously its apocalyptic origins and proclivities. Followers of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon chose to call themselves “Latter-day” Saints for a reason, after all. To ignore their conviction that they were living in the last days, and how that shaped their understanding of their lives, their church, their community, their nation, and their world, is to miss a central and distinguishing element of the Latter-day Saint faith, one that Blythe has brought to light.Blythe begins his study with the founding of the faith and the actions of Joseph Smith, whom Blythe calls “an apocalyptic prophet” (27). The angel Moroni appeared to Smith in 1823 in a vision, telling him that he had important work to do to prepare the world for the second coming of Christ. He then reminded Smith of some of the Bible's key passages regarding the last days. In the early years of the movement, while Smith both received and controlled authoritative revelations, he “simultaneously facilitated the communal project of apocalypticism among his disciples” (16). According to Blythe, Smith drew on the “traditions of biblical apocalypticism while simultaneously expanding on and going beyond the tradition. . . . The Second Coming in Smith's hands became not a single event, but instead an ongoing redemptive project whose beginning and end points remained conspicuously nebulous” (35).Smith grounded much of his prophetic work in his understanding of the United States. He and other early Mormons believed that the nation would play a central role in the fulfillment of last days prophecy, either in collaboration with the church, or in conflict with it. The publication of the Book of Mormon helped solidify this view by canonizing and preserving speculation about America's apocalyptic significance. This made Mormonism not just a religious project but a political one as well.Smith believed that the Saints needed to prepare “a populace to survive the coming cataclysm” (30). To that end, in 1839 he led a group of believers to Illinois, where they established a new community they called Nauvoo. There, Blythe notes, Mormonism became a “political messianic movement that could revolutionize the world” (36). Mormons built a temple, which they loaded with millennial symbolism—Blythe calls it an “apocalyptic monument”—and Smith introduced new rituals that he saw as fulfilling prophecy (39). In 1840, Smith prophesied that the Saints would preserve or save the US Constitution in a future moment of crisis. This conviction—that the Constitution is a sacred document that God has called the Saints to protect—has been an important tenet of the faith ever since. Smith also ran for president, making explicit his efforts to merge his political and religious agendas.The 1844 assassination of Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum had a profound impact on the growing church and how it understood its relationship to the United States government and the broader world. “John the Revelator's image of martyrs pleading for God to avenge their murders,” Blythe writes, “became a prominent element in Mormon apocalypticism” (8). Smith's death, in Mormon eyes, would spark God's avenging judgement on those guilty of both the murder and of the broader persecution of the Saints that the murder represented.In the spring of 1845, Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders announced that they would be leaving the United States. Judgment was imminent, and perhaps the United States could not be redeemed. They headed west to the Great Salt Lake region. There they reimagined and reconfigured their apocalyptic visions of the last days, incorporating their sense of themselves as exiles in the “wilderness” awaiting the judgements of God to fall on the unfaithful.But Young faced challengers. The Mormons had sacralized spaces in Missouri and Illinois, so the move west had the potential of raising uncomfortable questions about Smith's own understanding of prophecy and place. Young had to both justify the move to the Mountain West and also limit the influence of those who continued to believe that their faith should center on Nauvoo. Young helped Mormons come to believe that the new lands they inhabited were central to the old stories contained in the Book of Mormon, that their new homes were on sacred ground.As Young built the fledgling movement, he understood that too much apocalypticism could generate instability. He had much to gain by promoting a clear power structure, secure institutions, and reliable leaders. He started a process that grew over time in which church leaders used prophecy to encourage faithfulness, but they also carefully policed apocalyptic ideas that emerged from among laypeople. Their efforts were never perfect. “Those outside of the priestly power structure,” Blythe writes, “had much to gain from messianic posturing” (101), which meant that apocalyptic speculation was never as tightly controlled as church leaders wanted.As tensions between the Saints and the US government grew in the middle and latter part of the nineteenth century, the Saints’ belief that the United States government was a last-days enemy strengthened. From the Utah War in the late 1850s, to the federal government's crackdown on polygamy in the 1880s, Mormons believed that God would punish the nation's leaders and people for persecuting the Saints. “Both sides in this conflict subscribed to notions of holy war,” Blythe writes. “Federal troops saw themselves on a crusade against non-Christian fanatics in rebellion against the nation. Mormons, on the other hand, understood the army's march and occupation in terms of a foretold invasion of latter-day Israel” (137).These tensions led to a new surge in prophetic speculation. During this period, Blythe notes, leaders collected and recorded the most influential vernacular apocalyptic prophecies, and “Joseph Smith's prophecy of a future American civil war circulated widely in Mormon and non-Mormon circles” (9). Nevertheless, even as church leaders shared these prophecies among themselves, they hid many of them from the laity and the public. Church leaders continued to try to keep a lid on apocalyptic speculation.The Mormons’ relationship to the US government and their understanding of prophecy shifted again in the late nineteenth century. When Utah achieved statehood in 1896, Latter-day Saint leaders worked hard to build productive relationships with government authorities. They also sought to rein in voices of dissent, including some of the faithful most obsessed with prophecy. They especially aimed to curtail the older dualistic vision of an evil United States provoking God's judgment and a holy, separate, remnant of Saints who would escape that judgment. “Church leaders,” Blythe writes, “realized that the radical apocalypticism of the past had to be tempered because it stood in the way of assimilation” (180).Church leaders and laypeople alike continued to believe they were living in the “last days.” But they shifted their understanding of what that meant. Rather than trust that the apocalypse was imminent, they came to see the last days as a long era that might run for generations. War gave them the opportunity to demonstrate their American assimilation. During the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War, and then World War I, Mormons made patriotism, serving in the United States military, and defending the nation from foreign threats top priorities. Their days of exile and anti-government prophetic denunciations were over, at least in official church publications.The last section of the book analyzes the evolution of Latter-day Saint prophecy in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Once again, Blythe covers a tremendous amount of ground. He tracks how the Saints increasingly embraced a form of Christian nationalism, seeing themselves as part of God's redemptive work in the world that he might channel through a godly United States. Church leaders kept prophetic speculation to a minimum and forced visionaries to the margins. Nevertheless, a vernacular prophetic tradition continued in small groups, through rogue leaders, in breakaway movements, and, most recently, on the internet.Apocalypticism has played an important role in the lives of countless Mormons. It has fostered in them a powerful sense of purpose and personal identity, helped them interpret the challenges they face all around them, and offered a triumphant vision of the future. This excellent work by Christopher James Blythe ensures that we all understand why the Saints put “Latter-day” in the title of their church and how apocalypticism became so important to the Mormon faith.