In the 1980s and 1990s, inspired by the work of scholars like David D. Hall, Robert Orsi, and Karen McCarthy Brown, students of American religion began to drift away from the study of formal theology and toward what they called “lived religion.” Best understanding of the impact of religious belief on the lives of believers required not analysis of texts scholars and leaders might produce, but rather how those ideas manifested in the behavior, practice, and stories that members of any given tradition might embrace.In the introduction to his Terrible Revolution, a study of apocalypticism in the Latter-day Saint variant of the Mormon tradition, Christopher Blythe argues that this method has not been sufficiently applied within Mormon studies. He may well be right. With few exceptions (like the work of Susannah Morrill, for example) work on the history of doctrine and theology tends to trot out the usual suspects, from the Pratt brothers to James Talmage to Bruce R. McConkie. Blythe's work joins Jonathan Stapley's recent The Power of Godliness in an attempt to apply the principles of lived religion to the study of the development of Mormon religiosity, and both volumes offer similar theoretical constructs. Stapley emphasizes the “folk” culture of Mormon ritual work, exploring how lay church members elaborated on the sometimes fragmented and unsystematic rituals church leaders instituted. Blythe, for his part, seeks to unpack what he calls “vernacular prophecy” (9), the speculations, visionary insights, and theoretical work of lay members of the LDS Church who tried to make sense of the portentous, powerful, and yet still blurry promise of the coming apocalypse. It is a form of folk theologizing, to borrow Stapley's word, though theology is too narrow a word to describe precisely what was happening here. The apocalypse, of course, is never simply about abstract ideas: it is also about how one might live throughout a tremendous upheaval that seems alternately terrifying and glorious.Given these premises, Blythe here makes two contributions. The first is primarily theoretical: a new way of understanding the interaction between church leaders and church members, and more precisely, a new way of understanding the synthesis of ideas and practice that produce the religious culture of the Mormon movement. For Blythe, it was always something of a tug-of-war, as leaders sometimes found the popularity and creativity surrounding apocalyptic ideas galvanizing and useful for maintaining lay commitment. At other times, however, lay excitement around the apocalypse—which in Blythe's telling has never really drifted far from the center of Mormon culture—proved disruptive and even embarrassing to church leaders. It was particularly troublesome when church leaders hoped to ensure a smooth transition into the mainstream of American life in the early twentieth century, and positions like that of Angus McDonald, who assured the readers of his 1890s pamphlets that Jesus Christ had inspired the Paiute prophet Wovoka, whose Ghost Dance movement prophesied a coming indigenous utopia. More, McDonald challenge the authority of the church's own leadership, claiming they were no longer receiving the sort of authoritative revelation Joseph Smith had once had (194–95).This argument points to Blythe's second contribution. The story of McDonald, Blythe argues, reveals that the culture of apocalypse is not only interesting in its own right; it has been a telling mechanism by which authority in the church has been determined. In response to McDonald and others like him, beginning in the early twentieth century, church leaders began to discourage lay visionary experiences, prophecy, and apocalyptic speculation, seeing such things not merely as unwarranted speculation but a dangerous source of charismatic authority that might undermine their own power.Blythe thus gives us a new master narrative of the history of the Mormon tradition, focusing primarily on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but at times also visiting Mormon fundamentalism and other schismatic movements. Though the content of this narrative is focused on prophecy, Blythe is more broadly interested in the problems of institutional and charismatic authority in a new religious movement, the same issues that have animated scholars of religion since Max Weber's seminal turn-of-the-century works on the development of new religions. While many earlier scholars of the Mormon tradition, and in particular of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, have viewed the process of the institutionalization of charisma beginning with the death of Joseph Smith and consummated, as Thomas G. Alexander has argued, in the opening decade of the twentieth century, Blythe rather views the process as a whole as cyclical, never resolved, a constant give-and-take between the laity and the leadership.This persists up to the present day. Some of the most worthwhile and original work in this book is in the last chapter. Like many works on the history of the Mormon movement, Blythe devotes probably an outsized amount of time to the nineteenth century. There he applies some interesting theoretical tools, looking at the martyrology surrounding the death of Joseph Smith and cultural geography to explore the colonization of the Great Basin. These chapters are interesting, but also can feel a bit disconnected from the primary arguments of the book as a whole, particularly as Blythe lays them out in the introduction. He is also here telling stories most scholars of Mormonism have heard before. It is when he begins to explore understudied material—for instance, the migration of near-death experiences into the religious life of LDS members, or the rise and popularity of the prepper movement—that this book really starts to break new ground and offer not simply new history, but new perspectives on the trajectory of the new religious movement that Joseph Smith founded.