Please join us in welcoming our newest permablogger, bfwebster. This is his inaugural post at Mormon Mentality.

— Mormon Mentality Administration

Millennium — A thousand years of genealogy, temple work, proselytizing, and filling out reports, a prospect that can make wickedness and destruction look downright enticing. — Orson Scott Card, Saintspeak: A Mormon Dictionary (Orion Books, 1981)

Let me start by clarifying my premises. I fully believe in the prophecies regarding the tribulations of the last days preceding the second coming of Jesus Christ, as well as Christ’s reign upon the earth during a thousand-year period (the “Millennium”), to be followed by a great war and the transformation of the earth itself. I also think that the Book of Mormon events recorded in Helaman and 3rd Nephi are an effective type and shadow of the last days (and that Mormon deliberately cast them as such).

That said, we (as Latter-day Saints) really don’t know a lot of details about the Millennium, and I suspect that a lot of what we “know” is mistaken or, at least, overly simplified. Restoration or no, the early Church inherited much of the conventional conservative Christian scriptural interpretation (e.g., the ‘4004 BC’ chronology), rejecting portions only as specific revelations made it clear to do so. As part of that, we inherited much the conservative Christian viewpoint of the Millennium.

First point: based on a few highly metaphorical and symbolic verses in Isaiah (11:6-9; also 65:25; quoted twice by Nephi), many conservative Christians — and many Latter-day Saints — believe that lions will really eat straw instead of other animals during the Millennium. This just doesn’t make sense to me on many levels. It’s clear that — the terrestrial/paradisiacal state notwithstanding — we will still be mortal (though we’ll have the ‘twinkling of an eye’ resurrection option — D&C 63:50-51) and we will still have agency (else we couldn’t have the great war at the end of the Millennium — D&C 43:31). In that light, I just don’t see some magic transformation that would somehow convert the entire global ecosystem into a vegetarian-only ecology (which is almost as problematic as the “no death anywhere” ecology posited by many for the pre-Fall Earth). I’m not even sure that we humans will all become vegetarians, though I suspect that the ‘eat meat sparingly’ part of the Word of Wisdom will be honored a bit more than it is now.

Second point: as I’ve written elsewhere, I don’t believe that Christ is going to come, wave a magic wand, and restore the earth to its ‘paradisiacal glory’ overnight. Instead, I believe that we’re going to have to clean up the mess we made and that it will be a work of many generations.

Third point: we tend to have a vague image of going back to a pastoral lifestyle in the Millennium (Micah 4:4: “But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree…”), or possibly even a post-apocalyptic lifestyle. I disagree. Technology and industry are not going to vanish away, regardless of the level of tribulation; I do believe they will get cleaner, but that will be a side effect of getting more advanced. Likewise, knowledge and science will, I believe, increase, not decrease, during the Millennium. In fact, one may argue that the Millennium will bring or coincide with a ’singularity’-level advance in technology. We may even need singularity-level technology to clean up our own mess and avoid making new ones.

Fourth point: LDS prophets have been clear that much (if not the majority) of the earth’s population, post-Second Coming, will be non-LDS, and that we’ll have lots and lots of on-going missionary work to do. Again, we tend to think of that missionary work happening very quickly; I’m not so sure. I keep going back to Carol Lynn Pearson’s poem, “Proof”:

Proof
Is not the need
Of this unbelieving world.

Though Christ Himself
Comes in evidence,
There will be many
On that day
Whose knee will bow,
Tongue will confess,
And heart
Will turn away.

Turning to the Book of Mormon, it’s worth remembering that while Christ’s visit was followed by the establishment of a Zion society that lasted for about 200 years, there were civilizations throughout most of North and South America — and probably some in Central America as well (assuming a Mesoamerican setting) — that did not go through that conversion. So while I do believe that the Gospel will cover the earth, with Christ reigning over all the earth, I also suspect that the global conversion process — much like the paradisiacal cleanup — will take generations.

Fifth point: Nephi states that Satan will have no power during the Millennium “because of the righteousness of [God's] people” (1 Nephi 22:26). This parallels the Zion society in the Book of Mormon that, as noted, endured for 200 years. So — what will happen at the end of the Millennium that will cause Satan to be “loosed” (D&C 43:31)? Will it be pride, as with the BofM Zion society? Ennui? And what will become of those who knowingly rebel against God in a world where Christ has reigned personally for a thousand years?

So — giving the premises I stated at the start of this post, what do the rest of you think the Millennium may be like and how it may differ from standard conceptions? ..bruce..