A managerial apocalypse: Mormon Missionaries, eschatological anxieties, and covid-19. Issue 2 (3rd April 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Bialecki, Jon
• Is Part Of: Religion. Volume 52:Issue 2(2022)
• Page Start: 306
• Page End: 321
• Publication Date: 2022-04-03
• Subjects: Mormonism -- millenarianism -- covid-19 -- missionaries -- sovereignty; Religion -- Periodicals; Religions -- Periodicals; Theology -- Periodicals; Religion -- Périodiques; Théologie -- Périodiques; Religion; Religions; Theology; Electronic journals; Periodicals; 200.5
• DOI: 10.1080/0048721X.2022.2051800
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0048-721X

Abstract

ABSTRACT: When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had over 50, 000 missionaries in the field. The global organizational challenge created by this dispersal was made worse because the organs of Church governance were located the State of Utah. This situation was exacerbated by an uptick in the always latent yet also constiutiave apocalyptic anxieties central to the faith. Drawing on interviews with Mormon Missionaries who were either in the field or in training at the time, this essay thinks through the temporality of what Joel Robbins has titled 'everyday millennialism.' Tracking the ebbs and flows of eschatological worry amongst missionaries that occurred during the pandemic, this piece identifies how disruptive fears of an end-times associated with a Mormon sense of themselves as a nation-like 'peculiar people' counterintuitively drives the organizational energies of the institutional Church, reigning in that very same apocalyptic affect and ideation.