RT Article
T1 A managerial apocalypse: Mormon Missionaries, eschatological anxieties, and covid-19
JF Religion
VO 52
IS 2
SP 306
OP 321
A1 Bialecki, Jon 1969-
LA English
PB Routledge
YR 2022
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1800994893
AB 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.
K1 Sovereignty
K1 Missionaries
K1 Covid-19
K1 Millenarianism
K1 Mormonism
DO 10.1080/0048721X.2022.2051800