Mormonism's raveling and unraveling of a geopolitical thread

Salt Lake City Mormonism has long utilised its beliefs toward geopolitical ends. From its beginning in 1830, it never fully accepted the notion that religion exists primarily to promote private faith and moral interpersonal conduct. After a late nineteenth-century compromise between Mormonism and the American state, however, the movement's overt geopolitical agenda crumbled. Leaders and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints cast their lots with the national geopolitical agenda and, for a time, a uniquely Mormon geopolitical voice faded. By the decades after mid-century, however, a more coherent Mormon geopolitical message again emerged. This strongly Americanist discourse utilised Mormon doctrine and prophecies to point toward the last days and Zion's triumph. Yet new conceptions of global space often promote different geopolitical visions. This paper argues that post-Cold War Mormon geopolitical eschatology has diminished greatly on an official level, even if a more unofficial, less coherent discourse remains.