On the Box: These Scary, Scary End Times

There are two things that are on my mind after listening to testimony meeting yesterday. I have wondered about these two things for a while, but wasn't really sure what to say about them. Maybe I still don't really know what to say about them, but I feel compelled to say something (a line I heard several times yesterday).

The following are things that I have heard every single week in church and read in myriad articles and blog posts by devout Mormons:


"I am so grateful that our latter-day youth are so strong in their faith. They will need that faith to see them through all the terrible things happening in the world today."

"It is essential that we are diligent in our fasting and praying. The adversary is among us stronger in these latter days than he ever was."

"The world is getting scarier and scarier by the day with ever-increasing misery, sadness, and suffering."

"Thank goodness we have the scriptures to give us comfort in these last days. It's a terrible world out there, and it's only getting worse."


To listen to so many of these people, one would think that we were daily being attacked by rabid bears, that babies were popping out with three heads, that cannibalism was becoming the norm in civilized society, that people were having sex on street corners, that we are on the verge of living a "Hunger Games" scenario. Seriously!

Where is it all? What is it that is so terrible? Are things really getting "worse by the day"? Is life so miserable?

For a comparison point, I can compare this to the supposed sudden onslaught of cases of autism. Numbers of children diagnosed with autism has "skyrocketed," yes? Well, maybe, but when one looks at other factors, it appears that maybe it hasn't skyrocketed at all. For one thing, kids are being diagnosed earlier. There is something called Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), which places a whole slew of symptoms under the autism umbrella that never were there before. Prior to 1944, the year a doctor first described and named the disorder, people still had autism; they were just called "insane" and were treated as such. People are more aware now, and parents are on the lookout for anything that seems amiss in their children (addicted to categorizing and diagnosing as we are these days).

To relate this idea to myself, as another "sign" of the end times, I've been hearing a lot that homosexuality is "on the rise." Really? More people are gay now than ever before? I don't think so. More people are coming out, yes. More people are living openly according to their true natures, yes. Fewer people are allowing themselves to be stuffed into society's neat and tidy boxes of hetero-normative gender roles. At first glance, it may very well appear that there are more gay people now, but there aren't more gay people. They just aren't in the closet anymore.

So is the world a worse place now than it was 50 years ago? It it worse than 10 years ago? Is it, as some hardcore religious folk would have us believe, worse than it was last year?

Or does news just travel faster now? We have the world at our fingertips. Were bad things not happening when our parents were kids? Or did fewer events get covered because news coverage wasn't as easy and taken for granted as it is today? Are crime rates really going up, or do we have better police officers with better detection and tracking tools? Are there more earthquakes and tsunamis and floods? Or are news stories shoved in our faces everywhere we look?

I honestly do not get it. What is so freaking terrible?? Maybe you should watch a little John Green to hear about how great and amazing the world is right now:

Secondly, about the latter days thing, for how long will it be "the latter days"? Will people still be saying it is the latter days in another 100 years? another 500 years? another 5,000 years?

For HUNDREDS upon HUNDREDS of years, evangelists, priests, "prophets," and others have been saying that the end is near, that people need to repent, that people need to prepare themselves, etc. When I was a kid, my Sunday school teachers would say things like, "No one knows when it will happen, but I'm pretty sure it's going to be before the year 2000." I also heard, "The second coming will definitely happen before the current generation dies." This "Latter-Day" church was founded in 1830, that's 184 years ago. They believed it was the latter days, that the end was upon them. Now, we are hearing the same thing: "Prepare yourselves! The second coming is so close! We have to gird ourselves for battle with the adversary!"

Growing up, I was told by church leaders that my generation was a chosen one, that there was a reason that we were placed on the earth to fight this final battle, that we were the strongest, most faithful spirits in the preexistence. Now, as a 36-year old, I am hearing church leaders say the exact same thing to today's youth. They in turn will say the same to their children, who will say the same to their children, and this will continue ad infinitum.

It is one thing to wait for and hope for and look forward to a second coming, but, to me anyway, it is an entirely different thing to keep saying over and over and over that these are the "last days of this dispensation," making the world out to be a terrible, awful, depraved place full of nothing but evil and strife and discord in order to force our collective, confirmation-bias-loving psyches to see "signs" that may not be there at all.