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How Is America Going To End?The Catholic Church helped preserve Roman civilization. Can Mormonism do the same for America?

By Josh LevinUpdated Friday, Aug. 7, 2009, at 7:00 AM ET

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Mormonism is an American religion. It was birthed in this country, and the church's missionary work has made the religion one of the most-recognizable American institutions around the world. If the U.S. government dissolves or the continent gets submerged by rising seas, the Mormons have more reason than most to stick around. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints holds that the framers of the Constitution were divinely inspired, that American Indians are partly descended from an ancient Israelite tribe called the Lamanites, and that upon his return, Jesus Christ will rule both in the old Jerusalem and on American soil.**

In Mormonism and the American Experience, Klaus J. Hansen refers to the church's vision of the continent as a holy land as America's "religious declaration of independence" Like the early Christians—a group the Mormons consider their direct ancestors—the early Mormons prepared for the end of the world as if it were coming next week, and coming to their backyard. In 1831, one year after the first publication of the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith received a revelation that the end times were nigh and that the New Jerusalem should be built in Missouri. Church newspapers soon began recording "signs of the times": earthquakes, epidemics, and steamboat explosions. The belief that the Messiah was coming, says LDS scholar Michael Austin, generated lots of enthusiasm from early believers. It also led the Mormons to do "a lot of incredibly stupid things." Austin says that Joseph Smith's conviction that the millennium was afoot may have contributed to the 1837 failure of the Kirtland Safety Society, an Ohio bank started by Smith that issued notes in a manner that bore no relation to the capital on hand.

The apocalypse didn't arrive in the 1830s or any other time, but Mormons have never stopped preparing for it. According to Austin, "pretty much every generation of Mormons has perceived itself as the last generation before the end times."

While the Mormons have never put their survival skills to the test during an authentic apocalypse, they have faced down continual threats to the religion's existence. Shortly after Joseph Smith's bank bubble, most of the Latter-day Saints consolidated in Missouri; the Missourians, fearful of a group they perceived as clannish, issued an extermination order that forced the Mormons out. In 1839, the LDS Church moved on to Nauvoo, Ill., where more amenable state officials briefly allowed the group to govern themselves. Five years later, Joseph Smith was murdered by a mob of settlers angered by the Mormons' quasi-theocracy and church leaders' polygamy.

Zoom forward to today, and the Mormons have transformed, incredibly, from vagabonds to the epitome of old-fashioned American values. Seen as honest and incorruptible, Mormons are recruited in great numbers by the FBI. Dubbed by Harold Bloom "perhaps the most workaddicted culture in religious history," they have proved spectacularly successful in both secular and Church business. (1999's Mormon America: The Power and the Promise pegged the church's assets at $25 billion to $30 billion.) They venerate the traditional family unit, rarely divorce, and live as much as a decade longer than the average American. They are just like us, only they're always on their best behavior.

The Mormons' assimilation began after Brigham Young and his followers journeyed west following Smith's murder. The LDS Church envisioned carving out a state of its own, Deseret, that would take up close to the entirety of present-day Nevada and Utah and large swathes of the rest of the Western U.S. Jan Shipps, the leading non-LDS scholar of Mormonism, describes the exodus to the West as a journey "backward into a primordial sacred time"—a re-enactment of the Israelites' trek through the desert.

American civilization soon extended westward to meet the Mormons where they lived. In 1848, the U.S. gobbled up all of modern-day Utah as part of the spoils of the Mexican-American War. The federal noose tightened on the Mormons once again, with only the Civil War offering a respite from increased enforcement of polygamy laws. In 1882, plural marriage became a federal felony. Eight years later, with the church under increasing federal pressure to abolish the practice, then-President Wilford Woodruff declared that Mormonism's age of polygamy was over.

The end of sanctioned polygamy jolted the church into modernity. By the middle of the 20^th century, the Mormons had become more "American" than any other Americans. In a 2008 New York Times Magazine feature, Noah Feldman suggested that prejudice against the idea of a Mormon president might push the LDS Church to move "even further in the direction of mainstream Christianity." That theory, though, doesn't reflect the everlasting pull of pioneer-era Mormonism. In The Angel and the Beehive, Armand L. Mauss argues that assimilation brought about a "new predicament of respectability … rather than the old one of disrepute." Starting around 1960, the Mormon leadership renewed its emphasis on genealogy and the missionary program in an attempt to maintain Mormons' "identity as a special people."

Jan Shipps says the allure of yesteryear means Mormonism is always 25 to 30 years behind the rest of America. The church's strong stances against the Equal Rights Amendment and gay marriage, she argues, show that the Latter-day Saints lag behind the country's mores. (There's also the BYU dress code, which bans sleeveless clothing.) If and when the end of America comes, Mormonism will go even more retro—just as the end of polygamy brought the LDS Church into modern times, the dissolution of the United States would send them into the past. The Latter-day Saints' oscillation between contemporary society and their pioneer days makes them the perfect time capsule: They will always retain a piece of the American character, yet they have enough of a toehold in the past—and enough grain in the silo—to resume their pre-modern ways.

If the Mormon Church does someday become a proxy for the United States, what parts of American civilization will survive? "Things that used to be American—motherhood and apple pie—would be restored to primacy," Orson Scott Card says. Perhaps the wholesome Osmond family will come to represent the pinnacle of American entertainment, and Stephen Covey—the Mormon writer behind The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People—will be hailed as our society's leading philosopher. Long sideburns will forever recede from memory. More seriously, a Mormon society would continue to speak English, to spread the gospel of capitalism, and to put forward the idea that America was and is a sacred place, a nation worth remembering and preserving.