The vulgarity and low character of Donald Trump are famously at odds with the values and teachings promoted by the Church, but another area of conflict has been less apparent despite its impact. For the Church, the Trump presidency is an apocalyptic catastrophe in the technical sense: at least a postponement and potentially a mortal blow to the eschaton we thought we were approaching.

The shift towards isolationism, detachment from former allies and alliances, renunciation of promoting democracy and human rights in favor of transactional advantage and spheres of influence, embrace of foreign dictators and ethnonationalist politicians, and general disdain for all other nations has not just stranded the internationalist wing of the Republican Party. It also hinders the Church from achieving its core identity.

Of course BYU-Hawaii can’t fulfill its religious mission of international education if student visas are denied, and obstructing the travel of missionaries and general authorities will hinder the Church’s accomplishment of its missions. But something much more basic is at stake.

The Church is currently looking forward to multiple high-profile events over the next decade, from the bicentennial of its founding to the next Salt Lake City Olympics, as opportunities for another turn in the spotlight. This is not just a media strategy. This is the core identity of the Church: to be a light to the world, for all nations to come up to the mountain of the Lord’s house, for Zion to be built upon the American continent. To be the restored church of Jesus Christ in the latter days hard-wires internationalism into the Church’s basic self-conception. It’s no accident that one of the few Republicans calling for the continuation of America’s international leadership is former ambassador and Arizona senator Jeff Flake.

To a degree we can only recognize now that it is slipping away, Francis Fukuyama’s end of history has been incorporated into our End of History. A world of enduring peace between liberal democracies where nations can attain higher levels of health, prosperity and education within a stable international order based on rules, free trade, and defensive alliances, a world becoming freer and more interconnected, is a world in which the Church can send missionaries to nearly every nation, find converts attracted to its messages, and start wards and branches.

This ending, the good ending, is the future you sold off for a mess of border conflicts and oppressive tyrants when you voted for Donald Trump. The world in which the good ending was possible is now receding into the past. You can’t build a temple in a city under siege, you can’t publish the Book of Mormon under a hostile censor, and you can’t preach the gospel if freedoms of speech, religion and association are not respected.

Look at the meetinghouse locator on the Church website, and you will find blank spaces where multiple wards once existed in Mariupol and Melitopol. Today the meetinghouse in Sumy is just over 10 miles from the front lines. And there are more red dots at risk of being swept off the map in every conflict zone where militant expansionists, who once worried about international sanctions, now see a chance to establish their own spheres of influence, from the conflicted Armenian-Azerbaijani border to the northern tier of sub-Saharan Africa, where a series of military rulers is steadily losing ground to Islamic State or Al Qaeda-aligned rebellions. In a world that has been carved up into spheres of influence, many of the dots on the meetinghouse locator will be erased by war, as in Ukraine, or by oppression, as is likely to happen across Russia and parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, after the United States has withdrawn to its own sphere of influence.

Liberal democracy and a rules-based international order are of course younger than the Church, and much younger than Christianity. The Church can still spread its message without them, just as the gospel was preached long before European philosophers imagined and American revolutionaries implemented a better way for countries to govern themselves.

But you and I and the Church are not ready for that kind of world and the sacrifices it required to live and preach the gospel. We are not ready to face the stark choice between renouncing our commission to preach the gospel, or cooperating enough with dictators to avoid their wrath as long as possible. The retreat of democracy and human rights will mean an age of confessors, exiles and martyrs, of saints persecuted for their faith or targeted for violence. Are you prepared to take them in? to stand with them?

This is what we rejected, and what we chose instead, when we re-elected Donald Trump. May God forgive us for our folly.