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Hymns are useful evidence of religious practice. Hymns are a basic element of personal devotion, but at the same time the compilation of the hymnbook is carefully monitored by church leaders and the performance of hymns is modeled during the sessions of General Conference and other broadcasts, so hymns lie somewhere between high theology and lived religion. Our hymnbook provides an insight not quite like any other source on what Latter-day Saints believe.<\/p>\n
And the hymns of the church are strongly apocalyptic. Keep in mind, however, that \u201capocalyptic\u201d does not simply mean<\/a> the belief that the world is ending tomorrow. There is also no agreement about some benign \u201ceschatology\u201d to contrast with sinister \u201capocalypticism\u201d; as far as scholarship goes, it\u2019s all just one form or another of apocalypticism (much as the proper term for someone who believes that God brought the universe into its present form through the Big Bang and natural selection is “creationist”).<\/p>\n A hymn can be apocalyptic in a number of ways:<\/p>\n With that in mind, what portion of our current hymnbook is in some sense apocalyptic? By my count, around 40% (138 out of 341 hymns, including choral arrangements) have at least one apocalyptic allusion. The hymns with apocalyptic notes include sacrament hymns (\u201cJesus, Once of Humble Birth\u201d [196<\/a>], with the line \u201cNow he comes on earth to reign\u201d) and Christmas carols (\u201cJoy to the World\u201d [201<\/a>], with the line \u201cHe\u2019ll come and make the blessings flow\u201d).<\/p>\n There are of course edge cases, and people can reasonably disagree with how I decided whether some passage or another counted as apocalyptic. Is every reference to \u201clatter days\u201d necessarily apocalyptic? (Yes, I would argue, it is, because the \u201clatter days\u201d are embedded in a framework of salvation history that knows only three events, the Creation, the Crucifixion, and the Second Coming, and if you situate yourself later than the meridian of time, your only option is to anchor events somewhere along the final approach toward the Last Days. In our other religious framework for measuring cosmological times, the succession of dispensations, “latter days” still lands you at the end of the story.)<\/p>\n\n