In 1987 the band R.E.M. released a song called “It’s the End of the Word as we know it (and I feel fine)” You can listen here. I just finished reading book called “One Second After” by William R. Forstchen and this R.E.M. song kept coming to my mind as I read it. It is a work of fiction detailing one small community in North Carolina and how they survived after an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) weapon was set off 25 miles above the United States.
A brief overview of what an EMP weapon is, and what it does. An EMP weapon is a nuclear bomb that is detonated 25 miles or higher in the atmosphere. It produces high energy gamma radiation that then reacts with air molecules that release electrons causing the electromagnetic pulse. This pulse cannot be felt by the human body, and does no harm. There is no nuclear fallout or radiation contamination. What you do get is the total destruction or everything with a computer chip in it, and everything connected to the electric grid. So one well placed EMP weapon over South Dakota would effect the complete continental United States.
Any mode of transportation built after 1980 would not work. All cars except a few old ones would stop in their tracks. All airplanes would fall out of the sky. No trains. The electrical grid would go offline. With no electricity, there would be no water pressure in most places, no internet, no phones (landline or cell). This would not just be a temporary outage. The cars are irreversibly damaged. The electrical grid would take years to repair.
In the book One Second After, most large cities decayed into anarchy after just a few days. The quote “Every society is three meals away from chaos” is attributed to Lenin. After a year, about 80% of the population in the US was dead from starvation or disease. It was only 50% in the Midwest, but less than 10% in the large population centers of the East coast.
The book was praised for its realistic depiction of what an EMP could do to the US. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich wrote the forward, imploring the nation to do something to prepare for such an event. The way to prepare is to harden the electronics. But this is very expensive, and only the military does it for their equipment. The electrical grid could be protect for an estimated cost of $300 billion and 10 years of work. But nobody in the government has yet to have the foresight to do this, and they keep kicking the can down the road.
This got me to thinking what would the LDS Church do in such a case? Imagine a Church so centralized in one place (Salt Lake City) that is completely cut off from the rest of the world for years to come. There is no communication, travel is limited, and dangerous as all government has disappeared, with each city its own fiefdom run by whoever had the most guns at the time of the attack.
How would individual wards function without the constant guidance from SLC? I imagine the wards within shouting distance of the Church Office Building would get guidance. But what about a ward in California, or Maine, or Florida? What about Australia? Would individual wards still meet? Would people flock to Church with end-times feelings? After years of not hearing from SLC, how would the individual wards/stakes change?
What would happen if SLC was completely taken off the map with a nuclear bomb, along with all of the Q15? I’ve had a short story in my mind for years, and have even start writing it. It involves a nuclear bomb taking out SLC, and how a local ward in Southern California handles the vacuum of loosing the Q15 in one fell swoop. If I ever finish it, I’ll post it here.
So, what are your thought on the “end of the world as we know it?”
Wheat & Tares 
How would the Church do without electronic devices? It would prosper beyond belief.
The Church managed to function in my youth, when messages were conveyed by non-electronic mail and telephones. Some messages were even transferred by people speaking to each other in person.
What this would cause is a return to each ward, wherever it may be, being its own Mormon community in which the members worked and played together as a group. By necessity, they would decide what their community needed to prosper.
And then there is the obvious. If people could no longer watch Dua Lipa videos on their cell phones during sacrament meetings, the bishops would be forced to have speakers who were actually good speakers who can keep the members’ attention.
In addition, members would not be able to isolate themselves by watching meetings over zoom while they sit around in basements clad in little more than sweatpants and crocs.
What a community each ward would be. Most wards would be stronger than ever without the distractions of YouTube and Spotify. Of course, we need not wait until a disaster forces this on us . . . .
In a way, maybe this already happened. In WW2, the Saints in Germany were cut off from Salt Lake City. Both mission presidents (Americans) left the country, and both appointed local men to temporarily look after affairs. But both of those men eventually were lost, and what was seen as a temporary situation seemed that it was permanent. As I recall from my reading, in one of the missions, a majority of assembled district and branch presidents agreed they needed to appoint someone to preside — a few of the men were not in favor, thinking they had no authority and had to wait for SLC — but those men agreed to sustain the decision of the majority, and they did so. I read about this years ago — I think the source was a BYU paper.
Life goes on. If a location is not in regular order (a war, for example), and if the bishop (or branch president) is casualty, does the faithful father of an eight-year old baptize his daughter before he himself is sent to the front? Similarly, if a stake presidency cannot function, can Melchizedek Priesthood holders ordain other young as elders somewhere around their 18th birthdays? I say YES in both cases.
The precedent already exists. After WW2, Elder Benson of the Twelve went to Europe. We say he went to deliver welfare supplies, but that really isn’t true — he went to return the church to regular order. He had full authority to regularize affairs. We see the pattern in our modern handbooks (I haven’t read one recently, but I had to deal with a situation as a ward clerk a few years ago). The handbooks says that whenever a priesthood ordinance is performed improperly or under irregular circumstances, and when the time comes time to regularize affairs, the appropriate priesthood authority can either (1) ratify the ordinance; or (2) require it to be re-performed. It’s that simple.
So, a man who baptizes his daughter in irregular conditions such as I am contemplating acts appropriately and within the bounds of his priesthood — and the baptism is honored by God. Then, later, when the church in the area returns to regular order, the baptism can be ratified or re-performed for the purposes of entering it into the records of the church. Similarly, a young man being sent to the front an be ordained an elder by his father, or neighbor, and such ordination is honored by God. Later, with the return of regular order, the ordination can be ratified or re-performed (as well as any ordinations the young elder performed in the meantime).
I once raised this approach in an elders quorum for discussion on the priesthood responsibilities of fathers. Of course, most men in elders quorum say absolutely nothing, and it was that way in that lesson. One, a man who had a law-and-order mentality and professionally was a law enforcement officer, insisted absolutely NO to my proposition. Only a few very timidly admitted that I might have a point — and admittedly, all of them were hearing the proposition for the first time. But I think both the precedent and the handbooks support a YES — and even more importantly, common sense and an understanding of correct priesthood principles support a YES.
I asked the question to the adamant NO — if we were in such a condition of irregular order, and if I chose to perform a baptism for my 8-year-old daughter or to ordain my 18-year-old son, would he, as a fellow ward member and my neighbor, sustain my actions? Or would he deny the efficacy of the ordinances and treat my daughter as unbaptized and my son as unordained? He didn’t have a good answer, but I said i hoped he wouldn’t undermine me in front of my family and our community of saints, but would wait for regular order to be re-established and then a proper authority can decide to (1) ratify; or (2) re-perform.
In your fictional southern California situation, or in a real-life situation, I can imagine the local members will argue among themselves about how to proceed. I regret that few will take my approach, at least not at first, because — may I be candid? — our church culture does not support men (or women) thinking about things themselves and solving their own problems — our church culture seems to create a dependence on higher leaders, not an independence of individual saints who understand correct principles.
I agree that God’s house is a house of order, and I understand the role of higher church officials, but I think God Himself would be happy to see, at the level of the individual member of the church, a little more independence and a little more understanding of correct principles. I appreciate this article, because it allows for a little discussion of correct principles, and that is how correct principles are learned.
I’m not sure a single EMP over South Dakota would effectively destroy America. Would be interesting to find out the effects of Tsar Bomba on the Russian power grid. Of course there were no iPhones in 1961 but power grid technology here in the USA is based on 1950s technology even in 2025. Cars and airplanes act as faraday cages which is why passengers and electronics don’t get fried when struck by lightening. Enough functionality would remain for us to limp by until we find a new way to destroy ourselves. I’m holding out for a grey goo scenario, personally.
But… that’s not the point of the OP. If the church is effectively decapitated, if the 70 still had a majority alive I think the church would recover pretty quickly. I think there’s a scripture that says the 70 have the same authority as the 12, it’s just that it’s never been tested or used. It would turn into a month long debate not unlike the process of the cardinals choosing a new pope.
If the 70s were also destroyed along with the administrative structure of SLC then yeah the church would collapse into chaos. Local leaders would continue effectively for a while but over months or years schisms would appear. Stake presidents might try to unite and elect a new church governing body but they’d need Jesus to reappear and grant authority on the selected leader because I don’t know of any revelation that states the stake presidents have that authority or those keys.
On my mission Elder Wells of the 70 told me in an interview that the Q12 when set apart as apostles are told that they will be the prophet once they are the most senior apostle. I obviously have no way to verify that, but it casts the selection process in a new light.
well, the bomb thing and how it would destroy communications is right exactly my husband’s military experience, so fun discussion generated there, and the premise of the book is a bit off.
But that doesn’t change the discussion. Remember, people are not killed, just electronics, so nothing happened to church leadership and they will get fed in Utah in preference to most anybody else, so they are still alive when starvation sets in, so they have time to transition the church back to the 1800s.
ji,
My mother was raised in the church in Germany. She was five years old when the war started. She wasn’t baptized until after the war ended when they got a new mission president. It was a mass outdoor baptism on April 6th for all the children. I suppose someone thought this was a good idea in keeping with celebrating the anniversary of the church. My mother told me the only memories she had of her baptism were of how cold it was!
I have lots of family stories. I can attest that the ward members relied on each other one hundred percent. One example, they planted a field of potatoes and took shifts guarding it day and night. When the field was harvested each family got a 50 pound sack of potatoes which kept them alive in near starvation conditions. Talk about a ward activity!
On the subject of ji’s ratify or reperform scenario, there is actually a solid precedent for ratifying. In the last 10 years, DNA testing has revealed that a nontrivial number of us fail the “one drop” test and technically should never have been ordained to the priesthood. There has never been the slightest suggestion that we need to be reordained. Everybody just assumes that OD2 effectively ratified all of those ordinations, even though it says nothing of the sort. Unless a local congregation clearly strays into apostate territory, I think the incentive to quietly ratify priesthood activity in the OP’s scenario would be overwhelming.
BB, thanks for the story, and I hope not to see times like this. You tell us what happened on April 6th after the war ended. ji raises an interesting question. I’d like to change the scenario a little bit. Back up a year or two. It is 1943. BB is an 8 year-old girl in Germany, under Nazi rule. Imagine (for discussion) that her branch/district leadership is utterly non-functional because the men leaders are dead or away (sent off to fight, killed by bombs, etc.). Her father is an elder in the church, and he is a very good man, but there is no one to authorize a baptism. Imagine that BB has a 16-year-old brother whose last ordination before the war was to deacon. Their father is the last LDS man in the area, and he is leaving tomorrow for the Eastern front. He and his wife discuss, and he baptizes BB and ordains her brother a priest, with the hope that he will be able to offer the sacrament from time to time. Your city is bombed regularly by British and American aircraft. There has been no Allied landing in Normandy. BB is baptized and her brother is ordained an priest, and the father leaves. The saints routinely gather with a dozen or so saints to take the sacrament, and the 16-year-old boy is the only person in the room with the priesthood, and he offers to say a prayer on the bread and water and pass them to the women and children. Has the father sinned? Has he apostatized? Has he done wrong? If he dies in Russia’s snows, will his soul to straight to hell without proverbially passing go and without collecting $200?
Now change the scenario a little bit. You are a woman in that same branch. When this boy offers to say a prayer on the bread and water, do you take it with gratitude? Do you listen to the prayers, and offer a silent prayer of thanksgiving that you are able to take the sacrament, and pray that this sacramental ordinance can help you? Or, do you walk out because the boy has no authority to bless the sacrament? If you walk away, do you criticize and tell everyone else that they are deceived, that the devil is at work, and this this boy has no authority, and taking the sacrament from him is wrong?
I agree that after the Allied soldiers come into the area, that they can do a new baptism service, and the boy can be “properly” ordained to the office of priest, but that time hasn’t come yet, and you don’t have a crystal ball, so forget the future and focus only on the present. You spend many nights in bomb shelters. Did the man and his wife sin? Will God condemn them? Should fellow members condemn them? Or, did the parents do what they thought was right? What do we think God thinks about their actions? Should other members condemn them?
Georgis,
Thanks for your thoughts. All these things happened way before my time but maybe a little more context would help. My grandmother told me about attending meetings in people’s homes. Sometimes members got lost on the way because there were no more landmarks as the streets had been leveled from the bombings. Sometimes meetings were held in secret. It was an American church after all. So she left my mother, my aunt and uncle at home.
Bread? What bread? Bread was scarce. It was not unusual to use potato peelings for the sacrament. If you were lucky enough to have bread, you would take a piece of chalk and mark the underside of the loaf when you left the house. That way you would know if anyone had come along and stolen a tiny slice. Everyone did this.
My grandmother heard a rumour about a horse that had died in the street on the other side of town. She hurried over to join a long line of people. A man was on his knees beside the horse cutting out kilo sections of meat. My grandmother made stew that night. When my mother and my aunt found out where it came from they wouldn’t touch it. But when my uncle who was a young teenager came home he had two big bowls. No one told him.
There were constant air raids. My mother was wounded in her leg by shrapnel. My LDS grandfather who was away at war died in the gulag.
It’s very hard when you have been raised in a world of peace and prosperity, as I was lucky enough to have been and maybe you were too, to really imagine a place of such chaos and deprivation. My grandmother taught me that in war all bets are off because there is no one who is enforcing the rules. So you get to see the best and the worst of humanity. Both heroism and savagery.
There is a time and a place for organization. And Germans are known for being an organized people. But I just can’t imagine anyone worrying about micromanagement under those survival conditions. After the war, when everyone could breathe again, they were able to put things back in order. We are lucky today to have the luxury to worry about ordination dates.
As for the original post, LDS are good people. Based on what I know from the past, they will band together, figure it out, and get through it, come what may.
As many of you have said, and BB in particular, people are good, and they will figure out a way to get through it. That is how the book (after the third in the series) ends, with the people in this small town, after over 80% died, coming together, finding old computers that were not connected to the grid, and getting life back to normal. They got phones (local) working, they connected an old generator to the river and got electricity. They started raising crops, cattle, and lots of hunting. NYC was abandon, as was most of the cities on the east coast. Florida was completely gone, with over 90% of the population dead. But the people in this small mountain town lived on.
The book “Disaster” by Charles Manley Brown follows the reorganization of the church after all but one junior apostle is killed when a plane crashes into the temple killing the first presidency and 11 of the 12. It is a fascinating read.
About twelve years ago, I noticed that the conservatives in the ward were discussing EMP weapons in church and adopting survivalist mindsets. Anyone want to suggest a reason that W&T readers are now speculating in a similar fashion in 2025? Y’all are making me nervous!
An alternative to your last paragraph is a volcano under SLC. Part of the yellowstone system.
Also more likely scenario is just the destruction of “life as you know it” is the extreme droughts, floods, fires, tornadoes,hurricanes etc. Caused by 4 years of neglect of climate change by trump. In Australia we are being warned to expect/prepare for this, as global warming goes well past 1.5 degrees. So droughts in Utah then forest fires, then more extreme winters, and hotter drier summers with perhaps tornados?
The second scenario is that because of trumps activities America is isolated from the rest of the world trade wise. No electricity or cars from Canada or Mexico. No rare or heavy minerals( which means no mobile phones, no battery’s, or other high teck stuff needed for fighter planes. Do you have a national electricity grid? Without Canada’s cheap hydro power, would you have power 24 hours a day? Or brown outs?
It froze up before I was finished.
So the end of life as you know it could be coming without outside attacks.
As for the Church already increasingly irrelevant, not offering any guidance of how to avoid, or deal with the disasters you face.
In Australia we have a federal election next weekend. The polls are showing a return of the Labor government (I hope so). The opposition are too similar to trump though trying not to show it, and to a lesser degree.
re: Trevor and the prophetic selection process – the Q12 when set apart as apostles are told that they will be the prophet once they are the most senior apostle.
Thinking about this and papal succession/Conclave – I bet the families of Perry, Packer, Haight etc would like to see a voting process whereby white smoke is released from the top of the offices at 50 E North Temple.
Actually maybe they could ask Kevin W. Pearson to round up all remaining copies of “Visions of Glory” (Pontius) and start a bonfire and use that smoke instead. They could invite the downtown SLC community to roast weenies and have a hot dog eating contest. Anyone showing up with a bluetooth speaker playing Bon Jovi or a 7-11 drink would be given the Abinadi treatment.
Curious if Disaster (Brown) is as bad as the aforementioned book by John M. Pontius.
The problem I have with dystopian fiction is it’s rosy outlook. So what are my thoughts on the end of the world as I know it, hmm. We are the last hominid standing. I think the “others” will be hunted down and cruelly tortured to death by “good people”. Followed by much rejoicing and celebrating to the god they worship. Oh yes. community spirit. Rah, rah sis boom bah, Let’s slay another one.
That is if our AI overlords let us. Could an emp pulse save humanity? Nah, we’re doomed.
COVID killed any desire for me to continue in any belief of and discussion about the end times. My FIL was way big into this and he filled his home and his life constantly with more things just to prepare for the eventual collapse of society. He eventually died of COVID. He allowed himself to believe the right-wing rhetoric on vaccines and chose not to get it even though he was very vulnerable health wise already. But, once he got COVID and had to be put in the hospital where he remained for the rest of his days, he expressed deep regret for not getting the vaccine. My MIL, bless her heart, by extension, somewhat got into this same pattern of believing this end times stuff. Once her husband died, it’s been interesting to watch her go through this unloading process–not only of stuff, but from the constant influence of someone so certain of calamity being just around the corner. These are the people that got me to read Visions of Glory. They also encouraged me to read another series of books that was a compilation of random peoples’ visions of the end times and other peoples’ testimonies that these were true. Crazy stuff. I stopped reading when someone bore their testimony that what Glenn Beck says is all true. Couldn’t stomach that.
There was another book that tied into this so deeply called Conquering Spiritual Evil. That book was from some guy in Mt Pleasant who, I think, eventually went off after the Snuffer movement. The book is about how his daughter can constantly see spirits and can talk to them and it’s a how-to guide on dealing with all the evil spirits we can’t see. Come to find out, this daughter has also had terrible visions of the future where an EMP goes off. Calamity and destruction seem to be the consistent fever dream for so many very conservative, orthodox, christian believers. It is in the Christian DNA to always have an enemy to fight against and for bad things to happen. And it doesn’t have to be anything in particular, it’s always “the world.” Frankly, if things do actually collapse, I’m of the belief that it will be self-fulfilling prophecy. After my FIL died and I began my own reflections on the matter, I decided I was just done with it. I was done with fear and the constant barrage of doctrine that is always framed in fear. It was pointed out to me by a theologian that much of our church experience and our doctrine is framed in fear. That was an ah-ha moment for me. Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. Every Sunday in the LDS church it’s a steady dose of fear to keep people in community and faithful–and honestly, I don’t think most people realize the degreed poisoning (borrowing from the BoM) that fear has become in the church. I don’t think anyone realizes it is happening as much as it is. To be honest, with how extreme the conservative christian arm has become, if we were cut off from SLC and other things in the event of something really bad, I think there would be a tremendous amount of violence perpetrated in the US by that side of people as they have been conditioned for years to fear literally everything and everyone that are not like them. And they are armed to the teeth. The church has enabled this kind of fear and worship of power in the US. I think the church would be fine in other countries as they are used to being apart from the main body.
I do hope that if the 2nd coming is a real thing, that the Jesus of the gospels (not the one in Revelation) comes and shows a better way. But, I also hope that people realize that waiting for Jesus to come fix the problems they’ve either caused or perpetuated isn’t actually making things better, it’s really just abdication of personal responsibility and making things worse. As for whether or not baptisms will be acceptable and other minutia in times of disconnect and disaster–I guess that only matters if you really care to continue giving authority to one particular way of thinking and believing in God and religion. If baptism helps you show up as a better human being in this world for yourself and others and it’s not done by the “proper authority” according to one institution, I can’t imagine God would really care that much. But then again, taking God’s authority and wielding it to control others has long been a human endeavor.
Sorry, I’m reading this post and realizing I’m pretty cynical when it comes to discussion of the end times.
BB’s comments evoked a flood of memories. During several years in Germany as a child, a missionary and a married graduate student, I heard many accounts of the church during the Second World War. I knew and loved many people who survived horrendous conditions, including the Soviet gulags where Germans were sent after the war.
On my mission, the phrase “candlesticks on the sacrament table” served as shorthand for rumors of what leaders found when they returned to Germany after the war. The problem is: I don’t know if any of these stories were true. In retrospect they seemed more the imaginings of young Americans. My sense is people did the best they could and God blessed them with His spirit notwithstanding the handbook. Some congregations thrived in isolation; others withered.
Does God truly insist we worship in the correlated ways dictated in the church handbook? COVID showed us that insisting things be done in rigidly specific ways sucks the spirit out of our interactions and leaves so, so many people (e.g., women who live without “righteous” priesthood holders in their homes) on the wayside.
Another example: during my mission, the church introduced new translations of the Book of Mormon and Doctrine & Covenants. From one week to the next, the sacrament prayers changed materially as did like “repentance” which went from the harsh term “Buße” (which scans along the lines of “penance” and “restitution” and is a traditional religious word in Germany) to “Umkehr” which rings of “reverse course.” Did God care if two weeks after the change, the priest blessing the sacrament slipped into the older, now proscribed words?
Then some years later, the church published yet another highly literal translation of the Book of Mormon. The new book contained infelicitous phrases that further moved the Book of Mormon from a traditional scriptural language Germans intuitively understood in the direction of legalistic renderings that only a U.S. lawyer could love. (Sorry, lawyers, I’m just sayin….) The resulting work was joyless and flat. Indeed many older church members began using prior translations as a way of explaining the new to younger members.
I’d like to hope that after an EMT that cut off members in the U.S. from Salt Lake, congregations would connect with the Holy Spirit in ways that allowed God’s redemptive work to continue. The current übercorrelated church is as thrilling as a colorless, overly literal Book of Mormon translation that no one understands.
Sorry, but in a Mormon context, EMP just makes me think of Electronic Mission President, a pilot program Salt Lake is doubtless testing to use ChatGPT (sorry, I mean ChatJST) to run missions in place of pesky men who often do things like push baseball baptisms and deny missionaries medical care.
Meanwhile amidst the mass power outage in Spain and Portugal, the stories that are emerging are those of local people bringing food and drink to folks stranded on trains. Heartwarming stories of people pulling together and helping others.
In Humankind: A Hopeful History, the author points out that all these stories about about people eating each other after a a disaster are just that: stories. The documented situtations of show that people pull together and help each other. There actually was a group of kids that ended up alone on an island (much like Lord of the Flies). They worked together, helped each other, formed a little government, took care of the injured, etc.
Lily, that group of kids were self selected and had chosen to run away together. Very different to the situation in the novel.
Edit to say, I read the book you mention, and the author making the comparison of this group of boys to the boys in the novel left me feeling that I couldn’t actually trust the argument he was making. Unfortunately.