Quote:
Originally Posted by MikeWaters
I don't even know if Hinckley actually had conscious thoughts along these lines.
I'm suggesting, at least at a subconscious level, he was responding to this.
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Mormons are running into the same quandry as early Christians did when Jesus didn't return as quickly as they had expected. Uh . . . what now? So much was geared towards lasting until the impending judgment day that there was initially little planning for long-term organization.
Eventually, Christians organized and standardized along Roman political lines (still evident in Catholic terminology today - a diocese was originally a political district in the late Roman Empire)
Some decided to go mainstream, incorporating pagan ideas and festivals into their rites in order to fit in (e.g. Easter, Christmas, veneration of Mary) and appeal to a lot of people.
Some stuck to their guns, preferring martyrdom (a personal apocalypse, if you will) during one of the intermittent and sporadic persecutions.
Some decided to withdraw from society to live either as hermits, since the world sucks anyway, or in a community of monks (an oxymoronic construction if there ever was one).
I'm oversimplifying and cramming hundreds of years of events into a couple of sentences, and the parallels aren't perfect, but it's a basically a similar problem.