The "Peculiar People" Conundrum

Some spicy (?) takes on the end of the world, chosen people, and the concept of the enemy: "they."

When I was about fourteen, I gathered in my Mormon church building with the other youth of my congregation. We were sitting on metal folding chairs, and translucent windows let in the gray light from a rare rainy day in northern Utah. One of our youth leaders stood in front of us, giving a talk on the last days. He smiled at us.

“So, I’ve heard you’re the chosen generation,” he said. The chosen generation was a term I’d heard all throughout my youth—supposedly it referred to the group of Mormons, specifically, who would usher in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

“Yeah, well,” the leader said, sitting back on a table and crossing his legs. “They told me that when I was your age, too.”

While my peers around me laughed, I felt a deep sort of relief. The Second Coming sounded horrible to me. The world would burn and people who weren’t worthy would suffer. I was constantly questioning my worthiness, despite doing literally nothing against the teachings and rules I learned about each Sunday. The scriptures said Jesus Christ would gather his followers under his wing like a hen protecting her chicks, and still I couldn’t help but picture myself burning with all the rest of the heathens.

But if this leader was telling the truth, and other generations had also been told they were elite and chosen, perhaps I could die without witnessing all the calamities that would accompany the Second Coming. Perhaps I could be just another human who lived and died without ever meeting Jesus on Earth. I never told anybody about this fear, or this aversion to meeting Jesus. I knew it would be considered wrong, or that people would try to talk me out of my fear with the same stories I used on myself. Existential dread is not so easily swayed.

Unless my peers were also harboring unspoken fear about our religion’s narrative, everyone around me seemed pleased and honored to be part of the chosen generation. We were special, hand-picked for this specific purpose, born to raise up generations of faithful members that would help convert the whole world to Mormonism. I liked the Bible verse 1 Peter 2:9, which read,

“But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”

A peculiar people. That felt more real to me than a chosen generation or a holy nation. We were a bunch of weirdos with beliefs that, to an outside person, seemed rather strange. I could accept that. I could be the butt of the joke because I was in on the joke. I could wait until the afterlife to be proved right. There (if I was worthy…everlastingly up for debate) I’d galavant around the highest degree of heaven, knowing that those who rejected Mormonism were in lower kingdoms wishing they’d listened to our teachings.

I don’t know how to account for the skepticism I seemed to be born with. The church’s teachings always sounded nice and good and sometimes even wonderful to me. But I was always questioning (if even just in my mind), always looking at lessons through contrarian angles. And I always, always had a hard time believing that God’s chosen people were the Mormons, even if it was my religion, and even if I personally benefitted by being one of the special few.

I didn’t want to believe that God only loved 15 million of his children enough to grant them access to the highest degree of heaven. And yes, I can hear the apologists now: I know Mormon doctrine says God gives people several chances to join the Mormon church, even after death—but that didn’t make me feel any better about the people who lived and died for different world religions all throughout history. That brings in a whole slew of issues that led me to believe Mormonism was just another form of 1) Manifest Destiny and 2) Westward Expansion. I wasn’t a complete moron: I looked around and saw mainly white, upper-middle-class people, who were “special” and “chosen” by the world, and therefore it was easy for them to accept completely that they were special and chosen by God. It never sat right with me.

And I think, now, that’s the root of my youthful existential dread: I wasn’t just afraid I wasn’t worthy, I was afraid that Jesus Christ would come back to Earth, look deep into my soul, and know for certain that I didn’t believe in the Mormon story. I couldn’t hide it from him, even if I could hide it from myself for a little while.

I’ve been thinking a lot about these stories that we tell ourselves, these labels that we give ourselves—and the way they can create a victim-like mentality. If you’re part of the one true church, Satan will never leave you alone until you leave religion or until that church comes crumbling down. If you’re a peculiar person, anyone outside of your group will never understand you and constantly try to tear you down. The whole world is against you. The whole world is watching you. These are things I was told my entire life. It was literally us against the world.

There is always a “they” coming after us.

A “they” who wants what we have, even if they won’t admit it. A “they” who wants what we have torn down, even if they won’t admit it.

There’s a lot of discourse (which is maybe too nice of a word?) right now revolving around attacks on Christian beliefs, due to Charlie Kirk’s murder. To be honest, I didn’t even know who Charlie Kirk was until a couple weeks ago, so I really don’t have much to say about him or his shooting specifically. I do have to say that it feels like his murder has opened the floodgates for Christian paranoia. For some reason, this attack (rather than the other shootings attacking various Christian churches) has seemed to confirm the notion that “they” are against Christianity, and always have been.

The hashtag “I am Charlie Kirk” has been spreading, as Christians (including some Mormons that I know) are seemingly now able to conceptualize what it might be like to be attacked for their beliefs. We’ve whined about attacks on our beliefs before, with moments that are not actual attacks, like taking the word “God” out of song lyrics or, you know, constitutionally separating church and state. But finally, finally this specific shooting is confirmation that peculiar people are under attack.

The reality is that peculiar people are strong and in command. Every single president of the United States has belonged to some form of Christianity. Right now, “Christian” ideals (it’s up for debate how Christian the ideals actually are) are infused in our current administration, where again, constitutionally, they don’t belong. According to a Politico article, Trump has created a presidential commission on religious liberty, said out loud “Let’s forget about [separation of church and state] for one time,” established a White House Faith Office in the West Wing, invited pastors to pray in official government meetings, and taken executive actions to root out “anti-Christian” bias in the government. Trump is not an active church-goer himself.

According to a Pew Research Center study on the religious landscape of the United States, Christians make up 62% of the population. 7% identify as a member of another religion, and 29% identify as not being religious at all. Broken down even further, 74% of Republicans identify as Christian, and 50% of Democrats identify as Christian.

The narrative that Christian ideals are under threat seems quite overblown. I’m not a math person, but I can say with certainty, thanks to the above numbers, that the majority of Americans—regardless of political party—are Christians. This is not some fringe group being oppressed.

And yet, in much of the media I’ve seen, the narrative is that “they” are coming for Christianity in general. I don’t know who “they” are. Growing up in the Mormon church, “they” was Satan and his demon followers, or else some vague group of people in the world who wanted to see Mormonism, or Christianity in general, crumble. On social media, it seems like “they” may be referring to the radical left. “They” is starting to feel more like a nebulous force to me, some invisible threat that causes us all to spin around pointing at gusts of wind.

It’s when those Christian ideals are forced on other people that there begins to be a problem. That’s why the United States separated church and state to begin with—because founding fathers had witnessed the way religion can take over, limit peoples’ rights, and interrupt democracy.

“They” is a scapegoat, a necessary antithesis to chosen people. Having a common enemy, regardless of how real or fake it may be, is one of the easiest ways to keep someone inside of a group where it’s purportedly safe. And yet, it was inside a religious group that I felt most surveilled, most in trouble for having the audacity to believe something different than those around me.

It actually wasn’t a surprise to me that suddenly, we were due for a rapture. I was on a trip to the beach with friends this past weekend, and one morning, a friend came out breathlessly from her room, poured her cup of coffee, and told us she’d been up all night watching videos on TikTok about how the rapture was supposed to happen in just a few days. All the good Christians would be lifted into heavenly bliss. All the “theys” out there would suffer. Oh, and Charlie Kirk would be resurrected as the anti-Christ…still trying to untangle that particular element.

There have been a few of these raptures reported throughout my life—one was supposed to happen on June 6, 2006 (you know, 6-6-6), and one was supposed to occur in 2012 according to a misinterpretation of a Mayan calendar. I’m sure there have been others that I’m not aware of. Outside of religion, I can laugh at these ideas, and quote the scene in Parks and Rec where a doomsday cult keeps moving the end of the world date to whenever the park is free for their meeting.

There was no rapture, as far as I can tell. Or if there was, Mormons were not taken up and it seems like hell is already here, because everything has stayed the same. The chosen generation will move to the next, and then the next, and then the next, unless we can stop putting energy into that particular form of inertia and choose something different to believe in.

I’ll never forget what it was like to leave the Mormon bubble of Utah and enter “the world” out here in the DC area. I was so sure, based on my upbringing, that everyone outside of my religion would judge me, would be watching me, would hate me for what I tried to believe. But no one really knew anything about Mormonism, and once I told them, they gathered me under their wings as a friend and peer.

How radical.