Article – In Japan, the Mormon network gathers the flock

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

No doubt, the world comes to an end the most prepared and cohesive group is gonna be the Mormons.
If it weren’t for that whole beleiveing in god thing I’d join just for the networking opportunities. Sadly, no affiliate memberships are available.

The only thing that rivals the Mormon church’s ability to spread the word is its ability to cope with emergencies.
Within 36 hours of the earthquake striking off the coast of Sendai on March 11, the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced that all 638 of its missionaries in the country — 342 Americans, 216 Japanese and 80 from other nations – were safe.
Within a few days, the church also had accounted for all but about 1,000 of its 125,000 members in Japan.
“Whether it is Haiti or Japan,” said David Evans, a senior leader in the church who serves in the missionary department. “This is how it works everywhere.”
Chalk it up to a culture of discipline and emergency preparedness. The church has a detailed hierarchy and network that works in ordinary times to maintain cohesion among followers, and in disaster to locate them.

Dean Ing wrote a series of books that take place in a post-nuke America. The premise was that after the bombs fell, the most prepared would inevitably rise to power since they would be the ones most able to come out of the disaster in a position to rebuild as they saw fit. In the book, the US has become a Mormon theocracy and, like all theocracies, it deviates a bit from the ideal and becomes a bit sinister. I’d say its a virtual certainty, though, that if there is one demographic or social group that is most likely to come out of an apocalypse better than any other its probably gonna be them.

Anyway, good article. If you still havent taken advantage of your local Mormon cannery to assist you in stocking up, you may want to pursue that avenue.