Lapis Magazine

And the words "Apocalypse," "revelation" and "prophecy" are all related. And that's an important thing to understand, because it goes to a particular reading of the Book of Revelation. Now, apocalypticism comes from a religious base. It's woven into our political culture. You can trace it back to the Zoroastrians and the early messianic Jews. It gets picked up in early Christianity and, in the Bible, is found primarily in the last book of the Christian New Testament, The Book of Revelation.

But apocalypticism can be a drive of speaking truth to power. Apocalypticism can be confronting injustice or it can be built around demonization and scapegoating. And what I want to deal with is the different interpretations of biblical prophecy, and how they can be framed and reframed to achieve different political ends.

Ruby Sales writes about the difference between what she calls "imperial Christianity" and "liberation Christianity" and that goes to the heart of what prophecy is interpreted as within Christianity.

Apocalyptic millennialism is a particular kind of apocalypticism. Now, what that means is that there is a particular interpretation of the Apocalypse that is built around the idea of a thousand-year period. And how that thousand-year period, or this long period of time, perhaps a thousand years, is interpreted is incredibly important. Why? Because John of Patmos, who lived in a cave, had visions and he wrote them down, and he said that they were a revelation from God.

The people who put together the Bible originally thought that this was the same John who wrote the Gospel. Scholarship now argues that, perhaps, this is not the case. But no matter how you come down on the question of who John was, John was into some pretty heavy stuff.

I urge you to go read The Book of Revelation. I would point out that in the Catholic Church many versions of the Bible have this disclaimer at the beginning of The Book of Revelation that says: This is a magnificent, poetic work of all kinds of imagery, and you shouldn't read it literally.

The dilemma is, many Protestants have been taught to read it literally and look for signs of the end times. And this creates a certain problem because if you read The Book of Revelation in a particular way you can see it as a warning that, at a particular moment in history, Christians will find themselves in the situation of a literal struggle with Satan that will culminate in a battle of Armageddon. Now, specifically, Armageddon, the plains of Megiddo, is in the Middle East, and so a lot of biblical understanding or prophecy focuses on the Middle East

How do we know that the end times have arrived if we read The Book of Revelation in this literal sense of futuristic prophecy of something that we may experience in our lives as Christians? Well, there are signs of the times: there is sinfulness, there is depravity, there are wars and rumors of war, there are diseases.

There is a specific set of people who show up. One is the Antichrist, who is a very popular world leader, who is seen as building a one-world government, or a New World Order. And if you're really a little bit paranoid, you can take out your dollar bill and see words written on it that mean "New World Order." However, if you were taking Latin you'd get an F, because that is not really what it says. But a lot of people believe that to be true.

And during this period of the end times, the forces of evil get together and create a false prophet, who builds a one-world religion. And you can interpret, then, The Book of Revelation as the idea that in the end times, powerful political and religious leaders will sell you out. You have to be scrupulously on guard against being betrayed by powerful political and religious leaders, and you have to engage in spiritual warfare with agents of Satan. Now, most Christians don't read the Bible that way around the world. But in the United States, there is a particular group of Christians who do read the Bible that way.

The Millennium comes from the idea, then, of a thousand-year reign. Christianity is divided into those who are postmillennial and premillennial. Now, all that means is that if you believe in premillennialism, Christ comes back at the beginning of the Millennium and reigns and rules for a thousand years — the Millennium. If you're postmillennialist, you believe that Christ comes back after godly Christians have seized control of secular society for a thousand years.

Postmillennialists tend to be naturally politically active, because they think they have to take control of secular society and hold it for a thousand years, or a long period of time. Christian Reconstructionists, the Dominion theology, are postmillennialists who believe that they must take control of secular society.

Here's the catch — there aren't that many Christian Reconstructionists out there. The vast majority of Christian evangelicals in the United States are called premillennial dispensationalist. All "dispensationalist" means is "epoch."

"Premillennial" means they expect Christ to come back anytime now, and they're looking for the signs of the end times. What can the signs of the end times be? Plagues. Is AIDS a plague? Is AIDS a sign that we're in the end times? Natural disasters? The tsunami? Perhaps that's a sign that we're in the end times. Widespread immorality? Just watch "The 700 Club" — we're awash with immorality. So there are a lot of folks who have come to the idea that this is what is going on.

Premillennialists who believe in this have been hastened along by a very popular series of books by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins called The Left Behind series. And this series begins after something called the "Rapture" has taken place. Not all premillennialists believe in the Rapture. But if you do, you believe that when Christ is coming back there will be this moment when godly Christians will be pulled up into a safe heavenly embrace. And they will miss what are called the "tribulations" — some part or all of them.

Now, if you think you are going be raptured before the tribulations, why bother voting? Why bother becoming politically active? There is no theological reason, then, to become politically active. And the vast majority of Christian evangelicals in the United States are premillennial. And those that believe in the Rapture, what is going to motivate them to get involved?

Well, it turns out that premillennialists, as a major force in Christian evangelicalism are a relatively recent phenomenon. Throughout the history of Christianity, this has not been the major mode of thinking about the end times, and the study of the end times, which is called eschatology. What is it that gets these premillennialists back into the voting booths and back into political activism?

There are a couple things. One is that throughout history we have to understand that Christian participation in the political process is nothing new. If you are looking at apocalyptic forms of Christian evangelical behavior, or Christian activism, you can look at the abolition movement; you can look at "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" which is an apocalyptic anthem: "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord." That's the Apocalypse.

You can look at temperance; you can look at all sorts of periods where this kind of activism has had a very progressive outcome. And, of course, the most obvious example would be in terms of Frederick Douglass and the abolition movement using apocalyptic language. But Martin Luther King Jr. used apocalyptic language, and he used it for good to talk about speaking truth to power, to confront injustice so that there would be a very different world that followed.

This is to say, then, that apocalypticism, in and of itself, is not necessarily bad. Apocalypticism tied to demonization and dualism generally has a bad outcome. If you read The Book of Revelation there is betrayal by trusted political and religious leaders in the end times. They might be conspiring against you. And you see evidence of that in this idea of the Mark of the Beast, the number 666. In The Book of Revelation there is a particular interpretation of a passage that says: In the end times, Christians will be asked to betray the true religion and deny Christ. And they might receive a Mark of the Beast.

If that is the setup, you are creating a way of viewing the world that is completely dualistic. There is a good us, and we're with God; there is a bad them, and they're with the devil. And this creates a dynamic that is profoundly antidemocratic because where do you then get into a compromise and a debate with people who are working with the devil? What's the compromise?

Now, the idea of this kind of biblical understanding created a problem, because it was very hard, after the Scopes monkey trial, to get evangelicals active politically. Some of you may recall that the Scopes monkey trial was back many, many decades ago. And we tend to forget that pluralists, the democratic pluralists of the world, we lost the Scopes trial. Creationism was certified as the instructional method, not evolution.

But what happened in that struggle was that evangelicals and fundamentalists were stigmatized in the popular culture as irrational and stupid. Now, in fact, that wasn't particularly fair, but it was widely thought to be true, and so a lot of evangelicals and fundamentalists retreated from political participation in the 1930s. It's important, then, to look at what brought them back. It was the Cold War, and people like Billy Graham and others worrying that many evangelicals and fundamentalists were not participating and voting, and that weakened democracy against godless Communism. Therefore, there were all these get-out-the-vote campaigns. The Cub Scouts in the '50s did little get-out-the-vote, Liberty Bells on people's doorbells, to get people back into the voting booth.

But until the mid-1970s, you could not predict the voting pattern of a Christian evangelical or fundamentalist, based on their denomination or their specific religious beliefs. There was not a divide that could be measured statistically in a significant way based on denomination and religious belief.

That all began to change, partly because Jimmy Carter announced he was born-again. When Jimmy Carter announced that he was born-again, a number of previously nonvoting evangelicals and fundamentalists went back to the polls to vote for him, because they were so ecstatic that someone who announced themselves as born-again could be running for President. It legitimized their religious faith and their religious outlook in many ways.

What happened, of course, was these people, who in '64 had parlayed Goldwater into a doomed Presidential run, looked at what Carter had achieved by bringing voters back to the polls from the evangelical and fundamentalists communities, and they said: that's really powerful. We could organize people like that, too.

And these are conservatives — like Weyrich and Falwell. But they were faced with this theological problem: If you were a literal, Bible-reading Christian fundamentalist or evangelical, you needed a theological justification to engage in political activity of any sort. You can't just decide that you have two realms, the secular and the religious, and there is no connection. There is always a connection. So you need a theological justification for political participation.

Starting in the 1960s, the postmillennial Christian Reconstructionists, especially R.J. Rushdoony, began to write polemics at the broader premillennial community, and what they argued was that there was a failure to take back America for God. America was becoming increasingly secular, it was straying away from god, and, as postmillennialists, they obviously saw the need for political participation. They thought that people who didn't see that need, no matter what their eschatological outlook, no matter what their view of the end times, needed to deal with this in some way because they saw widespread sinfulness around America.

Rushdoony went and met with Francis Schaeffer who was a very popular theologian in Switzerland, and Schaeffer and Rushdoony had this dialogue about the proper role of Christians in a society that is increasingly secular. And Schaeffer started to write a series of books and appeared in a series of films that were very influential in the late 1970s, early '80s.

He appeared in these films with C. Everett Koop — at the time a neo-natal intensive care surgeon. What they argued was that Protestants had shown their failure to uphold God's will by their resistance to participating in the anti-abortion movement. And they did a series of films that argued that there was a connection between abortion, euthanasia, the Holocaust and slavery…. God, indeed.

What's interesting is that there was a pre-existing Catholic movement called The Seamless Garment Movement that also opposed abortion and euthanasia. But they also opposed war, nuclear weapons and the death penalty. Now, there is a completely consistent theology of life — you can make an argument for that. It's much more difficult to make an argument that you are against abortion, you are actually against euthanasia, but you are for the death penalty, you are for war and you are for nuclear weapons.

But they pulled it off — it's all about framing, after all. And they did it by distracting people, by trying to make the link with slavery and the Holocaust. These were very hot-button issues, tremendously emotional, real issues of oppression and genocide. So what they were able to argue was that if you are against slavery, if you are against the Holocaust, you should be against abortion.

These films were shown in Protestant churches across America and there began to develop this idea that political participation was necessary. But a theological element was still missing.

What Tim LaHaye did, when he was writing his nonfiction books, was to take this idea of political participation and say: Look. Sure, the tribulations are coming, and we believe that we're going be raptured up before the tribulations. But before the real tribulations, there are the pretribulation tribulations.

Now, if there are pretribulation tribulations, all bets are off. It doesn't matter when you think you're going be raptured, this is a whole other game. And in these pretribulation tribulations, there is a secular-humanist conspiracy, in league with the devil, to destroy Christianity before the Rapture. And if that happens, there will be no Rapture, there will be no Christians going to heaven, and we are all in deep trouble.

This is a very powerful argument. And so let's look at apocalyptic dualism, this particular reading of The Book of Revelation in which we think that there is a conspiracy of political and religious figures in the end times, and they are out to destroy America through this thing called secular humanism.

What is the evidence of this? Well, the evidence of secular humanism as part of the satanic plot domestically is abortion rights, gay rights, the feminist movement, any kind of acceptance of non-Christian religion. All of this is evidence, in domestic policy, of satanic attempts to destroy America.

In foreign policy what is it? According to Midnight Call magazine, not only are abortion and the feminist movement and gay rights all signs of the end times, and part of the satanic end-times plan to betray Christianity, but they imply strongly, and sometimes state outright, that The Antichrist is part of the system that is building world cooperation through the United Nations and other groups. They specifically think that the one-world religion of the Antichrist is probably Islam. Now, this provides a tremendous motivation for the war on terror. Because this is not just a war on terror, it is a war on the satanic religion of Islam.

I would think in a civilized society this would be recognized as outrageous religious bigotry, and the fact that it is not is terrifying to me. But, beyond that, if Christ is coming back for the premillennialist, where does Christ land? On the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. What is currently on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem? A mosque and several religious shrines.

This is how one gets into an intractable battle where there is no solution for the Middle East. If, in fact, Israel represents God's plan for the return of Jesus, there is no reason to have any criticism of any Israeli government policy whatsoever. If you think this is not important in the Bush Administration, I suggest you do a little reading into the role of Christian Zionism in building the most hardened kind of support.

I would urge you to understand that there are also people who are critics of Israel who are also outrageous anti-Semites. We need to find a balance here between being critical of Christian Zionism as a kind of plan for which there is no compromise and also, at the same time, be able to criticize those folks who invoke anti-Semitic imagery and criticism of Israel. I think that decent people can find that balance.

But the dilemma is, if you convert a battle over land, or policy or politics, into a struggle of cosmic good and evil, there is no compromise. And that is true in both foreign and domestic policy. If we frame our political enemies as agents of Satan, there is no compromise with them because we, of course, would be betraying our religion and our ethics by having any compromise. So I argue that this whole narrative needs to be confronted.

There are a couple of good books that talk about some of the specifics. With God on Their Side, by Esther Kaplan, is a litany of all of the domestic atrocities that have taken place. An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic Religion and American Empire is a Christian academic's look at the role of apocalyptic demonization in the Bush Administration's foreign policy.

It is important, then, to ask ourselves a question. If we are asking people on the Christian Right, especially Dominionists, to stop engaging in demonization, we need to inspect some of our own language. I am uncomfortable when I hear people of sincere religious faith described as "religious political extremists." What does that term mean? It is a term of derision that says: We're good and they're bad. There is no content. We are not talking about reproductive rights; we are not talking about separation of Church and state. It just becomes a label.

So when we enter into this dialogue over the outcome of these beliefs, and where it is going to take America, we need to avoid terms like "religious political extremists" or "lunatic fringe."

For some Christian Dominionists it is like triumphal hardball politics with a caffeine buzz, and that is really different from the Reconstructionists. So we need to be able to see the differentiation, to see the arguments that are going on, to be able to talk to those people who make up most Christians in America. These are people who are uncomfortable with a secular society but who are also deeply uncomfortable with the demonization and scapegoating that they hear on the Christian Right.