A History of the End of the World (33 page)

Visions of what will happen when Christians are suddenly removed to heaven might be horrific—“bursting graves, crashing planes, and cars careening out of control”—or rhapsodic. “In one Rapture painting,” writes Paul Boyer, “the lawnmower-pushing suburban husband gapes in wonder as his aproned wife soars over the clothesline to meet Jesus.”
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And the modern counterpart of a medieval best seller like
Fifteen Signs of Doomsday
was a handbook titled
How to Recognize the Antichrist.

Youngsters in fundamentalist households were reared from early childhood in constant and urgent anticipation of the end of the world. “Many who were raised as premillennialists can tell horror stories,” explains Timothy P. Weber, “about coming home to empty houses or finding themselves suddenly alone in department stores or supermarkets and instinctively concluding that Jesus has come and left them behind.”
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And novelist Rhoda Huffey, whose mother and father were both Pentecostal preachers, recalls the mind-set of an anxious eleven-year-old girl growing up with the conviction that she would be left behind when her parents were raptured to heaven:

“If the Christians had left, there was still one more way, which involved chopping off your head,” writes Huffey in her semiautobiographical novel,
The Hallelujah Side.
“This was in Revelation, the horrible book. The Anti-christ rode up on his dark horse to brand your forehead with the Mark of the Beast, 666. If you refused, he cut off your head with a hatchet and you went to heaven immediately. So there was nothing to be afraid of.”
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But the apocalyptic subculture was not confined to sermons, tracts, and comic books, however colorful and imaginative. Like the Millerites, who made good use of the latest high-speed printing presses in the mid–nineteenth century, the doomsayers of the twentieth century were quick to embrace the latest technologies of mass communications. As early as 1936, for example, one enthusiastic preacher pondered the famous prophecy in Revelation—“Behold, he cometh with the clouds; and every eye shall see him”
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—and then offered his own explanation of what the biblical author really means to say: “In the past we had to fall back on the explanation that it does not necessarily mean that all should see the Lord coming in the clouds of heaven at the same time,” the preacher explained, “but now we know that by Television, that beatific sight can be seen the world over at one and the same moment.”
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Some of the very first programs to be broadcast over the newfangled invention called radio were devoted to old-time religion. The Moody Bible Institute, for example, started broadcasting in the early 1930s over its own powerful radio station, and a hard-preaching radio show called the
Old-Fashioned Revival Hour,
originating in Long Beach, California, was heard over some 450 stations across the United States by the 1940s. Even the CBS radio network carried a weekly program on religion hosted by Donald Grey Barnhouse (1895–1960), the editor of an apocalyptic magazine titled
Revelation.
“If atomic bombs fall upon our cities,” declared Barnhouse, “we shall be in heaven the next second.”
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Some of the most charismatic pulpit preachers discovered the power of television and thereby turned themselves into authentic superstars in Christian circles. Oral Roberts (b. 1918) and Billy Graham (b. 1918) can be credited with the invention of televangelism; both started their ministries as tent revivalists but moved on to radio in the 1940s and television in the 1950s. A whole generation of fundamentalist preachers followed their example, the most famous (or notorious) of which include Pat Robertson (b. 1930), Rex Humbard (b. 1919), Timothy LaHaye (b. 1926), Jimmy Swaggart (b. 1935), Jim Bakker (b. 1939), and Jerry Falwell (b. 1933), the latter of whom came to be described as “the prince of the electronic church.”
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All of them couched their preaching (and their fund-raising appeals) in distinctly apocalyptic terms, playing on the fears and hopes of their electronic flocks in precisely the same way that the author of Revelation addressed his first readers and hearers. Ironically, both the daily newspapers and the Saturday-afternoon science-fiction flicks seemed to reinforce even the most urgent prophecies about the end of the world. “We may have another year, maybe two years to work for Jesus Christ,” warned Billy Graham during his 1950 crusade, “and [then] ladies and gentlemen, I believe it is all going to be over.”
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The apocalyptic idea in Christian fundamentalism has always remained on the far side of a certain cultural divide in America. Like the author of Revelation, who detested the classical civilization in which he lived and preached, the latter-day readers of Revelation condemned some of the most celebrated features of American civilization. They feared big business, big government, and big labor; they were revolted by the entertainment that was available in the local movie houses, over the radio, or on television; and they adopted the “language arsenal” of Revelation to denounce the sinful and satanic world in which they found themselves.

A few American doomsayers, of course, have always accentuated the positive when it comes to the end of the world. The millennial kingdom, for example, is sometimes advertised as a celestial version of the American dream: “Everyone will be self-employed and will enjoy the full fruitage of his own labor,” declared one preacher. “Every single inhabitant of the world in that age will be independent, own his own property and his own home, and provide for his own family in abundance.” Another preacher optimistically calculated that “the ratio between the eternally lost and saved would be 1 in 17,476.” And an evangelist associated with the Moody Bible Institute conceded that “the Lord is going to judge America some day,” but he insisted that “we are justified in hoping our country will be spared and that Americans will share the joy of the kingdom.”
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But the embers of resentment and revenge that burn at the core of Revelation always seem to explode into flames. “The United States has departed a-whoring after strange gods,” declared pioneering radio preacher Donald Grey Barnhouse shortly after the end of World War II. “The greed of the labor unions, the lust of Hollywood, the debauchery of the masses cry to high Heaven for judgment.”
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One preacher, sermonizing in 1949, blamed the public schools—“Godless, Bibleless, Christless”—for “clearing the path for Antichrist.”
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And M. R. DeHaan, the author of a 1963 apocalyptic novel titled
The Days of Noah,
attributed the moral decay of America to “women leaving their homes and children to enter factories and shops and offices” and described “people going almost completely crazy under [the] spell” of popular music: “Squeaks and squawks and empty groans and baby talking and monkey moans.”
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Stripped of its sugarcoating, the apocalyptic vision of America is a weapon in the culture war between fundamentalism and the modern world: “God is going to judge America for its violence, its crimes, its backslidings, its murdering of millions of babies, its flaunting of homosexuality and sadomasochism, its corruption, its drunkenness and drug abuse, its lukewarmness toward Christ, its rampant divorce and adultery, its lewd pornography, its child molestation, its cheatings, its robbings, its dirty movies, and its occult practices,” declared evangelist David Wilkerson in 1985. “America today is one great holocaust party, with millions drunk, high, shaking their fist at God, daring him to send the bombs.”
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All of the perceived ills of contemporary America were stitched together by some apocalyptic preachers into one vast web of conspiracy, with Satan planted invisibly but unmistakably at the center. At one time or another, the elements of the “cosmic conspiracy to install the Antichrist” have been said to include bankers, biofeedback, credit cards, computers, the Council on Foreign Relations, feminism, Freudian psychology, the human-potential movement, Indian gurus, “international Jews,” lesbianism, the Masons, Montessori schools, secular humanism, the Trilateral Commission, Universal Product Codes, and the United Nations—and the list is certainly not comprehensive.
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Even
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
long ago proven to be a work of crude anti-Semitic propaganda concocted by the secret police of imperial Russia, still surfaces now and then in apocalyptic circles.

Indeed, the conspiracy theory begins in the text of Revelation, where the author alerts his readers and hearers to the dangers of “the deep things of Satan” and warns them against the invisible working of Satan’s will through the creatures who are his agents and deputies.
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And so each new and unfamiliar phenomenon in postwar America could be seen by apocalyptic true believers as yet another manifestation of the same satanic conspiracy. Thus, for example, the technological revolution that brought computers into every aspect of American life inspired some readers of Revelation to regard credit-card numbers and pricing bar codes as “the mark of the beast.” After all, as the author of Revelation writes, “no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name”
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A few visionaries even insisted that “Antichrist would
be
a computer.”
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But, paradoxically, the conspiracy theories were actually a source of comfort—“an anchor…in a world of uncertainty and doubt” for men and women who were confused and disturbed by the cultural and political upheavals of postwar America.
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Where a secular observer sees a “subtext of conspiracy, paranoia, and social alienation” in apocalyptic preaching, the true believer sees a revelation that invests history with “drama and meaning,” according to Paul Boyer. Indeed, otherwise comfortable and complacent Americans whose only afflictions are boredom and ennui are attracted to the chills and thrills of Revelation, and they find meaning in an otherwise meaningless world by embracing the old apocalyptic idea that “history is following a clear trajectory determined by God and that it is headed toward an ultimate, glorious consummation.”
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Still, the antics and alarms of Christian doomsayers in postwar America were all but invisible to the audiences that laughed out loud at
Dr. Strangelove
when it was released in 1964. Of course, even a worldly or wholly secular family might be called upon by a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses going door-to-door with a supply of free literature.
Revelation: Its Grand Climax at Hand!,
one publication of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, features comic-book illustrations of the whole unlikely bestiary of Revelation. And anyone who switched through the channels on the television dial on any Sunday morning in the 1950s or the 1960s would encounter the preachments of Oral Roberts or Billy Graham or countless other fledgling televangelists. But, by and large, the old ideas about the end of the world were confined to a kind of Christian ghetto while the rest of America accustomed itself to the idea that doomsday will be strictly a human enterprise.

As with so much else in postwar America, however, the old ways of thinking and talking about the end of the world were about to change in profound and enduring ways. America was swept by wave after wave of radical new ideas and unsettling new experiences in the 1960s and 1970s—war, riot, and assassination, of course, but also the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement, the sexual revolution and the computer revolution, Beatlemania and Woodstock, the birth-control pill and men on the moon. The times they were a-changing, according to Bob Dylan’s anthem, and Christian fundamentalism caught the same the winds of change. The New World was the site of yet another apocalyptic invasion that carried the book of Revelation out of the Christian ghetto and into the heart of American politics and popular culture.

The self-made apocalyptic seer who literally put the apocalyptic idea on the best-seller lists of America was a colorful and charismatic preacher named Hal Lindsey (b. 1930). He was working as a tugboat captain on the Mississippi in the 1950s when he experienced a powerful religious conversion. After studying at the Dallas Theological Seminary, a center of premillennialist doctrine, Lindsey went on the road as a preacher for the Campus Crusade for Christ. Inspired by the lively response to the sermons on Bible prophecy that he delivered in the late 1960s, Lindsey and his collaborator, C. C. Carlson, went public with his prediction that the end was near with the publication of
The Late Great Planet Earth
in 1970.

Like the “medieval best sellers” of an earlier age, Lindsey’s book repurposed and reinterpreted the text of Revelation and other apocalyptic passages of the Bible in terms that made sense to contemporary readers. And Lindsey was rewarded with best-seller status that far exceeded even the
Scofield Reference Bible
and, significantly, reached far beyond the customary readership of Christian fundamentalist texts and tracts.
The Late Great Planet Earth
sold more than 20 million copies, and Lindsey was hailed by the
New York Times
as “the best-selling author of the 1970s.”
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Bart Ehrman goes even further and declares that Lindsey is “probably the single most read author of religion in modern times.”
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Lindsey comes across in
The Late Great Planet Earth
as media savvy and thoroughly modern, but he is only the latest in a long line of apocalyptic preachers that reaches all the way back to the author of Revelation himself. He is a supercharged culture warrior, setting himself against all the bogeymen that he discerns in the counterculture and the so-called New Age—astrology, extrasensory perception, meditation, mysticism, spiritualism, witchcraft, hallucinogenic drugs, progressive politics, Christian ecumenicalism, and what he calls “oriental religions.”
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And, again like the author of Revelation, he condemns all ideas about religion except his own, and he suggests that diversity and toleration in matters of faith are, quite literally, the tools of Satan.