666 and All That: Bible Prophecy, American Fundamentalism, and Contemporary World Trends

666 and All That: Bible Prophecy, American Fundamentalism, and Contemporary World Trends

Paul S. Boyer

University of Wisconsin, Madison

In 2001, a movie called Left Behind featured such events as “the Rapture,” the rise of the Antichrist, and Armageddon. Many reviewers were mystified. The New York Times called it “a futuristic global thriller…, in the … style of a 1970s ... disaster movie.” In fact, the Left Behind movie and the fictional series on which it was based are only the tip of a very large iceberg of Bible prophecy belief in contemporary American culture. Preached in thousands of churches, promulgated by mass-marketed paperbacks and TV evangelists, these beliefs thrive at all levels of society, helping shape the political culture. In the 2000 election, George W. Bush’s most committed supporters included such prophecy gurus as Jerry Falwell; Pat Robertson; and James Hagee, pastor of a 16,000-member church in San Antonio and author of From Daniel to Doomsday: The Countdown has Begun. Millions of Americans read Bible prophecy not as a spiritual allegory or as a source of images that have inspired great art, but as a detailed roadmap to coming events.

In this essay I would like to provide some historical context, look at how prophecy popularizers have interpreted key events since World War II, and offer some reflections on the larger implications of this worldview.

The Bible-prophecy beliefs that pervade contemporary America are rooted in ancient Mesopotamian myths of cosmic struggle between order and chaos, light and darkness, good and evil. These myths underlay the literary genre known as Apocalyptic that flourished in Second-Temple Judaism and early Christianity.[1] (The Greek word “apocalypse” simply means the unveiling of hidden knowledge.) Apocalyptic elements appear in the biblical books of Isaiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, the Gospels, Revelation, and elsewhere. The early Church Fathers discouraged apocalyptic fervor, but it flourished in medieval Europe, preached by wandering prophets and reformist priests and represented in cathedral sculpture, tapestries, stained-glass windows, mystery plays, illuminated manuscripts, and the visions of Hildegard of Bingen. In the Reformation, pamphlets and woodcuts portrayed both the Pope and Martin Luther as the Antichrist. Seventeenth-century Puritans were steeped in apocalyptic speculation. Some in New England saw America as the site of Christ’s millennial kingdom. Indeed, two centuries earlier, Columbus himself had written: “God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of St. John..., and he showed me … where to find it.”[2]

In eighteenth-century America, both the Great Awakening and the Revolution roused apocalyptic fervor. Jonathan Edwards preached that religious effort could bring the millennium in the present age. And Thomas Paine in his revolutionary tract Common Sense, proclaimed: “A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah…. The birth-day of a new world is at hand.” Readers who knew their Bible easily grasped Paine’s allusion to Jesus’s words: “As the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the son of man be.”[3]

Millennial hopes inspired antebellum reforms, including abolitionism. The Civil War’s great anthem, Julia Ward Howe’s “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” is in fact an apocalypse: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, He is tramping out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored...”

In the 1830s, meanwhile, followers of the New York prophecy scholar William Miller had begun to preach that the Book of Daniel foretold Christ’s return on October 22, 1843, later revised to 1844. Sustained by periodicals and colorful charts, the Millerite frenzy crested as the fateful day neared, leading to the “Great Disappointment.” From the ashes, however, arose the Seventh-day Adventist Church, whose followers still study the prophecies, though carefully avoiding date setting.

After the Millerite fiasco, a new interpretation arose, premillennial dispensationalism, formulated by the British churchman John Darby. Many U.S. evangelicals embraced Darby’s scheme, including Cyrus Scofield, whose 1909 Reference Bible, published by Oxford University Press, has sold some twelve million copies. The anti-modernist Fundamentalist movement, preaching biblical inerrancy and Christ’s bodily second coming, proved highly receptive to dispensationalism.[4]

As a premillennialist, Darby taught that Christ would return before Christ’s thousand-year earthly reign, foretold in Revelation. (“Millennium,” of course, is from the Latin word for one thousand.) Darby’s dispensational system meant that God has dealt with his chosen people, the Jews, and with the Gentiles in a series of distinct epochs, each with its means of salvation. Like a person patiently assembling a jigsaw puzzle, Darby buttressed his system with proof texts drawn from throughout the Bible. Arranged in proper order, he believed, these texts reveal a clear sequence of future events.

Darby avoided datesetting, but he insisted that the end is near, citing the end-time signs revealed by Jesus to his disciples: wars, wickedness, persecution, and natural disasters. The Jews’ return to the Promised Land of Palestine, he taught, would be another key End-Time sign.

In Darby’s scheme, the present dispensation will end with the Rapture, when all true believers will join Christ in the air. Those left behind will endure the seven-year Great Tribulation, dominated by the Antichrist─the Beast of Revelation─who will arise first in Europe and then impose a global economic and political dictatorship.

After seven years comes the Battle of Armageddon, foretold in Revelation 16. Antichrist’s forces gather at Megiddo, an ancient battle site in Israel, to fight a vast army from the East. At this moment, however, Christ returns with his raptured saints, slaughters the earthly

armies, and launches his millennial reign from a rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem. After the Millennium and the Last Judgment, a New Heaven and a New Earth arise, with Christ reigning triumphant and the damned enduring eternal torment.

This belief system pervades modern America. In a 1996 poll, 42 percent agreed with the statement: “The world will end in a battle in Armageddon between Jesus and the Antichrist.”[5] Major Protestant denominations, as well as the fast-growing independent Bible fellowships and suburban megachurches, embrace Darby’s scheme. In the sixteen-million-member Southern Baptist Convention, with 6,000 missionaries worldwide--63 percent of the ministers are premillennial.[6] The Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Seventh-day Adventists, with millions of adherents worldwide, espouse particular versions of end-time belief. These teachings also pervade Latin America and Africa, thanks to many thousands of fundamentalist and Pentecostal U.S. missionaries.

Hal Lindsey’s 1970 bestseller The Late Great Planet Earth, a popularization of dispensationalism, has sold millions of copies. Prophecy belief is purveyed by radio and TV evangelists, including Jerry Falwell, Jack Van Impe, and Pat Robertson, head of CBN, the Christian Broadcasting Network. Robertson, a lawyer turned televangelist, gained fame in 1985 when he prayed that a hurricane threatening his Virginia headquarters would change course. It did, and instead hit Fire Island, New York, a gay summer resort, destroying Calvin Klein’s beach house.

Prophecy belief is spread, too, by Christian bookstores; by fundamentalist seminaries; by magazines, tracts, comic books, and bumper stickers advising: “If the Rapture Occurs, this Car Will be Driverless.” (An answering sticker says: “When you are Raptured, Can I Have Your Car?”) Apocalyptic belief entered 1970s mass culture through such movies as The Omen (1976) and rock songs such as Barry Maguire’s “Eve of Destruction.” Bob Dylan’s brief phase as a born-again Christian gave us such apocalyptic songs as “When He Returns” of 1979.

Prophecy belief has historically been highest in the South, but in our mass-culture society, it is now a national phenomenon. End-time belief appears at all educational and income levels and among all racial and ethnic groups.

One reason for this phenomenon, obviously, is America’s pervasive religiosity and laissez faire religious marketplace. We far outrank other Western nations in religious piety. Lacking an established church, America has always embraced free-lance religious innovators with weak or non-existent institutional ties, and prophecy popularizers like Hal Lindsey with no formal denominational links fit this pattern.

Dispensationalism’s enduring power is also rooted in the symbolic language of the biblical proof texts, and the system’s adaptability. New events are constantly being fit into the scenario, while events that fail to fulfill their expected prophetic role quietly vanish. From the 1920s through 1945, for example, many prophecy writers saw Mussolini as the Antichrist. With Mussolini’s death, this theme simply dropped away.

Bible prophecy belief merits attention not only because it is so widespread, but also because it helps shape many Americans’ views of current events. Let me illustrate with a few examples from the post-World War II era: First, the coming of the atomic bomb in 1945 roused interest in prophecies of the earth’s destruction. As II Peter 3:10 memorably puts it: “[T]he heavens shall pass away with a great noise, … the elements shall melt with fervent heat….” Scores of postwar prophecy writers found atomic war foretold in such texts. Despite their claims to biblical literalism, they freely transformed the spears, bows and arrows, and beasts-from-the-sea of the apocalyptic scriptures into ICBMs, missile launchers, and nuclear-armed submarines.

These popularizers insisted that they were not advocating nuclear war, but simply viewing current events in the light of prophecy. But in finding atomic war foreordained, they encouraged passivity toward the threat. Why try to prevent the world’s destruction in a nuclear war, if it is inevitable—and especially if it will probably come after the Rapture?

Russia, too, preoccupied Cold War prophecy writers. Some interpreters had long identified Russia as “Gog,” the northern kingdom whose doom is foretold in Ezekiel 38. This view proved highly popular in the Cold War. Again, the prophecy writers proclaiming Russia’s coming destruction denied any intention of fomenting World War III: Russia’s end would be by divine, not human, means. But their message added fuel to Cold War tensions. If God has ordained the enemy’s doom, why resist the inevitable?

Postwar dispensationalists also wrote voluminously about the fate of the Jews, especially after the founding of Israel in 1948. In some respects, they saw the Jews’ destiny as glorious. Citing God’s grant to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob of all the land from the Euphrates to the “river of Egypt,” recorded in Genesis, they foresaw Israel’s vast future expansion. They also cited texts that appear to foretell the restoration of the Jewish Temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D.─on a site now occupied by a sacred Islamic shrine. The anti-Arab subtext here was clear. As one author put it in 1971: “When all the Jews return ..., God ... will lay the land of the Arabs waste.... [God’s covenant] must be carried out to the letter.”[7]

But the same writers who predicted Israel’s glorious future also portrayed the long history of anti-Semitic persecution as God’s “chastisement” of his wayward people. In 1991, in Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, with its harrowing scenes of Nazi death camps, a fundamentalist prophecy believer whispered to me: “Surely when Jews see this, they must realize what a mistake they made in rejecting Christ.” During the Tribulation, dispensationalists also believe, Antichrist will try to exterminate all Jews. In short, anti-Jewish holocausts past and future, while tragic and deplorable, are prophesied in Scripture, and thus beyond human power to change.

Post-1945 prophecy popularizers also pointed to global economic and political developments as portents of Antichrist’s world order, foretold in Revelation 13: “And [the Beast] causeth all ... to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads. And ... no man might buy or sell, save he that hath the mark … of the beast ..., Six hundred three score and six.” This number “666" exerts special fascination. The ancients often assigned numerical values to letters to uncover hidden meanings in words and names, and most Bible scholars view “666" as a coded allusion to the Emperor Nero.

Over the centuries, however, the fateful number was applied to the Pope, Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler, King George III, Henry Kissinger, and countless others. In the 1980s, some noted that each of Ronald Wilson Reagan’s three names has six letters! The Internet is full of proofs that Bill Gates’ name adds up to 666.

But postwar popularizers proved less interested in discovering Antichrist’s identity than in exposing the global system he will exploit, including the UN, the European Union, and multinational corporations. They cited credit cards, computerized databases, and global communications systems as the means Antichrist will use to impose his worldwide tyranny.

As with nuclear war and the Soviet threat, the anxieties exploited here were real, reflecting uneasiness about mass culture, globalization, and media-driven politics. Indeed, the prophecy writers’ view of an emerging world system echoed 1960s’ New Left rhetoric, which also saw international capitalism as all-powerful. The New Left called it “the Establishment,” and prophecy believers called it “the Beast,” but the analysis of world trends was remarkably similar.

As for the United States, postwar prophecy writers took a view very different from the era when America had been seen as enjoying God’s special favor. They now pointed to America’s growing wickedness as a sign of the End. The government, once viewed as an instrument of God’s purposes, became an agent of evil, legalizing abortion, banning school prayer, promoting evolution, homosexuality, and pornography, and preparing the way for Antichrist’s global rule by collecting computerized data on citizens and intruding into every facet of life.

Such was the shape of popular prophetic belief around 1990, when the world suddenly changed: the Cold War ended, the Soviet Union collapsed, fears of nuclear war eased. But the popularizers quickly readjusted their end-time scenario, and this chameleon-like belief system not only survived, but also grew stronger. Prophecy paperbacks continue to proliferate; TV evangelists, magazines such as Midnight Call, and prophecy conferences in luxurious resort hotels continue to spread the word.

Rapture Kitsch is everywhere: wristwatches that proclaim “One Hour Nearer the Lord’s Return”; placemats featuring a Rapture painting, complete with crashing cars and airplanes; and a glass-fronted wall-plaque containing a videotape and the message: “When the Owner of This Video Suddenly Disappears, Open Immediately and View the Tape Within.” The tape, of course, explains the Rapture and warns viewers to avoid the Beast’s Mark. (A friend in Boston insists that he saw a T-shirt that said: “My grandma was raptured and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”)

And then there is the “Left Behind” series, a fictionalized treatment of Darby’s scenario. The first, Left Behind, in 1995, covered the Rapture. Volume Ten, The Remnant, rocketed to number-one on The New York Times bestseller list in 2002. Volume 11, Armageddon, had an advance printing of 2.5 million copies. The final volume, The Glorious Appearing, came in March 2004. Tie-in marketing is in full swing, including Left Behind videotapes; comic books, T-shirts; a junior edition, Left Behind for Kids; and a radio dramatization aired on 350 Christian stations.

Mass-marketers and the Internet spread the word. Borders, Wal-Mart, and Amazon.com stock the “Left Behind” series and other prophecy books. Global media conglomerates, ironically, are cashing in on this lucrative market. Websites and chat groups are awash in prophecy speculation. A 2004 search for the keywords “Rapture” and “Antichrist” turned up 44,000 Websites. A website called “Rapture Index,” which correlates current events with prophecy, registers 250,000 hits per month. As historian Timothy Weber writes in his recent book On the Road to Armageddon, Bible prophecy has become simply “one more rest stop on the information super highway.”[8]

The 1991 film “The Rapture” started a wave of end-time movies. “The Omega Code,” a 1999 prophecy film distributed by Trinity Broadcasting Network, earned $4.5 million in three weeks. Further fueling the 1990s surge of prophecy interest was the approach of the year 2000. General Mills briefly offered a variant of “Cheerios” called “Millennios,” with “twos” added to the “O’s” so kids could spell out “2000”! Even though most prophecy writers denied a link between the biblical Millennium and the year “2000” on our human calendar, Y2K clearly stimulated interest in prophecy, and that interest continues to flourish. Today’s prophecy popularizers focus on two major themes: the Middle East and the rise of a global political and economic order preparing the way for the Antichrist. On the Middle East front, post-Cold War popularizers painted Islam as an evil force doomed to destruction. This is, in fact, an ancient theme. The Crusaders battled to free Jerusalem from Muslims so its prophetic destiny could unfold. Later interpreters saw the Ottoman Empire as Antichrist. The 1991 Persian Gulf War revived this old theme. In full-page newspaper ads, the Jews for Jesus organization proclaimed: “[Saddam Hussein] represent[s] the spirit of Antichrist about which the Bible warns us.”[9]

Prophecy writers focused especially on Saddam’s grandiose plans to rebuild ancient Babylon. In Revelation, this city on the Euphrates is the evil antithesis of Jerusalem, the holy city, and its fiery destruction is prophesied. Since Babylon cannot be destroyed unless it exists, Saddam’s rebuilding project took on great prophetic import. The cover of Charles Dyer’s The Rise of Babylon: Sign of the End Times of 1991 juxtaposed Saddam and Nebuchadenzzar, the Babylonian king who sacked Jerusalem in 586 B.C. and was condemned by God to eat grass in the fields. Wrote Dyer: “If Babylon is destroyed in the end times, who will destroy it? … [T]he United States is a major world power—how could it not play a major role in the last days.”[10]

This theme intensified after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In 2002, Hal Lindsey’s Website featured a cartoon of a military aircraft emblazoned with a U.S. flag and a Star of David and carrying a missile with a label targeting “Saddam”. The caption quoted Zechariah: “In that day I will … destroy all nations that come against Israel.” In short, when the Bush administration went to war against Iraq in 2003, prophecy believers were well primed, viewing the action as part of an unfolding divine plan for the Middle East.

The focus on Saddam was part of a larger demonization of Islam. Prophecy writers ignore Bush’s distinction between terrorists and Muslims in general. Soon after 9/11, Billy Graham’s son Frankin Graham, who prayed at Bush’s inaugural, denounced Islam as “a very wicked and evil religion.” In his 2003 book Beyond Iraq: The Next Move, prophecy-writer Michael Evans called Islam “a religion conceived in the pit of hell.”[11]

Like communist hunters of the ‘50s, prophecy writers gripped by an apocalyptic worldview see a holy war shaping up against an all-encompassing Islamic-Antichrist conspiracy. Endlessly they recite God’s curse on Abraham’s illegitimate son Ishmael and God’s blessing on Abraham’s legitimate son Isaac as proof a foreordained conflict between Arabs and Jews. Like all apocalyptic battles, this conflict can end only in triumph for one, annihilation of the other. Compromise is unthinkable.

In Hal Lindsey’s 1996 prophecy novel Blood Moon, an Islamic fanatic, Ishamel Muhammed, prepares to launch a nuclear missile on Israel. But Israel’s military leader, Isaac Barak, foils the attack and retaliates with a massive nuclear assault that destroys “every Arab and Muslim capital ..., along with the infrastructure of their nation.”[12] Genocide, in short, fulfills God’s prophetic plan. While demonizing Islam, today’s prophecy popularizers uncritically support Israeli hardliners who advocate ever-expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank and denounce any compromise over Jerusalem. In 1998, when a settlement based on the principle of land-for-peace briefly seemed possible, Midnight Call magazine declared: “What we are witnessing … is … the stripping of the Holy Land from its rightful owners, the Jews. The Bible calls it a ‘covenant with hell.’” John Hagee wrote in Final Dawn Over Jerusalem (1998): “There can be no compromise regarding … Jerusalem, not now, not ever … Israel is the only nation created by a sovereign act of God, and He has sworn by His holiness to defend … His Holy City. … [N]ations that fight against [Israel] fight against God.”[13]

In 2003, Midnight Call praised U.S. evangelicals’ “outspoken dedication to seeing that the God-ordained borders in Israel are restored and the land returned to its rightful owners, the Jews.” The website of the Left Behind series begins its list of “Five Compelling Signs of the End Time” with: “Israel Claims Her Land.” Gary Bauer, the arch-conservative head of the Family Research Council and erstwhile presidential candidate, was cheered in April 2003 when he told the American-Israel Political Action Committee: “God owned the land; he gave it to the Jewish people, and neither the U.N. or Russia or any [other nation] can give away land that does not belong to them, but belongs to you.”[14]

Dispensationalists have attacked even George W. Bush’s road map to peace, which calls for a Palestinian state, shared governance of Jerusalem, and the closing of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Michael Evans in Beyond Iraq denounces the road map as “a threat to the lives of all Americans” and continues: “Regardless of the opinions of men …, God said the land of Israel belongs to the lineage of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God keeps his promises … The only road map for peace is the Bible … God gave [the Jews] that land and forbade them to sell it.”[15]

Israeli hardliners gratefully welcome this support. Michael Evans’ book includes photographs of himself with Menachem Begin, Yitzak Shamir, and Benyamin Netanyahu. When Prime Minister Netanyahu visited the U.S. in 1998, he met first with Jerry Falwell, then went to Washington to see President Clinton. On the same trip he told an audience of 3,000 prophecy-believing Christian conservatives: “We have no greater friends and allies than the people sitting in this room.”[16]

But this support comes at a high price. Dispensationalists still preach, though in a more muted way, that Antichrist will slaughter most Jews, and that the surviving remnant will turn to Christ. In 2003, Midnight Call cited Ezekiel 22:21, among other scriptures, to prove that the Jews face yet another holocaust: “[I will] gather you and blow on you with the fire of My wrath, and you will be melted in the midst of it.” Glossing this passage, the writer says: “Like the metallurgist, the Lord will use the fire of the Tribulation to purge out the unfaithful.”[17] Israeli leaders and others who court dispensationalist support would do well to ponder the larger belief system that underlies this support.

The dispensationalists’ rejection of compromise in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute grows out of a larger conviction that effort for the peaceful resolution of any world conflict is contrary to the foreordained end of human history in a cataclysmic struggle between good and evil. This apocalyptic worldview shaped prophecy believers’ view of the Cold War, and it shapes their view of the present crisis. As a writer in Midnight Call put it in February 2004: “Whatever type of peace the world may achieve is based upon deception, and it is temporary.”[18]

Today’s prophecy expositors also continue to point to the emerging global political and economic system as a prelude to Antichrist’s rule. Pat Robertson’s New World Order of 1991 is a key text. His title, of course, echoes the first President Bush’s allusion to a “new world order” as the Cold War ended-—a phrase as notorious in prophecy circles as “Read my lips—no new taxes.” Robertson offers a deeply conspiratorial view of history, from the Masons, the Bavarian Illuminati, and the Rothschilds to the Federal Reserve Board, the UN, the Beatles, the European Union, and the World Bank, all culminating in the Antichrist’s coming dictatorship. Robertson even includes in the conspiracy the first U.S. Congress, which adopted the Great Seal of the United States with its motto, from Virgil, “Novo Ordo Seclorum,” which he translates as “New World Order.” He suggests that the conspirators staged the entire Cold War as a diversion from their plot to control the world. “A giant plan is unfolding,” he says, “Everything is perfectly on cue.”[19]

Robertson is not alone. In Lindsay’s Blood Moon, the UN Secretary General is unmasked as the Antichrist, and UN troops herd post-Rapture believers into concentration camps. In the film Omega Code, Antichrist is a Rupert-Murdoch-like media mogul who gains control of the European Union as a step toward world rule.

In this climate, conservative politicians and talk radio hosts realize that bashing international organizations carries little risk, since for many citizens, these organizations are--quite literally—demonic. The more world leaders like Kofi Annan claim to be seeking peace, they more suspect they become, since Revelation says the Beast will initially pose as a peacemaker.

The belief in a demonic New World Order fuels suspicion not only of international bodies, but also of America’s civic institutions, from public schools to the federal government itself. Indeed, with the Cold War’s end, the apocalyptic worldview that saw Moscow as “the focus of evil in the modern world” (in Ronald Reagan’s memorable phrase) is now just as likely to cast Washington, D.C. in that demonic role. Michael Evans in Beyond Iraq lumps the U.S. State Department with other satanic forces trying to frustrate Israel’s prophesied expansion.

All these themes converge in the Left Behind books, in which all civic institutions are suspect--the media, the government, most churches, and of course the UN. As the plot unfolds, the Antichrist, the charismatic Nicolai Carpathia, poses as a man of peace, and becomes head of the UN, which he promptly moves to a rebuilt Babylon, setting up the apocalyptic climax when both the UN and Babylon, the twin pillars of Satan’s New World Order, are simultaneously destroyed by fire from heaven.

Left Behind co-author Tim LaHaye has long been active on the religious right, and the Left Behind series simply gives him a new medium to pursue his agenda. As he boasts: “I’ve opposed the United Nations for fifty years.” His millions in royalties from the Left Behind books, and his recent $4 million four-book deal with Bantam Books, negotiated by his agent Michael Ovitz, are surely flowing into his fundamentalist causes, including the Creation Science Research Center; Concerned Women for America, run by his wife Beverly; and the secretive Council for National Policy, backed by House majority leader Tom Delay of Texas, a dispensationalist believer who recently visited Israel to denounce Colin Powell’s calls for a compromise solution to the Palestinian conflict.

Despite the pesky State Department, a fundamentalist and apocalyptic aura pervades the current administration. In his book The Right Man, former Bush speechwriter David Frum says that President Bush’s first words to him were: “Missed you at Bible study.” One wonders what passages are being studied. Since Bush’s 1986 religious conversion, he often seems convinced that his policies precisely mirror God’s will. When still in Texas politics, he said: “I could not be governor if I did not believe in a divine plan that supersedes all human plans.” Journalist Bob Woodward, after interviewing Bush before the Iraq War, became convinced that “the president was casting his mission and that of the country in the grand vision of God’s master plan.”[20]

The most explicit articulation of this theme in high government circles was that of Lieutenant General William G. Boykin, deputy undersecretary of defense and a confidant of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. In sermons in evangelical churches and talks to prayer groups in 2002-03, Boykin, resplendent in full-dress uniform, repeatedly voiced his basic message: terrorists hate America “because we’re a Christian nation,… and the enemy is a guy named Satan.” Dismissing Allah as an “idol” and “not a real God,” Boykin reports his boast to a captured Muslim warlord in Somalia: “You underestimated our God.”[21]

Bush distanced himself from Boykin after Muslim leaders protested, but the Pentagon resisted demands to demote him. In fact, the general was simply expressing openly what millions of Bush supporters on the Religious Right firmly believed on the basis of Bible prophecy. Indeed, Falwell, Graham, Hagee, Robertson, Evans, LaHaye, the editors of Midnight Call, and other prominent dispensationalists had already said as much.

Dispensationalism clearly helps shape the political climate within which today’s leaders operate. For prophecy believers, the administration’s war in Iraq; its near abandonment of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process; its tacit acceptance of expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank; its suspicion of the UN and what Donald Rumsfeld calls “old Europe”; and its passivity on such issues as global warming all conform closely to the course of events that they believe are foretold in Scripture.

Let me conclude then, with a few reflections on the apocalyptic worldview and its implications. To understand this belief system, one must try to grasp its appeal. Basic to this appeal is its utopian nature, evoked in the moving passage that concludes the Book of Revelation:

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth…, the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down … out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people… And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things are passed away.[22]

For dispensationalists, the Tribulation and Armageddon are the essential prelude to a glorious era of righteousness, peace, and justice. This is, of course, the original Utopian vision that has inspired countless others, including that of Thomas More, who coined the word “Utopia” in 1516. Marx’s Das Kapital is a secular apocalypse, with the overthrow of the capitalist ruling class as Armageddon, and the triumph of communism as a secular version of the Millennium. Others find a millennialist strain in Hitler’s vision of a thousand-year Reich, which fell short of its goal by only 988 years.

In The Open Society and Its Enemies of 1945, Karl Popper attacked all utopian ideologies for encouraging violent means to turn the dream into reality, draining energy from efforts to achieve more modest, less cosmic reforms; and dividing people into starkly opposed categories: saved and unsaved, proletarian and capitalist, Aryan and non-Aryan.

Despite Popper’s critique, many are still enticed by utopian dreams, including John Darby’s. All such visions speak to our discontent with an imperfect world and our longings for a better society.

Dispensationalism’s appeal also rests on its claim to give meaning to history. The history taught in our textbooks and public schools avoids speculation about its ultimate meaning or final outcome. Dispensationalist history, by contrast, is purposeful and full of cosmic meaning, advancing steadily toward its grand consummation. As one writer put it in 1971: “The twentieth century is a stream moving exactly in the pattern of the prophetic word.”[23] Filling a void left by the desacralization of historical scholarship, Darby and his successors stepped in to meet a deep popular longing for transcendent meaning in history.

And, finally, what are the implications of dispensationalism for our civic culture? On one hand, it encourages withdrawal from the public sphere. Individuals may accept or reject Christ, and thereby determine their personal destiny─salvation or damnation─but the overall course of events is inalterable. And if history is beyond human power to control, civic engagement is pointless.

Yet today prophecy popularizers also betray an impulse to help along God’s plan, by supporting the most hard-line and expansionist forces in Israel, for example; stoking the fires of our domestic culture wars; and avoiding contaminating contact with the UN or other international bodies that foreshadow Antichrist’s world order. What we are witnessing today is an unprecedented political mobilization of prophecy belief, with implications that are impossible to predict.

Thus, the prophecy popularizers send a mixed message, urging America to get on God’s side as the end approaches, while at the same time preaching a belief system that encourages passivity. They simultaneously encourage a starkly apocalyptic approach to complex issues while dismissing all efforts to resolve world conflicts, global problems, and domestic cultural differences. Such efforts are futile; resolution will come only at Armageddon. Indeed, the coming cataclysm is an essential prelude to the Millennium when, and only when, righteousness will prevail.

In the apocalyptic worldview, all conflicts dissolve into a cosmic struggle between good and evil. This mindset inevitably leads to absolutist and categorical thinking. On one side stand the forces of evil─whether Russia, Islam, secular America, the New World Order, or all of the above─that will culminate in Antichrist’s rule. On the other side stand the forces of righteousness that will ultimately triumph.

While the prophecy writers denounce the satanic forces seeking to rule the world, their apocalyptic worldview is equally triumphalist, rooted in an obsession with eradicating all that is evil and impure. In the lurid world of apocalyptic belief, the opposing sides become, in reality, mirror images of each other.

In short, some of the more troubling features of today’s America─the go-it-alone unilateralism, the simplistic worldview, the withdrawal from the public sphere, the suspicion of government and of social institutions─are vividly on display in this mass-culture apocalyptic material. Some prophecy believers have literally withdrawn from society and become survivalists, but even among those who remain among us physically, alienation runs deep.

We hear much today about “faith-based” organizations and “faith-based” values. Many insist that positions derived from religious dogma should be given greater influence in the public sphere. For example, Jean Bethke Elshtain, a professor of ethics at the University of Chicago, has recently written: “My religious views help to determine who I am, how I think, and what I care about. This is as it should be. In America, it makes no sense to ask people to bracket what they care about most deeply when they debate issues that are properly political.”[24]

Fair enough. But today, millions of citizens’ religious beliefs, “what they care about most deeply,” have convinced them that humanity faces a final showdown between good and evil that will end in the destruction of most of the human race. And these citizens form their opinions about current political issues on the basis of these beliefs, promoting policies predicated on the assumption that humanity’s final crisis is rapidly approaching and any efforts to divert history from its cataclysmic course is not only pointless but evil. These beliefs, in turn, are amplified and reinforced in the public arena by government officials, religious leaders, and all the technology of our contemporary mass media.

Of course, the First Amendment guarantees the right of prophecy believers to promulgate whatever ideas they wish. But those who do not share this nightmarish vision of humanity’s fate have the same constitutional right, and I would argue, an urgent obligation, to expose these beliefs to vigorous criticism and public debate. Bizarre as they may seem to some of us, the prophetic beliefs surging through modern American culture merit not just bemused indulgence, but close attention and scrutiny. To fail to understand their enduring appeal is to fail to understand contemporary America.