Perhaps this is another way of saying that subtlety is a transaction of faith. The artist must have faith that her effects will be perceived in the way she intends; the reader must trust that what he detects, beneath the surface of the text, is not merely a figment of his imagination. The disciple must come to believe that the whispers he hears in the wilderness are not the wind, or the devil, but the voice of his Creator. All religion, all forms of love, depend on this leap.
2018, Tin House
THE END
In 1999 my family believed the world was coming to an end. We were living in central Wisconsin, on the outskirts of a lake district (my parents noted, more than once, the fortuitous proximity to sources of fresh water), and as the millennium neared, our house became a fortress braced for the apocalypse. Trucks arrived each week from Mountain House, a company that manufactures rations for the U.S. Special Forces and sells things like freeze-dried chicken and vacuum-sealed pouches of beef stew. I’d be doing chemistry homework or watching an episode of Friends, when my dad’s voice would bellow out, “Mountain House!”—a boatswain’s call designed to rally everyone to the driveway for unloading. Together we unloaded boxes from pallets and carried them down to the basement, which had been converted into a storeroom packed with generators, short-wave radios, shotguns, and a collection of fifty-five-gallon plastic drums for water storage, which my siblings and I occasionally borrowed for recreational rolls down the sloped hill of our backyard.
The panic was my parents’ response to the Y2K bug, though its roots could be traced to an abiding occupation with biblical prophecy. They were among a handful of evangelicals who saw the computer glitch as the spark that could ignite the epic conflagration known as the end times, taking down the entire Western infrastructure and paving the way for the rise of the one-world government predicted in the book of Revelation. We would, ideally, survive on these provisions until the Rapture. That summer, my parents took us on a long-promised pilgrimage to Israel, where we climbed to the top of Mount Carmel. There, with dozens of other born-again tourists from around the world, we looked out at the Valley of Jezreel, an expanse of alluvial greenness where the Battle of Armageddon would take place.
Of course, the world did not end come January. For the remainder of my senior year, our family ate colorless suppers of dried meat and powdered mashed potatoes, refusing to speak about the error. I was off to Moody Bible Institute in the fall, but my sister claims that as late as 2008, our mom was still working through the dregs of that massive storeroom, trying to pass off the supplies as homemade meals. “It’s just something I found in the pantry,” she would say, upon which the entire table would drop their forks in horror and exclaim, “This is Y2K food, isn’t it?!”
Like a lot of former believers, I often regard my childhood as having occurred in a parallel dimension, one that occupies the same physical coordinates as secular reality but operates according to none of its rules or logic. Other times, I am struck by the ordinariness of my experience. In the age of “superstorms” and Ready.gov, it’s not unusual for people to have a cache of bottled water in their basement, or to casually speculate about fending a hungry mob off their property. As my friends and I hover around the knell of thirty, childless and saddled with debt, we speak about the future with an almost welcome sense of contingency. “If the glaciers haven’t melted,” we say, or “when the singularity occurs,” just as my parents couched every plan in the caveat “if the Lord tarries.”
“We now live in a world shaped by evangelicals’ apocalyptic hopes, dreams, and nightmares,” Matthew Avery Sutton writes in American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism. While it’s tempting to dismiss biblical fundamentalists as reactionaries, filtering current events through the lens of their bizarre theology, Sutton argues that the obverse is true: apocalypticism has been a potent force in our nation’s history and has left an indelible mark on American political life.
Despite the ancient and primitive aura that is often attached to fundamentalism, the movement was both a response to and a product of modernity. Sutton’s history begins at the height of the Progressive Era, a time of scientific and technological progress when most Americans believed that humanity was on a steady Hegelian trajectory toward perfection. Late nineteenth-century Christians were largely in tune with this optimism. They sought to fight corruption, alleviate poverty, and work toward social justice, believing that such social improvements would hasten the arrival of the Millennial Kingdom, the one thousand years of earthly peace and prosperity promised in the Bible, after which Christ would return. But progress is a weird thing; it has a way of engendering optimism and dysphoria in similar measure. In the glare of this dawning future, some believers retreated to their Bibles and found in its more obscure passages a darker vision of the future.
At the helm of this movement was John Nelson Darby, an Anglo-Irish preacher who concluded that his fellow Christians had been reading the Bible incorrectly; scripture clearly stated that Christ was going to return before, not after, the Millennial Kingdom. Preceding this Second Coming would be a period of tribulation: pestilence, natural disasters, and the rise of the Antichrist, a totalitarian leader who would wage war against Israel and rule over a coalition of nations in the former Roman Empire. Darby was drawing primarily from passages in Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation—Jewish apocalyptic literature that imaginatively envisioned the destruction of Jerusalem and wars between the empires of the ancient world. He believed these passages should be taken at face value, as references to the yet unrealized future. There was not, at that time, a nation of Israel, but this didn’t bother him; God would bring the Jews back to Palestine at some point before the tribulation. This new theology was called premillennialism. It was a rather technical contention, but embedded in it was a radically new attitude toward earthly life: humanity was headed not toward utopia but to annihilation.
Darby’s theory fell on rocky soil in Britain, but it did take root in the United States. His theology found a particularly sympathetic ear in the American evangelist Dwight L. Moody (the founder of my alma mater), who would become one of the fiercest proponents of premillennialism. By the early 1920s, this doctrine had created a schism within American Christianity, separating the new biblical conservatives—the self-described fundamentalists—from their liberal Protestant brethren. Fundamentalists withdrew from mainstream Christian culture, fortifying their own institutions such as Moody Bible Institute and the Bible Institute of Los Angeles.
Fundamentalism might have remained an obscure, Gnostic-like offshoot of Christianity—something akin to Manichaeism—had the decades following its arrival in America not confirmed its pessimistic outlook. The two world wars, as well as the rise of fascism and bolshevism, seemed to validate the premillennial forecast of an abrupt and violent end, which attracted new converts to the movement. By the advent of the Cold War, preachers faced little difficulty tapping into the angst of an American public terrified at the prospect of nuclear annihilation. “Amid the disjuncture of modern times,” Sutton writes, “apocalypticism often made better sense than competing theologies.”
Because most Americans today associate end-times proclamations with the religious fringe—televangelists, street preachers—it’s easy to underestimate the influence this theology has had in the halls of power. John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan subscribed to premillennialism, as did William E. Blackstone, a Chicago real estate developer who wrote the 1878 bestseller Jesus Is Coming, and became one of the first advocates for the reestablishment of Israel. Over the past century, the fundamentalists who have bought into this vision of the future have advised presidents, managed oil empires, and worked as chemists on the Manhattan Project. Even Mussolini was momentarily taken with the reality of biblical prophecy. In the early 1930s, the leader met with two American missionaries, Ralph and Edith Norton, who wanted to interview him for the Sunday School Times. Like a lot of fundamentalists of that era, the missi
onary couple believed Mussolini was a strong candidate for the Antichrist—the dictatorial leader who would resurrect the Roman Empire. As the Nortons quizzed Mussolini about his political intentions and explained the basics of biblical prophecy, Il Duce became fascinated. “Is that really described in the Bible?” he asked. “By the time the Nortons were through with him,” Sutton writes, “Mussolini apparently believed—and maybe even hoped—that he was the long-awaited world dictator prophesied in the book of Daniel.”
During the 1930s the fundamentalist movement more fully aligned itself with the Republican Party, in response to the New Deal. Because the Antichrist was believed to be a totalitarian leader presiding over a one-world government, believers feared any whiff of federal expansion. (This same fear produced skepticism toward the United Nations.) The book of Daniel predicted that end-times government would be “a mix of iron and clay,” which some believers interpreted to mean totalitarianism brought about through popular democracy. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt took his turn at regulating big business and ushered in government programs such as the Works Progress Administration and Social Security, evangelicals recognized signs of the end. Christian leaders worried that FDR would, in the words of Keith L. Brooks, “ride roughshod over the Constitution into the seat of a dictator.” William Bell Riley, the Baptist minister known as “the Grand Old Man of Fundamentalism,” saw in these new programs “the hydra heads of Socialism and incipient Communism.”
While African Americans were largely barred from leadership positions in the fundamentalist movement, black churches also watched for the coming of Christ—though their signs of the times had less to do with international politics than with the injustices taking place on American soil, including lynching and Jim Crow. (Perhaps the central hypocrisy in the history of fundamentalist theology is the fact that white evangelicals managed to find signs of apocalypse in every social evil except their own prejudice.) At the same time, premillennialism intersected in creative ways with the tradition of black liberation theology. In 1924 James Webb, a Seattle minister and member of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, claimed, “The universal black king is coming,” an allusion to the book of Daniel. This kind of rhetoric would grow in popularity during the 1960s, when black evangelists blended evangelical theology and the Black Power movement to denounce, in apocalyptic terms, the country’s legacy of racial injustice. In an ironic twist, evangelicalism, with its rigidly segregated churches and colleges, inspired the moral lexicon of civil rights activists.
Despite such moments of redemption, the story of American premillennialism reads more often like a farce, one in which postexilic Jewish literature is consistently (mis)interpreted in the context of modern geopolitics. Take Gog, an empire described in the book of Ezekiel as an expansive and sinister nation that would sit to the north of Israel. Gog was possibly a reference to ancient Babylon, and yet around the time of the Bolshevik revolution, many believers became convinced that Ezekiel had augured the rise of modern Russia—a symbolism that would persist well into the Cold War; in the words of President Reagan, “What other powerful nation is to the north of Israel? None.” During World War II, biblical references to Rome, Gomer, and Magog came to symbolize Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin, and the merchants of Tarshish in Ezekiel were interpreted as allusions to England. Years later, George W. Bush apparently believed that these empires referred to Iraq and Afghanistan. “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East,” he told French president Jacques Chirac in a 2003 phone call, appealing to their common Christian faith as a basis for an invasion. “This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase His people’s enemies before a new age begins.” Chirac, a Roman Catholic, promptly asked his staff to call the French Protestant Federation and find out what Bush was talking about.
That Bush and Reagan managed to become leaders of the free world speaks to decades of fundamentalist political ambition. And it’s this ambition that is perhaps the most baffling aspect of the movement. One might expect the anticipation of apocalypse would go hand in hand with apathy or social withdrawal. After all, if you believe the world is on the brink of destruction, why bother trying to transform it? But over the years, fundamentalists have become more politically engaged than their liberal Protestant counterparts. Sutton explains this paradox via Christ’s parable of the talents. A wealthy man goes on a journey, entrusting each of his servants with a number of talents, a unit of money. When he returns, he assesses what each man has done with their portion—whether they hid it in the ground or invested it—and praises them accordingly. The parable, which is today the vade mecum of the Christian financial planning industry, has long been interpreted in terms of a more expansive brand of stewardship. American believers see themselves as guardians of earthly virtue, charged to “occupy” the Earth until Christ’s return.
What is the future of American premillennialism? Or perhaps a better question would be, can this species of fundamentalism be said to have a future? Despite the fact that Sutton’s history reveals the adaptability of this theology over the past century, Sutton, in the end, defers to the prevailing view that fundamentalism is on its way out. “Some of the most famous evangelical preachers in the nation no longer talk about a soon-coming apocalypse,” he writes in his epilogue. He mentions the emerging church—a new generation of believers who have adopted a postmodern approach to scripture and reject premillennial ideas—and cites Chuck Colson’s staid post-9/11 column in Christianity Today, in which the preacher wrote, “I try to avoid end-times prophecy.”
But this decline in apocalyptic pronouncements doesn’t necessarily indicate a shift in doctrine. When Sutton buys it, he, like a lot of secular observers, underestimates how self-aware and media savvy evangelicals have become in the twenty-first century. The public rhetoric of evangelicals—those carefully crafted messages delivered from the pulpit or in print—may not reflect new theological trends so much as the church’s public relations acumen. Consider that post-9/11 sobriety. I was a sophomore at Moody Bible Institute when the tragedy occurred. That week our college president, whose chapel address was later broadcast nationally on Moody Radio, delivered a sermon glazed with the language of compassion. He spoke about how to make sense of the senseless, and reminded us that Christ was suffering alongside our nation. But such sermons are less the product of a revised theology than they are the new face of a movement that has come to see tragedies such as 9/11 as media opportunities, occasions to attract unbelievers who’ve been rattled by seismic horror. Within the privacy of our classrooms, conversations were decidedly more frank. One afternoon my systematic theology professor gave a forty-minute lecture about the perfect alignment between Islamic prophecy and biblical end-times chronology, arguing that Osama bin Laden was the false prophet described in the book of Daniel. Theories of this sort, once unabashedly flaunted by preachers and televangelists, are now increasingly limited to private discussions within the coterie of true believers.
Eager as we may be to relegate such narratives to the dustbin of history, apocalypticism remains a timely subject—and not only because more than 40 percent of Americans believe that Jesus will “definitely” or “probably” return before 2050. The truth is that we live in an era not unlike the one that incubated modern fundamentalism. Like those early twentieth-century Americans who saw progressivism—with its emphasis on rational, technological solutions—as a panacea for social and economic strife, today some of us hope that Silicon Valley visionaries will engineer an earthly utopia. Such visions of the future belie our fears about the present, as climate change and global terror pose increasingly plausible disaster scenarios. Progress and panic have always been two sides of the same coin, and if we dismiss the rants of televangelists, or snicker at the megaphone insanity of street preachers, it is at least in part because they embody an unflattering reflection of our own obsession with apocalypse, because their worldview is the most obvious distillation o
f the modern death wish. In the end, the history of evangelicalism, cynical and fatalistic as it may be, is very much our own.
2015, Boston Review
SNIFFING GLUE
It’s 1994, and Michael Stipe recently lost his religion. It’s before Bieber and bling, before ordering a latte required six qualifying adjectives. In coffeehouses across the country, bored teens slouch on thrift-store couches nodding along to the Cranberries’ “Zombie.” Weezer breaks into the alt-rock scene with the Blue Album; Green Day tops the charts with the first punk rock song to whine about a lousy therapist. In April, hordes of fans gather in Seattle Park to mourn the death of Kurt Cobain. A few months later, 350,000 people make the pilgrimage to Saugerties, New York, for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Woodstock.
That September, in Peoria, Illinois, the gospel artist known simply as Carman takes the stage at a sold-out stadium concert. Dressed in a hooded sweatshirt, high-top sneakers, and neon Ray-Bans, he calls out to a crowd of cheering young people: “Who’s in the house?”
If you’re not familiar with the 1990s contemporary Christian music scene, Carman was kind of a big deal. Born Carmelo Dominic Licciardello in Trenton, New Jersey, Carman began his career as a Las Vegas lounge singer, then got saved and spent much of the ’70s and ’80s dominating the Christian adult contemporary market. At this concert, he opened with the hit single from his 1993 album The Standard, a project designed to court a younger audience.
“Who’s in the House” is a hip-hop track about the presence of the Lord. Through megaphone distortion, Carman rapped a few lines: “You take him high / you take him low / you take J.C. wherever you go,” then led into a call-and-response hook reminiscent of 1980s-era De La Soul. “Tell me who’s in the house? J.C.!”
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