by Gore Vidal
The Great Obfuscator has come among us to dispense not only good news for the usual purposes of election but Good News. Reagan is nothing so mundane as an American president. Rather, he is here to prepare us for the coming war between the Christ and the Antichrist. A war, to be specific, between the United States and Russia, to take place in Israel. Hence, the mysterious and irrelevant, to most of us, exhortations about prayer in the schools, abortion, drugs, evil empires, and, mostly lately, the encroaching “sea of darkness.” Hence, the military buildup that can never, ever cease until we have done battle for the Lord. Hence, the evangelical tone which makes the priestly eloquence of the late Woodrow Wilson sound like the current mayor of New York City. Hence, the perfect indifference to the disintegration of the American economy, educational system, industrial infrastructure; and, finally, really finally, the all-out onetime-only investment in a nuclear war to end all wars and Evil itself. This world is simply a used-up Kleenex, as Reagan’s secretary of the interior, James Watt, acknowledged when he scorned the environmentalists with the first hint of what was in the works: “I do not know,” he said to Congress in 1981, “how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.” So why conserve anything, if Judgment Day is at hand?
For those, and I am one, who have been totally mystified by this president’s weird indifference to the general welfare at home and the preservation of peace abroad, the most plausible answer has now been given in a carefully documented and deeply alarming book called Prophecy and Politics: Militant Evangelists on the Road to Nuclear War.* The Texas-born author, Grace Halsell, comes from a fundamentalist Christian family. She has been for many years a working journalist, the author of seven books, a speechwriter for the dread Lyndon Johnson, and a longtime student of the twice-born Christians and their current president.
According to Halsell’s interpretation and synthesis of facts available to all, the old actor has been rehearsing for some time the part of the Great Anarch who lets the curtain fall on the late great planet earth, as prophesied in the Good Book and in that even Better Book, The Late Great Planet Earth by an ex–riverboat captain, Hal Lindsey, whose account of the ultimate showdown between Christ and Antichrist was much admired by Ronald Reagan as well as by the eighteen million other Christian fundamentalists who bought the book in the 1970s and who believe that we are living in the penultimate Dispensation. The what? Let me explain.
Let us begin not with the Old Testament sky-god but with one Clyde Ingerson Scofield, who was born in Michigan in 1843. Scofield had an innate end-of-the-world bent which was reinforced by an Anglo-Irish divine named John Nelson Darby, who “taught that God had two plans and two groups of people with whom to work. Israel was God’s kingdom here on earth and the Church (Christianity) was God’s heavenly kingdom.” According to Scofield/Darby, the sky-god has divided history into seven seven-year plans, or “Dispensations.” During each Dispensation, God relates to man in a different way. Obviously, this particular sky-god is highly bureaucratic, even Leninist in his approach. Although Scofield was easily able to identify seven Dispensations in scripture, others could not. Eager to shed light, Mr. Scofield then sat down and rewrote the Bible so that we could all share in the Bad News. In 1909, he published the first Scofield Reference Bible. Since then many millions of copies have been (and are being) sold of his mock Bible.
Essentially, the Scofield exegesis is both Manichean (material world evil, spirit good; therefore, man cannot live at peace, is flawed, doomed) and Zoroastrian (Ahura Mazda, the wise Lord, defeats the evil Ahriman at the end of “the time of long dominion”). During the last but one Dispensation, Christ will defeat the Antichrist at Armageddon, fifty-five miles north of Tel Aviv. Just before the battle, the Church will be wafted to Heaven and all the good folks will experience “Rapture,” as Scofield calls it. The wicked will suffer horribly. Then after seven years of “burying the dead’ (presumably there will be survivors), God returns, bringing Peace and Joy and the Raptured Ones.
The gospel according to Scofield is preached daily by such American television divines as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, et al.; and according to a Yankelovich poll (1984), 39 percent of the American people believe in the death of earth by nuclear fire; and Rapture. Among the 39 percent is Ronald Reagan, as we shall see.
In 1985, Grace Halsell went on a Falwell Old Time Gospel Hour Tour of the Holy Land. If any of the good Christians on this tour expected to gaze upon Bethelehem and Nazareth where their God’s son was born and lived, they were doomed to disappointment. These trips have only one purpose: to raise money for Falwell and Israel, under the guise of preparing the pilgrims for the approaching Armageddon. At Halsell’s request, her group finally met one nervous taciturn local Christian. Moslems were ignored. On the other hand, there were constant briefings by Israelis on their military might.
The Falwell indoctrination is, relentlessly, the imminent end of the world, the ambiguity of the role of the Jews (why won’t they convert?), and the importance of the state of Israel whose invention in 1948 and victories in 1967 were all foretold, most excitingly, by Scofield: exciting because Dispensationalists can never be sure which Dispensation they happen to be living in. Is this the one that will end in Armageddon? If so, when will the seven years be up and the fireworks start? In 1982, poor Pat Robertson got out on a limb when he thought that Israel’s invasion of Lebanon was the beginning of the longed-for end; rapturously, Pat declared on television: “The whole thing is in place now, it can happen at any time….But by fall, undoubtedly something like this will happen which will fulfill Ezekiel.” Happily for us, unhappily for Pat, 1982 wasn’t the year. But I reckon if we all pray hard enough the end’s bound to come real fast.
As Halsell and group gaze upon Armageddon, an innocent rural countryside, one of her companions fills her in on the meaning of it all. Reverently, he quotes St. John: “And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.” When she inquires what this neutral sentence has to do with a final battle between Christ and Antichrist, she gets a barrage of bronze-age quotes: “The cities of the nation fell…and every island fled away and the mountains were not found.” Apparently, the Euphrates then dries up and the Antichrist himself (you guessed it, Gorbachev) crosses into Israel to do battle with the Lord, who comes down from Heaven, with “a great shout” (played by Charlton Heston—once again Ronald Reagan is, in Jack Warner’s phrase, the star’s “best friend”). The Lord and the Americans win hands down, thanks to SDI and the B-I bomber and the Fourteenth Regiment cavalry from Des Moines, Iowa, and a number of Republican elephants who happen to have strayed on to the field, trumpeting free enterprise, as the Lord requires.
Dispensationalists delight in the horror of this crucial (pun intended) battle, as predicted so gloatingly by Ezekiel: “Torrential rains and hailstone, fire and brimstone…a great shaking in the land…every kind of terror.” But it is sly prescient old Zechariah, eye glued to that bronze-age crystal ball, who foretells atomic weapons: “Their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet [Hiroshima, mon assassin], and their eyes shall consume away in their holes, and their tongue shall consume away in their mouth.”
What about the Jews? asked Halsell. Since they won’t be with Gorbachev (a.k.a. Gog and Magog), what happens to them? The answer is stern: “Two-thirds of all the Jews living here will be killed…” She asks, why, if the Jews are His chosen people, as the Dispensationalists believe? The answer glows with charity: “He’s doing it mainly for his ancient people, the Jews….He devised a seven-year Tribulation period mainly to purge the Jews, to get them to see the light and recognize Christ as their Savior….Don’t you see? God wants them to bow down before His only son, who is our Lord Jesus Christ.” Anyway, forget the Jews because many, many other people will also be exterminated so that Christ may come again, in peace. Just why Jesus’ Dad should have chosen nuclear war as the means of universal peace is as
rare and impenetrable a mystery as the Trinity itself.
Although the three religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) of the Book, as Moslems call the Old Testament, are alike in a common worship of a highly primitive sky-god (rejected by the more civilized Hindus, Buddhists, and Confucians) and variously adapted to different times, peoples, and climates, only Fundamentalist Christianity in our century has got so seriously into the end-of-the-world game, or Rapture, as it is described by the Dispensationalists who believe…
But why am I telling you this? Let Jerry Falwell, the millionaire divine of Lynchburg, Virginia, explain it to you as he did to the journalist Bob Scheer in the Los Angeles Times (March 4, 1981): “We believe that Russia, because of her need of oil—and she’s running out now [no, she’s not, Jerry]—is going to move in the Middle East, and particularly Israel because of their hatred of the Jew [so where’s the oil there, Jerry?] and that it is at that time when all hell will break out. And it is at that time when I believe there will be some nuclear holocaust on this earth….” Falwell then does the obligatory mishmash from Apocrypha—and the wild “real” thing, too: Russia “will be ultimately totally destroyed,” he tells us. When Scheer says that if that happens the whole world will be destroyed, Falwell spells out the Dispensationalist doctrine: “No, not the whole world, because then our Lord is coming back to the earth. First, he comes to take the Church out [plainly, Falwell was never in the army—for us “to take out” means destroy; he means lift up, save]. Seven years later, after Armageddon, this terrible holocaust, He’s coming back to this very earth so it won’t be destroyed, and the Church is coming with him [up, down; out, in—the vertiginous Church], to rule and reign with Christ on the earth for a thousand years….” A joyous millennium of no abortion, no sodomy, no crack, no Pure Drug and Food Act, no civil rights, but of schools where only prayers are said, and earth proved daily flat.
“We believe,” says Falwell, “we’re living in those days just prior to the Lord’s coming.” When Scheer asks for an expected time of arrival, Falwell assures him that although the Lord has warned them not to give dates, he himself has a hunch: “I do not think we have fifty years left. I don’t think my children will live their full lives out….” So we are now in the penultimate seven-year Dispensation, which will end with Armageddon.
Scheer suggests that after the nuclear weapons we drop on Russia and the ones they drop on us, the great planet earth will be very late indeed. But Falwell knows that there will be survivors, in addition to the taken-out Church. Personally, he has no fear of the nuclear holocaust because, as he said to Halsell’s group, with a grin, “You know why I’m not worried? I ain’t gonna be here.”
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Halsell notes: “A Nielsen survey released in October 1985 shows that 61 million Americans (40 percent of all regular viewers) listen to preachers who tell them that we can do nothing to prevent a nuclear war in our lifetime.” But do the 61 million actually believe what they hear? I suspect that they probably do on the ground that so little other information gets to them. They are not book readers (the United States has dropped to twenty-fourth place among book-reading nations); the public educational system has been allowed to deteriorate as public money goes mostly to defense; while television news is simply entertainment and the principal entertainer (until the latest Iran scandal) is a professional actor who knows very little about anything other than his necessary craft, which is to sell emotions—and Armageddon. But, again, does the salesman believe in the product that he sells? Halsell thinks that he does.
On September 20, 1970, an evangelical Christian, George Otis, and several like-minded folk visited Reagan when he was governor of California. They spoke rapturously of Rapture. Then, according to Otis, they all joined hands in prayer and Otis prophesied Reagan’s coming election to the presidency. According to Otis (Visit with a King) Reagan’s arms “shook and pulsated” during this prophecy. The next summer (June 29, 1971) Reagan asked Billy Graham to address the California legislature; afterward, at lunch, Reagan asked Graham, “Well, do you believe that Jesus Christ is coming soon, and what are the signs of his coming if that is the case?” Graham did not beat about this burning bush. “The indication,” he said, “is that Jesus Christ is at the very door.”
Later in 1971 Governor Reagan attended a dinner where he sat next to James Mills, the president of the California state senate. Mills was so impressed by the dinner conversation that he wrote it all down immediately afterward, but published it much later (San Diego Magazine, August 1985), pro bono publico, if a bit late.
After the main course, the lights dimmed and flaming bowls of cherries jubilee were served. No doubt inspired by the darkness and the flames, Reagan suddenly asked, out of right field, if Mills had read “the fierce Old Testament prophet Ezekiel.” Mills allowed that he had (after all, you don’t get elected to the California State Senate if you say no); as it turned out, he did know Ezekiel. Then, “with firelit intensity,” Reagan began to talk about how Libya had now gone communist, just as Ezekiel had foretold, and “that’s a sign that the day of Armageddon isn’t far off.” When Mills reminded him that Ethiopia was also due to go over to Satan and he couldn’t, somehow, see the Emperor Haile Selassie turning pinko or allowing the Reds to take over his country in order to make war “on God’s Chosen People,” Reagan agreed “that everything hasn’t fallen into place yet. But there is only that one thing left that has to happen. The Reds have to take over Ethiopia.” Mills thought this unlikely. Reagan thought it inevitable: “It’s necessary to fulfill the prophecy that Ethiopia will be one of the ungodly nations that go against Israel.” As it turned out, Reagan was right on target. Three years later Ethiopia went communist, or something very like it.
Mills was particularly impressed by Reagan’s manner, which is usually amiable to the point of goofiness: Now he was “like a preacher [talking] to a skeptical college student.” Reagan then told Mills: “All of the other prophecies that had to be fulfilled before Armageddon have come to pass. In the thirty-eighth chapter of Ezekiel it says God will take the children of Israel from among the heathen when they’d been scattered and will gather them again in the promised land. That has finally come about after 2,000 years. For the first time ever, everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ.”
When Mills said that the Bible clearly states that men will never have the fun of knowing just when this awesome event will take place, Reagan replied, “Everything is falling into place. It can’t be too long now. Ezekiel says that fire and brimstone will be rained upon the enemies of God’s people. That must mean that they will be destroyed by nuclear weapons…Ezekiel tells us that Gog, the nation that will lead all of the other powers of darkness [‘sea of darkness,’ he moaned just after he plunged into Irangate] against Israel, will come out of the north. What other powerful nation is to the north of Israel? None. But it didn’t seem to make much sense before the Russian revolution, when Russia was a Christian country. Now it does, now that Russia has become communistic and atheistic, now that Russia has set itself against God. Now it fits the description perfectly.” So you thought there would be an arms deal with the Soviet Union? A cutback of nuclear weapons? Not on, literally, our lives. To stop the arms race would be to give the victory to Gog.
Mills’s conversation took place fifteen years ago. Nine years later, the nemesis of Gog was elected president. If he survives, Constitutionally or constitutionally, he now has two more years to see us on our way to, if not actually into, glory. Until recently, one could not imagine any American president with a sense of history openly expressing religious views that are so opposed to the spirit of the founders of the United States. Jefferson had a low opinion of religious—as opposed to ethical—Christianity, and no friendly view of the pre-Scofield Old Testament, while the non-Christian Lincoln’s appeals to the Almighty were as vague as Confucius’s ritual hymns to Heaven. The American republic was created by men of E
nlightenment, who had little or no use for sky-god systems; certainly they would have regarded the Scofield-Falwell-Reagan sky-god as a totem more suitable for men who walk with their knuckles grazing the greensward than for the upright citizens of the last best hope of earth.
But Reagan knows nothing about Jefferson, and history is not his bag. On the other hand, “ ‘I was fortunate,’ ” he told TV evangelist Jim Bakker. “ ‘I had a mother who planted a great faith in me….’ ” Garry Wills, in his recent book Reagan’s America, tells us a great deal about Nelle Reagan who “was baptized in Tampico (Illinois), as a Disciple of Christ, by total immersion…on Easter Sunday, 1910.” She was a great influence on her son, who taught Sunday School and then attended Drake University, a Disciples’ college. With mounting horror, one realizes that he may not be what all of us had hoped (even prayed), a hypocrite. Until Reagan’s recent misfortunes, he had not the United States but Armageddon on his mind.
During the presidential race of 1980, Reagan told Jim Bakker of the PTL network: “We may be the generation that sees Armageddon,” while a writer for The New York Times reported that Reagan (1980) told a Jewish group that “Israel is the only stable democracy we can rely on as a spot where Armageddon could come.” Apparently, the god of Ezekiel has a thing about the necessity of stable democratic elections prior to sorting out the Elect just before the Bang.
Although most American right-wingers are anti-Semites, the Armageddonists need a strong Israel in order to fulfil prophecy. So TV-evangelicals, Pentagon (“Those are the real anti-Semites,” former Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky muttered in my ear last October at Frankfurt), and right-wing politicians like Richard Nixon are all dedicated supporters of Israel. Sensibly and cynically, the Israelis exploit this religious madness.
Halsell reports that in October 1983, President Reagan told an Israeli lobby leader, Tom Dine, “You know, I turn back to your ancient prophets [Dine runs a home for retired ancient prophets where you can be denounced by the prophet of your choice] in the Old Testament, and I find myself wondering if we’re the generation that’s going to see that come about. I don’t know if you noticed any of those prophecies lately, but believe me, they certainly describe the times we’re going through.” This was the year that Reagan decided to alert the nation to Gog. On March 8, 1983 he declared, “They [the Soviet Union] are the focus of evil in the modern world.” Later, “I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written [my italics].” The old Acting President seems not to mind our approaching fiery fate. But then, of course, he’s been saved, as he told George Otis. So, like Falwell, he ain’t gonna be here either at the end.