by Bruce Bawer
Lindsey now warns his readers, "Will we repeat history? Will we fail to take the prophets literally and seriously?" The key word here is literally. Lindsey is speaking to an audience of people who do not understand the concept of symbolic truth or metaphoric language. Raised in an aggressively "horizontal" culture, they lead lives in which only the tangible is real and in which there is little or no "vertical line." Such people, if confronted with actual spiritual truths, might well be irked, put off, perplexed. They prefer, and perhaps can only understand, a religion that presents itself in literal form—and the more literal, the better. Lindsey, recognizing this, encourages his readers' tendency to read the Bible and its prophecies literally—and to think that this is equivalent to taking them seriously.
Having established the vital importance of biblical prophecy today, Lindsey proceeds to set forth the supposed literal truths to which he says that prophecy points. "Current events," he claims, "are fitting together simultaneously into the precise pattern of predicted events.
Israel has returned to Palestine and revived the nation. Jerusalem is under Israeli control. Russia has emerged as a great northern power and is the avowed enemy of revived Israel. The Arabs are joining in a concerted effort to liberate Palestine under Egyptian leadership." Saying that all these events fulfill biblical prophecies, Lindsey proceeds to extrapolate from the current events of circa 1970 on the basis of those prophecies. Of course the prophecies he quotes are ambiguous enough that a writer at any point in the last two thousand years could have made a similar case that the current events of his own time were likewise "fitting together simultaneously into the precise pattern of predicted events."
"Some time in the future," Lindsey writes, "there will be a seven-year period climaxed by the visible return of Jesus Christ." He proceeds to describe the Rapture and the Great Tribulation in terms consonant with those of Darby and Scofield. Yet to Scofield's more general picture of the Tribulation, Lindsey has added up-to-date specifics. "Egypt will attack the revived state of Israel, which will then be under the control of a false Messiah. This man will probably be a Jew who works closely with the world dictator who will come to power in Rome." The Jews will suffer greatly "until many cry out to the true Savior, Jesus," at which point God will deliver 144,000 of them. (Lindsey's comment: "What a great demonstration of God's loving heart!") These Jews will be "144,000 Jewish Billy Grahams turned loose on this earth" and will "have the greatest number of converts in all history." Also, a ten-nation united Europe will emerge under "the greatest dictator the world has ever known," a "completely godless, diabolically evil" figure who "will proclaim himself to be God" and "will establish himself in the Temple of God" on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem. Aiding this "Antichrist" will be the "False Prophet," whose "mark" will be the number 666. Not to worry, however: In the end, God will destroy "all ungodly kingdoms" with "a thermonuclear blast."
Like Scofield, Lindsey does not mean for any of this to be read in symbolic terms. The End Times picture that he paints is meant to be understood literally, down to every detail. And so it was, and is, by millions.
It is only after painting this picture of the Great Tribulation that Lindsey jumps back and depicts the Rapture, "the 'blessed hope' for all true believers," when Jesus returns "to meet all true believers in the air." This event, Lindsey promises, "will be the living end. The ultimate trip." He then shifts from his sixties slang into the argot of TV commercials: "Will you be here during this seven-year countdown?" he asks. "Will you be here during the time of the Tribulation when the Antichrist and the False Prophet are in charge for a time? Will you be here when the world is plagued by mankind's darkest days?" Because Jesus Christ has paid for our sins, Lindsey writes, "God can offer a totally free gift of forgiveness." Protestant fundamentalists think that they're rejecting the modern world and its values, but those who respond to such rhetoric as this are in fact succumbing to the psychology and jargon of Madison Avenue. Lindsey is selling salvation as if it were a lottery ticket: You can't win it if you don't get in it! Act now and win the "free gift" of eternal life! (The redundant term free gift is used with amazing frequency, in legalistic Christian publications and websites, to refer to the hope of heaven.)
Lindsey's vision of heaven is of a thoroughly literal, tangible future place that is part peaceable kingdom, part election-campaign promises, and part Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous dream vacation. "Even the animals and reptiles," Lindsey writes, "will lose their ferocity and no longer be carnivorous. All men will have plenty and be secure. There will be a chicken in every pot and nobody will steal it. . . . If you can think of the most beautiful place you have ever been, then amplify its beauty beyond your comprehension and imagine what it would be like without death, disease, or any curse upon it, you may have an inkling of heaven." Lindsey interprets the biblical line "And we shall be changed" to mean that after the Rapture, saved Christians will be changed by God "in essence, but not completely changed in appearance. If you're not too satisfied with the face or body you now have, you will have a glorious new body." God, in short, is a celestial plastic surgeon, offering deliverance in the form of a face-lift and tummy tuck. Lindsey's comment: "Just think how excited a woman can get about a new wardrobe. How much more excited we should be about acquiring a new body!"
Lindsey envisions the Rapture by depicting various imaginary people's reactions to the sudden, mysterious disappearance of others. He imagines, for example, a motorist recalling that he was on the freeway when suddenly he saw driverless "cars going in all directions" around him. Someone recalls how a quarterback disappeared from a football game—"completely gone, just like that!" A professor says, "It was puzzling—very puzzling. I was teaching my course in the philosophy of religion when all of a sudden three of my students vanished. . . . They were quite argumentative—always trying to prove their point from the Bible. No great loss to the class." And a preacher tells his congregation, "Many of you have lost loved ones in this unusual disappearance of so many people. However, I believe that God's judgment has come upon them for their continued dissension and quarreling with the great advances of the Church in our century. Now that the reactionaries are removed, we can progress toward our great and glorious goal of uniting all mankind into a brotherhood of reconciliation and understanding." Among all these folk who scratch their heads over the Rapture, Lindsey includes one wise soul whose wife was raptured and who has seen the light. "I think all that talk about the Rapture and going to meet Jesus Christ in the air wasn't crazy after all," the husband tells a friend. "I don't know about you, brother, but I'm going to find myself a Bible and read all those verses my wife underlined. I wouldn't listen to her while she was here."
So it goes. That people will be raptured away in their cars underscores that salvation will come to ordinary people in the course of their daily lives; that the Rapture will take up a quarterback illustrates that there's no contradiction between being a macho, rough-and-tumble athlete and being a saved Christian. That those who are left behind include a know-it-all theology professor who rejects biblical literalism (and who uses non-macho words like "quite") and a clergyman who believes in "brotherhood" and "reconciliation" and "understanding" among "all mankind" makes the point that all this liberal intellectualism and love-thy-neighbor stuff isn't what will save you. You'll only be saved if you take your Bible, underline the right passages, and accept Lindsey's interpretations of them without exception. Note that the man whose wife was raptured doesn't plan to read the whole Bible and try to make sense out of it; he just plans to read the parts his wife underlined, obviously in accordance with Darby, Scofield, and Lindsey.
To be sure, Lindsey says, not "all believers" will be taken off by Christ. Those who deny the truth of the Rapture will be denied eternal life. "We may have to go over to some of them," Lindsey avers, "and say, T told you so, friend.'" His book speaks to an utterly unchristian impulse, feeding people a sadistic scenario of themselves saying "I told you so" to supposed "friends" who are damned for
eternity. If this is religion, it is religion that encourages attitudes about oneself and other people that are precisely the opposite of those that Jesus preached. It is religion for people who think that joining a religion is like betting on a horse; it is religion for people who are so utterly lacking in any sense of a vertical orientation that they can be interested in the idea of heaven only if it includes a new body that is prettier than the one they're inhabiting now; it is religion for people who can only read the mystical language of scripture about being "changed" in the most literal way. To read Lindsey's book is to be struck by how overwhelmed people can be by the world's complexities, how terrified of their own mortality, how incapable of finding strength, solace, and sense in the realm of the spiritual, and how ready to accept notions of God and heaven that have nothing at all to do with a vertical dimension.
God's plan for humankind, as presented by Darby, Scofield, Lindsey, and others, exists on the intellectual, moral, and spiritual level of card tricks or jigsaw puzzles. Lines and images are plucked out of context from every part of scripture, the idea being that God put all these lines in these various places so that men like Lindsey could come along and weave them together into a scenario of the End Times—a scenario whose believers will be saved and whose detractors will be damned. To read the Bible in this way is precisely like reading Shakespeare in search of secret anagrammatical messages, while missing entirely the beauty of the writing and the author's insights into human emotions and relationships. At no point in The Late Great Planet Earth does Lindsey ever answer (or even ask) the question, What exactly is the reason for, and the higher meaning of, the Rapture and Great Tribulation and so forth? If God wanted us to know about and believe in this comicbook scenario of the End Times, and for this reason placed all the details of it in scripture, why did he scatter those details around in various books of the Bible like pieces of a puzzle? What kind of a God plays such games, makes up such puzzles? More important, what kind of a God saves people because they embrace a particular scenario of the End Times and damns others because they don't? Where is the morality in that? Why on earth should the meaning of life come down to such silliness?
There would not be a huge audience for works of "prophecy" like Lindsey s, to be sure, if there were not also a huge number of adult Americans with very low levels of education. For in order to even begin to accept Lindsey's interpretation of history and current events, a reader of The Late Great Planet Earth has to have virtually no knowledge of history and no understanding of other modern civilizations. Readers must also either be utterly ignorant of contemporary scientific knowledge or be able to hold in their minds two thoroughly incompatible sets of ideas at the same time. Legalistic Christians speak of themselves as being traditional, true to the faith of their fathers; but in fact their faith could not be more radically different, not only in its tenets but also in its essential nature, from that of Christians who lived as recently as two centuries ago. The belief systems of earlier generations of Christians were grounded in an understanding of the universe that was thoroughly consistent with the most advanced scientific knowledge of their time; premillennialism, as set forth in Darby, Scofield, and Lindsey, requires one either to dismiss today's science or to ignore the flat-out contradictions between what one claims to believe and what one knows to be true.
Another key point: The world situation has changed dramatically. Since the appearance of Lindsey s book in 1970, the Soviet Union, a key factor in his prophecy, has ceased to exist, and the Egyptian government no longer spearheads a pan-Arabic anti-Israel movement. Recognizing this, Lindsey came out in 1994 with a new book, Planet Earth—2000 A.D., which replaces the supposedly prophecy-fulfilling events of a generation earlier with more recent happenings and replaces Communism with another great international evil, "religious zealotry." Lindsey doesn't mean premillennialism—he means Islam: "The greatest threat to freedom and world peace today," he writes, "is Islamic fundamentalism." Why? Because the goal of Islam, whose adherents he describes repeatedly as "fanatics," "zealots," and "radicals," is to wage "holy war" against non-Moslems. Lindsey's generalizations about Islamic fundamentalism, which are every bit as applicable to his own Protestant fundamentalist readers, remind us that people often find their enemies among those who are most like themselves.
Planet Earth—2000 a.d. was reissued in a revised edition only two years after its first appearance. In a new preface, Lindsey explains that prophetic events are coming along faster and faster as we near "the final, climactic stages of world history" and that he and other "students of prophecy" are thus kept busier than ever interpreting them. When he first wrote 2000 A.D., he states, "the enduring image of ethnic unrest and the media attacks on the justice system in the U.S. was Rodney King—but that was before O. J. Simpson. The World Trade Center gave way to the Oklahoma City Bombing." What Lindsey is saying here is surprising. In The Late Great Planet Earth, he pretended to be interpreting biblical prophecies definitively; this or that biblical passage indubitably pointed to this or that current event. Now, he all but admits that every year brings a new set of developments that can be plugged into biblical prophecy just as easily as last year's headlines. If his rein-terpretation of biblical prophecies, and with it his pushing back of Armageddon, has caused any misgiving or perplexity on the part of his followers, there has been no sign of it.
With The Late Great Planet Earth and its successors, Lindsey has taught a generation of American legalistic Christians to look at current events not with an eye to understanding them for what they are, but rather as clues to Armageddon. He has taught them to look at other people's religions and political systems not as possible sources of enlightenment about the human condition but as creatures of Satan and potential enemies in the Ultimate Battle. In these and other ways, Lindsey has been instrumental in shaping the combative, paranoid, and aggressively ignorant temperament of the people who, after two generations of obscurity, would step out of the shadows to form the Religious Right.
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8
TAKEOVER
In the 1970s, notes Sydney Ahlstrom in his 1974 Religious History of the American People, "an inchoate conservative tendency could be noted, though no one could say what this frightened and perplexed multitude portended as a political force." If we wish to observe the way in which that multitude of legalistic Christians stepped out of the shadows, made its presence known, and proceeded to establish itself as a powerful social, cultural, and political force, we can do worse than to examine the recent history of the Southern Baptist Convention. Indeed, some observers would say that the return of legalistic Christianity from its decades of obscurity began with what Walter Shurden describes, in the title of a collection of essays by Baptist moderates, as "the struggle for the soul of the SBC."
As we have seen, the Southern Baptist Convention, America's largest Protestant denomination, has its roots in such founding Baptist concepts as soul competency and the priesthood of the believer. According to Baptist tradition, no individual believer can be forced against his or her conscience to accept any church law or doctrine or to obey any minister. Every Baptist has the right to read and interpret the Bible according to the way in which he or she feels directed by the Holy Spirit. As recently as 1986, Gordon James wrote in Inerrancy and the Southern Baptist Convention that
Southern Baptists were founded on the premise that there would always be room for everybody, including people who asserted differing views but were still within the general realm of what Baptists believed. . . . Baptists irrevocably believe that every individual has the right to construct his own statement of belief, likewise do churches, associations, and conventions, groups of individuals or any combination hereof. This being an absolute of Baptist belief, it is also an absolute that an individual is only bound by personal beliefs. No church can be bound except by its own beliefs. . . . It is the foundational position Southern Baptists have called soul competency, and the related doctrine called the priesthood of the believer and libert
y.
Shurden, in a 1993 book entitled The Baptist Identity: Four Fragile Freedoms, argued that what it means to be Baptist comes down to four kinds of freedom: Bible Freedom (meaning a freedom of access to scripture, freedom from creedal restrictions on scripture, and freedom of the individual to interpret scripture); Soul Freedom (meaning the freedom to "deal with God without the imposition of creed, the interference of clergy, or the intervention of civil government"); Church Freedom (meaning the freedom of individual churches from any denominational authority); and Religious Freedom (meaning an insistence on the absolute separation of church and state).
For a number of years now, however, these core elements of the Baptist tradition have been under steady and ruthless attack by members of the Southern Baptist Convention who call themselves traditionalists and who seek to impose dogmas on the Convention that have never been a part of Baptist doctrine. Like the Episcopal Church, Baptist churches are not and never have been "confessional": Baptists do not derive their unity from doctrinal statements that are carved in stone. To be sure, just as the Episcopal Church has its traditional "Articles of Religion," the Southern Baptist Convention has its "Baptist Faith and Message," a statement of beliefs that has undergone revisions over the years. Yet like the Episcopal Articles of Religion, the Baptist Faith and Message is a general statement of Christian beliefs that has less specificity, and less of a binding character, than the confessions that are central to such denominations as the Methodists and Presbyterians. In both the Baptist and the Anglican traditions, the right of individual conscience is sacrosanct, and no statement of belief has the power to abrogate that right.
In the hands of slaveowners and, later, segregationists, the traditional Baptist emphasis on individual conscience became a cynical tool for the defense of racial prejudice and exploitation. Yet in the mid-twentieth century, moderate Southern Baptists made some successful efforts to turn the SBC into an instrument for love and enlightenment. Many reactionary members of the Southern Baptist Convention, angered by these efforts as well as by the movements for racial and gender equality, began to take action to turn the SBC against its heritage of freedom and to impose harsh legalistic dogma upon its traditionally independent churches and members. In 1979 began what is known in the SBC as the takeover—the gradual wresting of denominational power from the moderates by the fundamentalists, whose intense political strategizing and hardball tactics were carried out under the direction of two influential Baptists named Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson. (Though the umbrella term legalist would probably be more accurate here than fundamentalist, since some of these people are conservative evangelicals as opposed to strict separatist fundamentalists, I will follow Southern Baptist usage and call them fundamentalists.)