A History of the End of the World (31 page)

Ironically, the most progressive ideas in Christian ity appealed to some of the most wealthy and powerful Christians. For example, it was John D. Rockefeller Jr. (1874–1960), son of the founder of Standard Oil and a major American philanthropist, who financed the so-called Interchurch World Movement, an early effort to engage the Christian churches with the grave and ever-growing problems of the modern world. “I see it literally establishing the Kingdom of God on earth,” he affirmed in an article in the
Saturday Evening Post,
thus embracing the most fundamental tenet of the Social Gospel.
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But the Christian fundamentalists were able to recruit a few captains of industry of their own. In 1910, for example, the two brothers who owned Union Oil Company, Lyman and Milton Stewart, sponsored the free distribution of 3 million copies of
The Fundamentals,
a series of pamphlets designed to win Protestant clergy across America to the credo of Christian fundamentalism. And the Stewart brothers also paid for the distribution of some seven hundred thousand copies of William E. Blackstone’s apocalyptic manifesto,
Jesus Is Coming,
to the same influential readership.

Such lavish efforts prompted a kind of third great awakening in the opening years of the twentieth century—“more than three hundred separate denominational bodies,” according to Paul Boyer, “all committed to belief in Christ’s premillennial return.”
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The ancient apocalyptic ideas of the book of Revelation, as revised and reinvigorated by the teachings of John Darby, attracted men and women across the spectrum of Christian belief and practice, ranging from the old-line Protestant churches to the Pentecostalists, who embraced such practices as speaking in tongues and the laying on of hands.

One notable example of the fresh outbreak of apocalyptic fever began with Charles Taze Russell (1852–1916), a haberdasher from Pennsylvania whose reading of Revelation and the other apocalyptic texts convinced him that the first stirrings of the millennium had already commenced. At any moment, he believed, God will snatch 144,000 “saints” off the face of the earth, and they will soon return in the company of Jesus Christ to fight the battle of Armageddon against the armies of Satan. Russell’s followers, numbering some thirty thousand by the beginning of the twentieth century, were first organized as the Watchtower Society and later changed the name of their church to the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

“Millions now living,” Russell assured them, echoing the words of Jesus and Paul as first recorded in Christian scriptures nearly twenty centuries earlier, “will never die.”
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Russell, like so many other apocalyptic preachers before and after him, was daring enough to set a date for doomsday. He fixed 1874 as the starting date of the countdown clock, and he predicted that the reign of Jesus Christ would begin forty years later—that is, in 1914. For that reason, when the opening shots of the First World War were fired, his prophecy took on sudden and urgent meaning, not only for his own followers but for a great many other apocalyptic true believers.

“War! War! War!!!” enthused one Pentecostal journal. “The Nations of Europe Battle and Unconsciously Prepare the Way for the Return of the Lord Jesus.”
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By the late summer of 1914, America was still clinging to the happy notion that goodwill, enterprise, and ingenuity are all that humankind needs to achieve the secular equivalent of the millennial kingdom right here on earth. “The word
machine,
” as Paul Fussell puts it in
The Great War and Modern Memory,
“was not yet invariably coupled with the word
gun.
”
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Such bright hopes were among the first casualties of the First World War, which demonstrated that the promising new technology of the twentieth century was capable of killing and maiming young men by the millions. For the readers of Revelation, however, the ghastly spectacle of modern combat only confirmed their conviction that they were witnessing nothing less than the battle of Armageddon.

Ironically, the First World War was dubbed “the war to end all wars” by optimistic and high-minded propagandists—a phrase that certainly applies to Armageddon—but the conflagration turned out to be neither the end of war nor the end of the world. Still, the terror and tumult of the Great War sparked the same kind of apocalyptic speculation that had attended every war in Western history since the sack of Rome in the fifth century. The latest generation of seers studied the ancient texts and decided that the world was witnessing the events that had been prophesied in the book of Daniel: “And a mighty king shall stand up, that shall rule with great dominion, and do according to his will, and his kingdom shall be broken, and shall be divided toward the four winds of heaven.”
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Indeed, the First World War was so traumatic—and the postwar world so terrifying—that it scared the bejesus out of men and women who had placed themselves on the cutting edge of the modern world. Thus, for example, Christabel Pankhurst (1880–1958) was transformed by the experience of the First World War from a famously militant feminist into a stump speaker for the premillennialist cause and “the promised return of Jesus as King of Kings and Lord of Lords,” as she witnessed in one of her own works of biblical prophecy.
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“Like so many others, I had lived in an atmosphere of illusion, thinking that once certain obstacles were removed, especially the disenfranchisement of women, it would be full steam ahead for the ideal social and international order,” Pankhurst declared. “But when, in 1918, I really faced the facts, I saw that the war was not a war to end war—but was, despite our coming victory, a beginning of sorrows.”
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Viewed through the lens of biblical prophecy, in fact, the shattering events of the First World War made perfect sense to the apocalyptic mind. Russia was identified as the biblical kingdom of Gog, and the toppling of the czar by the Bolsheviks in 1917 was seen as the fulfillment of a prophecy in the book of Ezekiel: “Thus saith the Lord God: Behold, I am against thee, O Gog.”
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The Balfour Declaration of 1917, which committed Great Britain to the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and the liberation of Jerusalem from the Turks in 1918 by the British army, were interpreted as “the beginning of a series of events that are destined to establish God’s kingdom here upon earth,” according to an enthusiastic Bible commentator named E. L. Langston.
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“The Jews and the land of Palestine are like charts to the mariner,” Langston explains. “As we study the prophecies concerning ‘the people’ and ‘the land’ we hold the key to the mysteries of God’s plan and purpose for the world.”
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Like Daniel in Babylon, like John in pagan Rome, men and women in twentieth-century America were ready to see signs of the approaching end all around them. “Wars and rumors of war” produced a constant and mounting thrum of anticipation in Christian circles. For them, as for readers of Revelation across the last twenty centuries, even the bad news could be seen as good news.

Thus did Revelation begin to work its old magic on the hearts and minds of otherwise modern men and women. At various points in the long history of the ancient text, as we have seen, the number 666 was understood to identify Nero, Alaric, Muhammad, or Napoleon. Now the same number was variously understood by the latest generation of apocalyptic code-breakers to reveal the names of Lenin and Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini, even Franklin Delano Roosevelt—all depending on the specific political stance of the beholder.

Some of the apocalyptic excess on display in the wake of the Great War was downright scandalous. The Pentecostal preacher Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–1944) was capable of moving her congregation and her radio audience to moments of rapture with high-spirited sermons on the Second Coming. Clad in colorful if also bizarre costumes and backed by a fifty-piece stage orchestra, she purported to engage in acts of faith healing and “spirit slaying.” A verse from the book of Revelation appeared on the masthead of
The Bridal Call,
a publication of McPherson’s International Church of the Foursquare Gospel: “And the Spirit and the bride say, Come…”
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But she ended up a victim of her own passions: a mysterious sojourn in the desert was rumored to be nothing more than a shack-up with her lover, a radio technician on the church staff, and she died of an overdose of barbiturates.

Other examples are comical. One apocalyptic sect called the House of David, for example, sought to gather the lost twelve tribes in anticipation of the coming millennial kingdom. The House of David fielded a baseball team whose players sported long beards that were meant to suggest Old Testament prophets, and the team put on exhibition games across the country to raise money and attract new members. Advertised as a celibate community, the House of David attracted its own scandal when its founder, who styled himself as King Benjamin and his wife as Queen Mary, landed in jail on charges of fraud and seduction.

Still other uses of the iconography of Revelation were purely rhetorical and wholly secular. Sportswriters in the mid-1920s dubbed the four players who made up the backfield of coach Knute Rockne’s football team at Notre Dame as “The Four Horsemen,” and the same term was applied to four conservative members of the Supreme Court who voted to strike down various components of the New Deal during the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s. When one apocalyptic preacher in Los Angeles claimed that the “mark of the beast” was actually the stylized blue eagle that served as the logo of the National Recovery Administration—the centerpiece of the New Deal—even otherwise pious observers were forced to crack a smile.

“Who that has seen it,” wrote Ernest Cadman Colwell in 1937, “can ever forget the rapt expression of the interpreter who found the explanation of the Beast of Revelation in the N.R.A.?”
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Yet some of the most inventive interpreters of Revelation were utterly earnest when it came to the new meanings that they prized out the ancient biblical text. They were so respectful of the apocalyptic tradition that they regarded Benito Mussolini as a more likely Antichrist than Adolf Hitler precisely because Mussolini reigned in the city of Rome, the seat of ancient Roman paganism and the object of such fear and loathing in the book of Revelation. Indeed, Mussolini caught the attention of Christian apocalyptic observers when he first came to power in the 1920s, and
Il Duce
remained in their crosshairs long after
Der Führer
had proved himself to be far more beastly.

“I am not prepared to say Stalin, Hitler, or Mussolini is the beast,” declared the pastor of a Baptist church in New York City, “but I have no hesitation in saying they are his forerunners and are beating the trail for him to come upon the scene. Mussolini, above them all, bears the earmarks.”
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Thus, for example, the salute that was originated by Mussolini’s Fascist Party (and only later adopted by the Nazis), with its open palm and upraised arm, was linked to the passage in Revelation where it is said that the Beast “causeth all to receive a mark in their right hand.”
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According to evangelist W. D. Herrstrom, “it is certain that the people of the world will be required to raise their right hands with a movement similar to the present Fascist salute in order to show the mark during the reign of the beast.”
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And the fasces that appeared on the American dime in the 1930s—the bundle of rods with a projecting ax blade that originally represented the magisterial authority of ancient Rome and later served as a symbol of the Fascist party in Italy—was seen as yet another example of “the mark of the beast.”

On at least one occasion, in fact, such apocalyptic speculation prompted a face-to-face confrontation with Mussolini himself. A husband-and-wife team of Christian journalists from Belgium, Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Norton, managed to secure an audience with
Il Duce,
and they asked in the course of their interview whether he intended to reestablish the Roman Empire. When he replied that it would be impossible to do so, they boldly witnessed to the Fascist dictator about the prophecy that Rome, symbolized in Revelation as “Babylon, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth,”
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would be reborn and then destroyed in the end-times.

“Is that really described in the Bible?” asked the astounded Mussolini. “Where is it found?”
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M
ussolini, of course, was no laughing matter. The atrocities of the Second World War and the Holocaust beggared even the apocalyptic imagination, and they readily suggested a kind of Armageddon. “Human history [is] moving toward a climax in which evil becomes more and more naked and unashamed,” conceded theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in 1940.
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Yet the theological calculus of Revelation prompts the true believer to see even the worst atrocities—and
especially
the worst atrocities—as a sign that the Second Coming is fast approaching.

“Suddenly, in the midst of the brilliant civilization of the twentieth century, all the worst attributes of humanity have come to the front; all the most evil passions have been unleashed; all the evil spirits some thought were exorcized centuries ago have returned sevenfold, more loathsome and diabolical than of old,” wrote Arthur Maxwell, editor of the prophetic journal of the Seventh-day Adventists, in
History’s Crowded Climax.
“All the strange and terrible developments of these tremendous times…are indeed but a further indication that we are in the midst of the crowning crisis of the ages.”
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Tragically, some of the same Christian fundamentalists who saw the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine as a precondition to the Second Coming were also capable of extraordinary callousness toward the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. “God may be permitting Satan to use a Hitler, Goebels [
sic
] or a Stalin to chasten His People and thus make them discontent in their wealth and prosperity,” argued one Christian tract when the machinery of the Holocaust was already in full operation. “The Jew is gradually being forced to go back to his promised land. He is not wanted in very many lands.”
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