A History of the End of the World (35 page)

Reagan was only half right, of course. The fact that the Soviet Union ended—but the world did not—posed an awkward problem for the doomsayers and, especially, the date setters. And yet, as we have seen over and over again, the true believer is not much troubled by the demonstrable failure of a prophecy, which can always be recalibrated and reissued to suit the latest turn of events. Once injected into politics and statecraft by Ronald Reagan, the book of Revelation achieved a degree of stature and influence that it had not enjoyed since Joachim of Fiore and Hildegard of Bingen served as apocalyptic advisers to the popes and kings of the medieval world.

T
he new respectability of the apocalyptic idea in American politics seems to coincide with its sudden popularity in American popular culture, where the imagery of Revelation began to appear in artifacts ranging from a punk-rock song by the Sex Pistols titled “I Am Antichrist” to a jingle in a Pizza Hut commercial: “Beware of 666! It’s the Anti-Pizza!”
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And surely it is no coincidence that the best-seller status of
The Late Great Planet Earth
in the early 1970s was quickly followed by the release of
The Omen,
an apocalyptic thriller about an American diplomat who discovers that he is the unwitting adoptive father of the Antichrist.

“When the Jews return to Zion, and a comet rips the sky,” goes a bit of doggerel that figures prominently in the plot of
The Omen
(and neatly sums up the apocalyptic scenario according to John Nelson Darby), “the Holy Roman Empire rises, then you and I must die.”
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Tellingly,
The Omen
does not actually concern itself with the end of the world. Rather, the moviemakers concoct a wholly spurious plot line that requires the hero, played by Gregory Peck, to kill the satanic child with seven daggers that have been excavated from the ruins of Megiddo, the supposed site of the Battle of Armageddon. “The book of Revelation predicted it all,” announces a doomsaying priest—but Revelation predicts no such thing.
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Indeed,
The Omen
“can be read as reflecting the baby boomers’ own ambivalence about parenting,” according to Stephen D. O’Leary, rather than anything that is actually to be found in Revelation.
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Still,
The Omen
was successful enough at the box office to spawn a series of sequels, including
Damien: Omen II
in 1978 and
The Final Conflict
in 1981, and the screenwriter of
The Omen
returned to the apocalyptic well yet again for a network miniseries titled
Revelation
in 2005. A remake of
The Omen
in 2006 was promoted with the slogan: “You have been warned! 6-6-06.” And the memorable scene in
The Omen
in which the ambassador detects a birthmark in the form of three sixes on the skull of the young Antichrist conveyed the satanic meaning of 666 to millions of Americans who had never cracked open the book of Revelation. Thus did the corpus of urban legend in America come to include anecdotes about supermarket customers who refuse to accept change in the amount of $6.66 or automobile owners who send back license plates that include the number 666.

“Watching, waiting and working for the millennium,” observes church historian and pop theologian Leonard Sweet, “has become, even more than baseball, America’s favorite pastime.”
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The pop-culture version of the apocalypse, however, fails to convey the soul-shaking hopes and terrors that have been inspired in the readers and hearers of Revelation since it was first composed twenty centuries ago. The end of the world according to Revelation has been depicted, literally and luridly, in a series of movies—including
Image of the Beast, Early Warning, The Final Hour,
and
The Road to Armageddon—
that were produced by Christian fundamentalists and screened only in church basements and classrooms. But whenever a secular moviemaker sets out to deal with Revelation in a straightforward way, the absence of true belief always gets in the way.

For example, Michael Tolkin’s independent feature film
The Rapture
is torn between a fascination with the iconography of Revelation and a horror of religious fundamentalism. To be sure,
The Rapture
comes much closer to what is actually depicted in Christian scripture than any of the major studio releases in the Omen series. The hero and heroine—an agnostic cop and a jaded telephone operator who favored group sex with strangers before she was born again—end up being chased down a desert highway in California by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and then rising into the heavens on the day of the Rapture. (The director used a smoke machine and a camera dolly on a darkened soundstage to create the crude effect.) But Tolkin also depicts the heroine, played by Mimi Rogers, as a religious fanatic who murders her own young daughter with a gunshot to the head in order to hasten the weeping child into heaven. As a result, the movie is a theological muddle that seems to suggest that even nonbelievers and child killers will be “raptured” on the last day. No true believer would have committed such a grave doctrinal error.

For consumers of pop culture, then, the apocalyptic idea is sometimes just another item in the smorgasbord of religious beliefs and practices on offer in contemporary America: “[T]he latest surge in prophetic interest began in the early 1970s, at the same time that Americans began showing interest in the occult, parapsychology, ouija boards, Eastern religions, and UFOs,” observes Timothy Weber. “They may simply be an example of Americans’ insatiable appetite for the unusual, spectacular and exotic.”
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And another scholarly observer wonders if the phenomenon is “just another merchandising ploy, a cult of ‘chic bleak’ herding us into bookstores and cinemas and revival meetings to buy the latest wares of the latest self-selected messiah.”
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The Omen
may have been Revelation Lite, but that’s about as much as America was ready to embrace in the 1970s. Even
The Late Great Planet Earth
was a sugarcoated and caffeine-charged version of the hellfireand-damnation sermons that were still confined to the church halls and Christian broadcasting. As the end of the second millennium approached, however, the book of Revelation would come to be used yet again as a weapon in the culture war that was being fought by Christian fundamentalists for the heart and soul of America.

No American president after Ronald Reagan has been quite so outspoken about his personal belief that the end of the world is nigh. At the same time, however,
every
American president since Reagan has declared himself to be a “born-again” Christian. George Herbert Walker Bush, for example, may have been affiliated with the United Nations, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Affairs at various points in his long career—all of them condemned as tools of Satan by apocalyptic conspiracy theorists on the far right wing of Christian fundamentalism—but he proudly proclaimed himself to be a born-again Christian, too: “I’m a clear-cut affirmative to that.”
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The perceived need of American politicians to affirm their religious credentials may have less to do with their spiritual beliefs than with the sea change in American politics that took place during the Reagan presidency. Televangelists like Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, and Pat Robertson, founder of the Conservative Coalition, among many others, sought to deploy the faithful as a voting bloc and a source of financial support for politicians who adhered to certain articles of faith in Christian fundamentalism, which include criminalizing abortion and legalizing prayer in the public schools.

With 46 percent of all Americans declaring themselves to be evangelical or born-again Christians, according to a 2002 Gallup poll, the so-called Christian Right came to play a crucial role in the political strategy that ultimately achieved a Republican majority in Congress and a Republican president in the White House.
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By 1984, for example, the Republican party deemed it appropriate to invite televangelist James Robison to give the invocation at the convention where Reagan was renominated—and Robison deemed it appropriate to deliver a white-hot apocalyptic sermon to the enthusiastic delegates: “Any teaching of peace prior to [Christ’s] return is heresy,” said Robison. “It’s against the word of God. It’s Antichrist.”
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A certain high-water mark of political activism by Christian fundamentalists in America came in 1988, when Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, declared himself to be a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. He was already on record as predicting that the end was near—“I guarantee you by the fall of 1982 there is going to be a judgment on the world,” he wrote in 1980
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—but now he found it appropriate to tone down the apocalyptic rhetoric: “There is no way I feel I’m going to help the Lord bring the world to an end,” he told the
Wall Street Journal
in 1985, perhaps already thinking of his own presidential ambitions.
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The willingness of preachers like Falwell and Robertson to enter the political arena was something new in Christian fundamentalism. The apocalyptic idea suggests that politics are essentially pointless because human beings can do nothing to change or postpone God’s divine plan for the end of the world, and so saving souls is the only sound occupation for a good Christian. That’s why Christian fundamentalists in the early twentieth century regarded the Social Gospel with such contempt, and the same disdain for doing good works in the here and now continues to characterize many of the doomsayers who are convinced that the end is near.

“God didn’t send me to clean the fishbowl,” is how Hal Lindsey put it. “He sent me to fish.”
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The woes of the world, in fact, are nothing but good news in the eyes of apocalyptic true believers who look forward to a new heaven and a new earth. “We are not to weep as the people of the world weep when there are certain tragedies or breakups of the government or systems of the world,” explained Pat Robertson in an unguarded moment. “We are not to wring our hands and say, ‘Isn’t that awful.’ That isn’t awful at all. It’s good. That is a token, an evident token of our salvation, of where God is going to take us.”
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Other Christian fundamentalists, however, are inspired to “give the Devil ‘all the trouble [they] can till Jesus comes,’” a calling that prompts them to crusade for creationism, school prayer, and family values and against abortion, gay marriage, and pornography, among various other causes.
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Pat Robertson, for example, condemns feminism as “a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.” And when Disney World hosted a privately sponsored weekend gathering called “Gay Days,” he insisted that the toleration of homosexuality in America will result in hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, and “possibly a meteor,” citing chapter and verse from Revelation to support his prediction.
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Some Christians, of course, seek to trouble the Devil by following the lofty moral example of the Gospels. Jimmy Carter, for example, is a born-again Baptist—a church whose members, by and large, embrace the hard-edged apocalyptic doctrine of dispensational premillennialism—and he famously invoked the strictest expression of Christian morality when he confessed to
Playboy
in 1976 that he “committed adultery in my heart many times,” an allusion to the Sermon on the Mount: “Whosoever look-eth on a woman to lust after her,” says Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, “hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”
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But Carter is also famous for picking up a hammer and pounding nails under the auspices of Habitat for Humanity, an act that wordlessly but eloquently alludes to the Little Apocalypse as it appears in Matthew: “For I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in.”
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Some fundamentalist preachers endorse both faith
and
works. “[E]very person who is a follower of Christ is responsible to do something for the hungry and sick in the world,” writes Billy Graham in
Approaching Hoofbeats: Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
“We must do what we can, even though we know that God’s ultimate plan is the making of a new earth and a new heaven.” Yet Graham also insists that all of the afflictions of the modern world that might be remedied through good works, ranging from AIDS to global warming, are sure signs that the end is near. “The Bible teaches that peoples and nations have brought this pain upon themselves by humanistic religion and man-made war,” he insists. “Almost every headline, almost every television news flash, almost every radio bulletin proclaims one truth: the rider who brings death is on his way and hell is close behind.”
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Apocalyptic true believers, in other words, are instructed by their faith to consult the Bible to discover the inner meaning of the events, great and small, that unfold around us every day. When they do, however, they are likely to conclude that it is too late to do anything except pray that they will be among the saved when the Antichrist reveals himself. It’s an approach to problem-solving that links the author of Revelation with Ronald Reagan and, for that matter, millions of other Americans. Thus, for example, when they consider one of the most explosive human conflicts on earth—the struggle between Arabs and Jews over sovereignty in what three faiths regard as the Holy Land—some Christians cast their eyes to heaven rather than contemplating facts on the ground. For them, the fate of the modern Middle East is a matter of theology rather than geopolitics, and the birthplace of Daniel and John is now the stage on which the final act of the divine drama of the end-times is being played out.