A History of the End of the World

end.”¹⁴ And yet, by 1696, an English scientist named William Whiston was ready to argue that a wholly natural celestial phenomenon like Halley’s Comet may have caused the Great Flood as described in Genesis, and proposed that “the earth’s prophesied destruction by fire would be by the same means.”¹⁵

“Whiston’s end-time drama included no Second Coming, no Last Judgment,” as Perry Miller, a distinguished historian of Puritanism, points out.¹⁶ Here was perhaps the earliest stirring of an idea that would take on ever more ominous meanings in our own times—a vision of the end of the world that allowed no role at all for God. And even those Christian true believers who continued to read the book of Revelation with perfect credulity began to see wholly new and unsuspected meanings in the ancient text. Those ideas, too, would move westward to America, where Yankee ingenuity was applied to Holy Writ with revolutionary consequences.

An early example of the Americanization of the Apocalypse is found in the remarkable life and work of Cotton Mather (1663–1728), son of Increase Mather, grandson of John Cotton, and minister of the Old North Church in Boston. He was capable of holding an earnest belief in the efficacy of both witchcraft as supposedly practiced by the women of Salem and the efficacy of the newfangled science of smallpox inoculation. He penned a panic-making treatise on satanic possession that played a role in the witch trials—“Go tell the world what it is these Monsters love to do”—and yet he also arranged for his own young son to be inoculated, an act so controversial in colonial Boston that it prompted one outraged citizen to throw a bomb (or “a Fired Granado,” as Mather himself describes it) through the window of his lodging room.¹⁷

“But, this Night there stood by me the Angel of GOD,” Mather writes in his journal to explain why the grenade failed to explode, “whose I am and whom I serve.”¹⁸

The apparent contradictions that coexisted within the heart and mind of Cotton Mather can be readily explained by his conviction that he was beholding, at once, the shuddering death of the old earth and the birth pangs of the new one. “In fact, Mather’s blend of optimism and paranoia is entirely characteristic of the millennial vision,” explains historian Damian Thompson in The End of Time. “Fear of witches is above all evidence of End-time anxiety, since it was believed that the Last Days would see a terrible loosing of the powers of darkness.” At the same time, Mather saw the prosperity of the American colonies—“great increase in the blessings of land and sea”—as a evidence that “God had surely intended ‘some great thing’ when he planted these American heavens and earth.”¹⁹

Indeed, Cotton Mather saw himself as “Herald of the Lord’s Kingdome now approaching,”²⁰ and he shared the conviction of his famous father and grandfather that America was the place where the prophecies of Revelation would be fulfilled. He was so fixated on Revelation, in fact, that he convinced himself that “evil angels,” speaking through a young woman whom he believed to be the victim of demonic possession, once scolded him for neglecting a certain passage from the book of Revelation in his sermons. The demons wanted him to preach on Rev. 13:8 (“All that dwell upon the earth shall worship [the beast]”), but he defied them by choosing Rev. 20:15 instead: “And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.”²¹

On the subject of doomsday, Mather was inspired by both religion and science. He conceded that the New Jerusalem would appear in North America only after the world was destroyed in a vast conflagration, just as John had predicted in Revelation, but he was also mindful of the latest discoveries of the earth sciences when he described the end-times. Volcanoes, he suggested, will be the instrument of the divine will: “Subterraneous Combustions, and such Amassments of Igneous Particles,” he writes, “which are an Eternal Fire.”²² And, significantly, he looked beyond the days of terror and tribulation to the shining moment when the New Jerusalem floats down from the heavens.

“[O]ur glorious LORD will have an Holy city in AMERICA,” Mather declares in 1709, adopting a phrase that became (and remains) an American credo, “a City, the Street whereof will be Pure Gold.”²³

A century or so after Mather uttered these words, men, women, and children by the millions would begin to arrive in America—“huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” according to the poem by Emma Lazarus that is famously inscribed on the Statue of Liberty—and they, too, came in search of streets paved with gold.²⁴ Even if they were wholly ignorant of the book of Revelation, they were following in the footsteps of the Puritan fathers who failed to foresee what would become of their apocalyptic fancies.

The Puritan colonists, of course, were no democrats. Rather, they aspired to the kind of government that is deeply implicit in both Jewish and Christian scripture and especially the book of Revelation—“a theocracy, as near as might be, to that which was the glory of Israel,” according to John Mather.²⁵ That’s why the earliest Puritan colonists in America, who aspired to create a religious utopia, felt thoroughly justified in denying citizenship to anyone who was not a member of a Puritan congregation, banishing religious dissenters, and even sending a few Quakers to the gallows.

Happily for the health of the American democracy, the Puritans were soon eclipsed by new arrivals to North America who did not feel obliged to impose their religious beliefs and practices on their fellow citizens. The Founding Fathers, for example, drew more inspiration from the proto-democracies of pagan Greece and Rome than they did from the divine monarchy that is celebrated so lushly in Revelation. Indeed, they were perfectly willing to tinker with Holy Writ itself. Thomas Jefferson, for example, disdained the book of Revelation and boldly took it upon himself to rewrite the Gospels to suit the spirit of a revolutionary and democratic age, keeping only what he regarded as “the very words only of Jesus” and cutting away “the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms as instruments of riches and power for themselves.”²⁶

Still, the glowing theological core of Revelation—the sure promise that a new and better world was coming soon—appealed to even the most secular of the American patriots. Thus, for example, the apocalyptic vocabulary of abuse was put to good use by pamphleteers in the struggle for American independence. King George III was denounced as the Anti-christ, and the Stamp Act of 1765, which required the American colonists to affix a tax stamp bearing the king’s name and image to their papers and publications, was linked to the prophecy in Revelation that Satan would command all of mankind to display the mark of the Beast.

To be sure, many American patriots were also pious Christians, but when colonial preacher Samuel West sermonized on “that terrible denunciation of divine wrath against the worshippers of the beast and his image,” he was referring to the British lion rather than the satanic seven-headed dragon of Revelation.²⁷ And the American version of the New Earth in 1776 was a place where every human being—or, at least, every adult white male—enjoyed the “inalienable rights” of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, free of the dictates of kings or priests. Novus Ordo Seculorum is the Latin motto that was adopted in 1782 and placed on the great seal of the United States: “A new order of the ages.” Even a red-hot revolutionary like Thomas Paine, who may have stripped his rhetoric of all religious trappings, expressed himself in terms of the millennial ideal that can be traced all the way back to the apocalyptic tradition of distant antiquity. And the destiny of American democracy, as Paine defined it, owes something to the words that were written down in John’s little book in biblical antiquity.

“We have it in our power,” he declared, “to begin the world over again.”²⁸

Of course, the old ideas about the apocalyptic kingdom of Christ on earth were never wholly abandoned in colonial America. Now and then, the banked embers of religious true belief would burst into flame as preachers stoked the fears and longings of their congregations with the kind of hard-sell sermonizing that is the trademark of American evangelism. Again and again, the spirit of Christian revival attracted the crowds to church halls and tent meetings and whipped them into a spiritual frenzy—so often, in fact, that certain stretches of western New York State came to be called the Burned-Over District precisely because its populace was so susceptible to each new wave of religious enthusiasm.

The revival movement in America was “the forerunner of something vastly great,” according to Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), the Puritan minister whose preaching sparked the so-called First Great Awakening in the mid–eighteenth century. Not incidentally, Edwards was the author of a vast commentary on Revelation titled Notes on the Apocalypse.²⁹ Starting with the prophecy in Revelation that