them with “an avalanche of watermelon rinds, banana peelings, overripe tomatoes, and other edible fruit.”93 Some missionaries adopted a kind of protective coloration, referring only to “the Messiah” and never to its Greek-derived equivalent, “Christ.” And one earnest missionary found out for himself why it was unwise to start canvassing a Jewish tenement from the ground up. By the time he reached the top floor, the apartment dwellers on the lower floors had read the literature he was handing out and greeted him on the way back down with curses and insults, hot soup, and rotten vegetables.
“Thus I learned that the next time I went into a tenement house,” the young man explained, “I must start on the top floor and work down.”94
For some Christian fundamentalists, the resistance of the Jewish people to their efforts at conversion was seen as a sign of something wicked.
To their credit, many other fundamentalists were moved to denounce those of their fellow Christians who engaged in acts or expressions of anti-Semitism. Thus, for example, James M. Gray, a minister with the Moody Bible Institute, condemned anti-Semitism as “one of the most despicable, brutal and dangerous forms of racial hatred and antagonism known to mankind.” At the same time, however, he frankly acknowledged that his religious convictions instructed him to regard the Jews as doomed: “It is true that Jehovah has awfully cursed Israel for her sins, and His curse rests upon her today,” Gray declared. “But it is one thing for God to curse her and another thing for us to do so.”96
Then, too, some frustrated missionaries were encouraged by what they read in the book of Revelation to take a kind of smug satisfaction in the fate of those who resisted conversion, Jews and Christians alike. The author of Revelation, as we have seen, burns with resentment toward the “lukewarm” Christians who prefer the good life to what he sees as the righteous life, and he seems to take pleasure in imagining the revenge that God will take on anyone who does not share his faith. And the same gloating can be seen in latter-day readers of Revelation, too. Thus, for example, a revivalist preacher writing in 1918 insisted that God will literally chortle with delight over the suffering of everyone who has not been “raptured” to heaven before the end-times.
“Often had these left-behind ones been warned, but in vain,” wrote the preacher. “Servants of God had faithfully set before them their imperative need of fleeing from the wrath to come only to be laughed at for their pains. And now the tables will be turned. God will laugh at them, laugh at their calamity and mock at their fear.”97
To be sure, the God of Israel is famously depicted as a jealous and wrathful deity in certain horrific passages of the Hebrew Bible. “Vengeance will I wreak on my foes,” promises God in the book of Deuteronomy. “I will make my arrows drunk with blood as my sword devours flesh.”98 But here we see exactly how God is transformed in the new readings of Revelation from judge, king, and warrior into a cackling killer who takes pleasure in avenging himself on the men, women, and children whom he created in the first place.
At the same time that Christian fundamentalists were seeking to save Jewish souls, they were also engaged in a bitter struggle with some of their fellow Christians over the right way to read the book of Revelation. The same debate that had divided Christians in late antiquity—whether to read Revelation “spiritually” or “carnally”—was now setting traditionalists against modernists in the opening years of the twentieth century.
Revelation, according to one Christian commentator writing in 1907, was “a ‘queer bird’ hatched from ‘visions of the impossible,’” and he insisted that a majority of modern Christians had abandoned the whole apocalyptic enterprise in favor of “saner and more spiritual conceptions.” Other critics resorted to the old argument that the book of Revelation tempted Christians to engage in the error of “Judaizing” the biblical text: “A product of ‘highly imaginative Jewish thought,’” as James H. Moorhead sums up the argument, “apocalypticism seduced the early Christian community for a time but was never consistent with the basic thrust of the church’s message.”99
Against the overheated doomsday scenario of the premillennialists, the Christian progressives advocated what came to be characterized as postmillennialism—that is, the notion that the second coming of Jesus Christ will take place only
Ironically, the most progressive ideas in Christianity 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
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
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.”103 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.”104
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.”105
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
