A History of the End of the World

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Kubrick and his collaborators on Dr. Strangelove do not mention God or the Devil at all, but they may have been mindful of the end-time scenario of Revelation when they devised the final scene of the movie. Faced with the utter destruction of humankind, the demented scientific genius called Dr. Strangelove holds out the bright hope of a New Heaven and a New Earth. A few hundred thousand men and women—“a nucleus of human specimens”—can be sheltered “at the bottom of some of our deeper mine shafts” for a century or so. Men would be selected for their potency and women for their sexual allure. Like the ancient readers of Revelation who imagined the millennial kingdom as an era of abundance, the postnuclear New Earth would be a sensual paradise for those who survived to see it.

“Naturally, they would breed prodigiously,” explains Dr. Strangelove. “But with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of, say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work back to the present gross national production within, say, twenty years.” And when the survivors finally emerge from the abyss, the men and women who had been judged worthy to live in the New Earth will be ready for the brave new world that they will find on the surface: “The prevailing emotion will be one of nostalgia for those left behind,” he concludes, “combined with a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead.”⁹

At precisely the moment of greatest optimism, however, a single American aircraft reaches its target in the Soviet Union, the doomsday device is triggered, and the atmosphere is suddenly filled with a series of mushroom- shaped clouds, the iconic image of the atomic age. Like On the Beach—and, again, quite unlike the other books and movies in the apocalyptic genre—Dr. Strangelove ends with no hope of human survival. “We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when,” goes the song that plays beneath the final fugue of thermonuclear detonations. The song would be an appropriate soundtrack to the book of Revelation, but now the words are purely and bitterly ironic.

Not everyone in America in the postwar era, however, shared the secular and cynical outlook that characterizes Dr. Strangelove. For a great many men and women, the comforting certainties of old-time religion—including the end of the world as it is depicted in the premillennialist reading of Revelation—remained very much alive. Indeed, two different and contesting apocalyptic ideas coexist in America, one based on science and the other based on religion. For the religious true believer, the prospect that the world might end in a nuclear conflagration is perfectly consistent with the belief that God, rather than humankind, will be its author.

“Some day we may blow ourselves up with all the bombs, [b]ut I still believe that God’s going to be in control,” declared the Reverend Charles Jones, pastor of a Baptist church in Amarillo, Texas, whose congregants included many of the men and women who worked at the nearby Pantex hydrogen-bomb assembly plant. “If He chooses to use nuclear war, then who am I to argue with that?”¹⁰

Christian fundamentalism, in fact, produced its own pop-culture version of the Apocalypse, including books, movies, comics, posters, and miscellaneous items of inspirational merchandise. The true believer might buy and wear a “Rapture watch” whose face carried a message to remind the wearer that the end is nigh—“One hour nearer the Lord’s return”—or display a dashboard plaque that was meant to alert passengers that the driver might be “raptured” to heaven at any moment: “If you hear a trumpet, grab the wheel.”¹¹

Visions of what will happen when Christians are suddenly removed to heaven might be horrific—“bursting graves, crashing planes, and cars careening out of control”—or rhapsodic. “In one Rapture painting,” writes Paul Boyer, “the lawnmower-pushing suburban husband gapes in wonder as his aproned wife soars over the clothesline to meet Jesus.”¹² And the modern counterpart of a medieval best seller like Fifteen Signs of Doomsday was a handbook titled How to Recognize the Antichrist.

Youngsters in fundamentalist households were reared from early childhood in constant and urgent anticipation of the end of the world. “Many who were raised as premillennialists can tell horror stories,” explains Timothy P. Weber, “about coming home to empty houses or finding themselves suddenly alone in department stores or supermarkets and instinctively concluding that Jesus has come and left them behind.”¹³ And novelist Rhoda Huffey, whose mother and father were both Pentecostal preachers, recalls the mind-set of an anxious eleven-year-old girl growing up with the conviction that she would be left behind when her parents were raptured to heaven:

“If the Christians had left, there was still one more way, which involved chopping off your head,” writes Huffey in her semiautobiographical novel, The Hallelujah Side. “This was in Revelation, the horrible book. The Anti-christ rode up on his dark horse to brand your forehead with the Mark of the Beast, 666. If you refused, he cut off your head with a hatchet and you went to heaven immediately. So there was nothing to be afraid of.”¹⁴

But the apocalyptic subculture was not confined to sermons, tracts, and comic books, however colorful and imaginative. Like the Millerites, who made good use of the latest high-speed printing presses in the mid–nineteenth century, the doomsayers of the twentieth century were quick to embrace the latest technologies of mass communications. As early as 1936, for example, one enthusiastic preacher pondered the famous prophecy in Revelation—“Behold, he cometh with the clouds; and every eye shall see him”¹⁵—and then offered his own explanation of what the biblical author really means to say: “In the past we had to fall back on the explanation that it does not necessarily mean that all should see the Lord coming in the clouds of heaven at the same time,” the preacher explained, “but now we know that by Television, that beatific sight can be seen the world over at one and the same moment.”¹⁶

Some of the very first programs to be broadcast over the newfangled invention called radio were devoted to old-time religion. The Moody Bible Institute, for example, started broadcasting in the early 1930s over its own powerful radio station, and a hard-preaching radio show called the Old-Fashioned Revival Hour, originating in Long Beach, California, was heard over some 450 stations across the United States by the 1940s. Even the CBS radio network carried a weekly program on religion hosted by Donald Grey Barnhouse (1895–1960), the editor of an apocalyptic magazine titled Revelation. “If atomic bombs fall upon our cities,” declared Barnhouse, “we shall be in heaven the next second.”¹⁷

Some of the most charismatic pulpit preachers discovered the power of television and thereby turned themselves into authentic superstars in Christian circles. Oral Roberts (b. 1918) and Billy Graham (b. 1918) can be credited with the invention of televangelism; both started their ministries as tent revivalists but moved on to radio in the 1940s and television in the 1950s. A whole generation of fundamentalist preachers followed their example, the most famous (or notorious) of which include Pat Robertson (b. 1930), Rex Humbard (b. 1919), Timothy LaHaye (b. 1926), Jimmy Swaggart (b. 1935), Jim Bakker (b. 1939), and Jerry Falwell (b. 1933), the latter of whom came to be described as “the prince of the electronic church.”¹⁸

All of them couched their preaching (and their fund-raising appeals) in distinctly apocalyptic terms, playing on the fears and hopes of their electronic flocks in precisely the same way that the author of Revelation addressed his first readers and hearers. Ironically, both the daily newspapers and the Saturday-afternoon science-fiction flicks seemed to reinforce even the most urgent prophecies about the end of the world. “We may have another year, maybe two years to work for Jesus Christ,” warned Billy Graham during his 1950 crusade, “and [then] ladies and gentlemen, I believe it is all going to be over.”¹⁹

The apocalyptic idea in Christian fundamentalism has always remained on the far side of a certain cultural divide in America. Like the author of Revelation, who detested the classical civilization in which he lived and preached, the latter-day readers of Revelation condemned some of the most celebrated features of American civilization. They feared big business, big government, and big labor; they were revolted by the entertainment that was available in the local movie houses, over the radio, or on television; and they adopted the “language arsenal” of Revelation to denounce the sinful and satanic world in which they found themselves.

A few American doomsayers, of course, have always accentuated the positive when it comes to the end of the world. The millennial kingdom, for example, is sometimes advertised as a celestial version of the American dream: “Everyone will be self-employed and will enjoy the full fruitage of his own labor,” declared one preacher. “Every single inhabitant of the world in that age will be independent, own his own property and his own home, and provide for his own family in abundance.” Another preacher optimistically calculated that “the ratio between the