A History of the End of the World

eternally lost and saved would be 1 in 17,476.” And an evangelist associated with the Moody Bible Institute conceded that “the Lord is going to judge America some day,” but he insisted that “we are justified in hoping our country will be spared and that Americans will share the joy of the kingdom.”²⁰

But the embers of resentment and revenge that burn at the core of Revelation always seem to explode into flames. “The United States has departed a-whoring after strange gods,” declared pioneering radio preacher Donald Grey Barnhouse shortly after the end of World War II. “The greed of the labor unions, the lust of Hollywood, the debauchery of the masses cry to high Heaven for judgment.”²¹ One preacher, sermonizing in 1949, blamed the public schools—“Godless, Bibleless, Christless”—for “clearing the path for Antichrist.”²² And M. R. DeHaan, the author of a 1963 apocalyptic novel titled The Days of Noah, attributed the moral decay of America to “women leaving their homes and children to enter factories and shops and offices” and described “people going almost completely crazy under [the] spell” of popular music: “Squeaks and squawks and empty groans and baby talking and monkey moans.”²³

Stripped of its sugarcoating, the apocalyptic vision of America is a weapon in the culture war between fundamentalism and the modern world: “God is going to judge America for its violence, its crimes, its backslidings, its murdering of millions of babies, its flaunting of homosexuality and sadomasochism, its corruption, its drunkenness and drug abuse, its lukewarmness toward Christ, its rampant divorce and adultery, its lewd pornography, its child molestation, its cheatings, its robbings, its dirty movies, and its occult practices,” declared evangelist David Wilkerson in 1985. “America today is one great holocaust party, with millions drunk, high, shaking their fist at God, daring him to send the bombs.”²⁴

All of the perceived ills of contemporary America were stitched together by some apocalyptic preachers into one vast web of conspiracy, with Satan planted invisibly but unmistakably at the center. At one time or another, the elements of the “cosmic conspiracy to install the Antichrist” have been said to include bankers, biofeedback, credit cards, computers, the Council on Foreign Relations, feminism, Freudian psychology, the human-potential movement, Indian gurus, “international Jews,” lesbianism, the Masons, Montessori schools, secular humanism, the Trilateral Commission, Universal Product Codes, and the United Nations—and the list is certainly not comprehensive.²⁵ Even The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, long ago proven to be a work of crude anti-Semitic propaganda concocted by the secret police of imperial Russia, still surfaces now and then in apocalyptic circles.

Indeed, the conspiracy theory begins in the text of Revelation, where the author alerts his readers and hearers to the dangers of “the deep things of Satan” and warns them against the invisible working of Satan’s will through the creatures who are his agents and deputies.²⁶ And so each new and unfamiliar phenomenon in postwar America could be seen by apocalyptic true believers as yet another manifestation of the same satanic conspiracy. Thus, for example, the technological revolution that brought computers into every aspect of American life inspired some readers of Revelation to regard credit-card numbers and pricing bar codes as “the mark of the beast.” After all, as the author of Revelation writes, “no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name”²⁷ A few visionaries even insisted that “Antichrist would be a computer.”²⁸

But, paradoxically, the conspiracy theories were actually a source of comfort—“an anchor…in a world of uncertainty and doubt” for men and women who were confused and disturbed by the cultural and political upheavals of postwar America.²⁹ Where a secular observer sees a “subtext of conspiracy, paranoia, and social alienation” in apocalyptic preaching, the true believer sees a revelation that invests history with “drama and meaning,” according to Paul Boyer. Indeed, otherwise comfortable and complacent Americans whose only afflictions are boredom and ennui are attracted to the chills and thrills of Revelation, and they find meaning in an otherwise meaningless world by embracing the old apocalyptic idea that “history is following a clear trajectory determined by God and that it is headed toward an ultimate, glorious consummation.”³⁰

Still, the antics and alarms of Christian doomsayers in postwar America were all but invisible to the audiences that laughed out loud at Dr. Strangelove when it was released in 1964. Of course, even a worldly or wholly secular family might be called upon by a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses going door-to-door with a supply of free literature. Revelation: Its Grand Climax at Hand!, one publication of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, features comic-book illustrations of the whole unlikely bestiary of Revelation. And anyone who switched through the channels on the television dial on any Sunday morning in the 1950s or the 1960s would encounter the preachments of Oral Roberts or Billy Graham or countless other fledgling televangelists. But, by and large, the old ideas about the end of the world were confined to a kind of Christian ghetto while the rest of America accustomed itself to the idea that doomsday will be strictly a human enterprise.

As with so much else in postwar America, however, the old ways of thinking and talking about the end of the world were about to change in profound and enduring ways. America was swept by wave after wave of radical new ideas and unsettling new experiences in the 1960s and 1970s—war, riot, and assassination, of course, but also the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement, the sexual revolution and the computer revolution, Beatlemania and Woodstock, the birth-control pill and men on the moon. The times they were a-changing, according to Bob Dylan’s anthem, and Christian fundamentalism caught the same the winds of change. The New World was the site of yet another apocalyptic invasion that carried the book of Revelation out of the Christian ghetto and into the heart of American politics and popular culture.

The self-made apocalyptic seer who literally put the apocalyptic idea on the best-seller lists of America was a colorful and charismatic preacher named Hal Lindsey (b. 1930). He was working as a tugboat captain on the Mississippi in the 1950s when he experienced a powerful religious conversion. After studying at the Dallas Theological Seminary, a center of premillennialist doctrine, Lindsey went on the road as a preacher for the Campus Crusade for Christ. Inspired by the lively response to the sermons on Bible prophecy that he delivered in the late 1960s, Lindsey and his collaborator, C. C. Carlson, went public with his prediction that the end was near with the publication of The Late Great Planet Earth in 1970.

Like the “medieval best sellers” of an earlier age, Lindsey’s book repurposed and reinterpreted the text of Revelation and other apocalyptic passages of the Bible in terms that made sense to contemporary readers. And Lindsey was rewarded with best-seller status that far exceeded even the Scofield Reference Bible and, significantly, reached far beyond the customary readership of Christian fundamentalist texts and tracts. The Late Great Planet Earth sold more than 20 million copies, and Lindsey was hailed by the New York Times as “the best-selling author of the 1970s.”³¹ Bart Ehrman goes even further and declares that Lindsey is “probably the single most read author of religion in modern times.”³²

Lindsey comes across in The Late Great Planet Earth as media savvy and thoroughly modern, but he is only the latest in a long line of apocalyptic preachers that reaches all the way back to the author of Revelation himself. He is a supercharged culture warrior, setting himself against all the bogeymen that he discerns in the counterculture and the so-called New Age—astrology, extrasensory perception, meditation, mysticism, spiritualism, witchcraft, hallucinogenic drugs, progressive politics, Christian ecumenicalism, and what he calls “oriental religions.”³³ And, again like the author of Revelation, he condemns all ideas about religion except his own, and he suggests that diversity and toleration in matters of faith are, quite literally, the tools of Satan.

“Satan loves religion, which is why he invades certain churches on Sunday,” Lindsey writes, hinting but never stating exactly which churches he regards as the “throne of Satan.” “Religion is a great blinder of the minds of men.”³⁴

Above all, he insists that God’s plan for the imminent end of the world is to be found in “the tested truths of Bible prophecy.” The Late Great Planet Earth, in fact, is essentially a restatement of the doctrine of dispensational premillennialism as framed by John Darby in the nineteenth century. “Some time in the future there will be a seven-year period climaxed by the visible return of Jesus Christ,” Lindsey begins, and he proceeds to describe the standard version of the end-time scenario that he learned at the Dallas Theological Seminary. In fact, some of his former fellow seminarians, surely a bit envious of his remarkable success, “complained that Lindsey had simply repackaged his lecture notes!”³⁵

The “seven-year countdown” to the Second Coming will be triggered by the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the resumption of animal sacrifice by the Jewish people. Next will come the world dictatorship of the Antichrist and the period of persecution known as the Tribulation—but not before Christian true believers are