A History of the End of the World

raptured to heaven. At the end of the Tribulation, Jesus Christ will return to fight the battle of Armageddon, reign over a peaceable kingdom on earth for a thousand years, and then, at last, defeat Satan once and for all, sit in judgment over all humankind, and reward the Christian saints with eternal life in a new heaven and a new earth.

“Someday, a day that only God knows, Jesus Christ is coming to take away all those who believe in Him,” writes Lindsey about the Rapture. “Without benefit of science, space suits, or interplanetary rockets, there will be those who will be transported into a glorious place more beautiful, more awesome, than we can possibly comprehend.”³⁶

What distinguishes Lindsey from doomsayers with more modest book sales is his undeniable genius for hot- wiring the book of Revelation to the geopolitical realities of the contemporary world. Here, too, Lindsey is following the example of earlier readers of Revelation; indeed, as we have seen, the author of Revelation himself apparently sees the Roman emperor Nero as the Antichrist, and successive generations have come up with their own suspects, ranging from Muhammad to Mussolini. And, like exegetes in every age, Lindsey offers his readers and hearers a way to make sense of the baffling and frightening world in which they find themselves. For Lindsey, it is a world haunted by the realpolitik of the Cold War and the constant threat of nuclear annihilation.

The Antichrist, according to Lindsey, will be a flesh-and-blood politician who rises to a position of leadership in what he calls “the revived Roman Empire”—that is, the Common Market, the community of nations that was the forerunner of today’s European Union.³⁷ Magog, he insists, is the Soviet Union, and Gog is its head of state. The “kings of the east,” briefly mentioned in Revelation as combatants in the battle of Armageddon, are meant to identify the People’s Republic of China.³⁸ And the final conflagration, described in Revelation in terms of stars falling from heaven and monstrous creatures rising from the abyss, is actually meant to be a global nuclear war—“an all-out attack of ballistic missiles upon the great metropolitan areas of the world.”³⁹

Lindsey insists that God granted visions of the far distant future to the ancient prophets that were wholly unintelligible to them or the readers and hearers to whom they preached during their own lifetimes. Thus, for example, Lindsey quotes from the book of Zechariah—“Their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet, and their eyes shall consume away in their holes, and their tongues shall consume away in their mouths”⁴⁰—and then he credits the Hebrew prophet with a vision of events that would come to pass only in the atomic age: “Has it occurred to you that this is exactly what happens to those who are in a thermonuclear blast?” asks Lindsey. “It appears that this will be the case at the return of the Christ.”⁴¹

Then, too, Lindsey adopts a “language arsenal” of his own making in The Late Great Planet Earth, a vocabulary that is intended to capture the attention of jaded readers who would not otherwise pick up a book of Christian witness or Bible prophecy. Thus, for example, the Bible itself is “the Best Seller.” The Antichrist is called “the ‘Future Fuehrer,’” and the Great Whore of Babylon is “Scarlet O’Harlot.” Armageddon is “World War III.” Those 144,000 male virgins from the twelve tribes of Israel who are said to be “sealed” by Jesus Christ in the end-times are dubbed “Jewish Billy Grahams”—that is, “physical, literal Jews who are going to believe with a vengeance that Jesus is the Messiah.” (All other Jews, he suggests, will be dead and gone.) And Lindsey, after having condemned the use of hallucinogenic substances, proceeds to describe the experience of the Rapture as “The ultimate trip.”⁴²

“If you are a believer, chapters 4 and 5 of Revelation describe what you will be experiencing in heaven,” Lindsey writes. “Talk about mind expansion drugs!”⁴³

Fatefully, Lindsey is unable to resist the same temptation that has resulted in the embarrassment of every previous doomsayer from Montanus to Father Miller—the cardinal sin of date setting. The countdown clock for doomsday, Lindsey argues, began with the establishment of the modern state of Israel, and he interprets various fragments of biblical text to confirm that the end will come within the lifetime of the generation that witnessed its rebirth in 1948. On the assumption that a generation is equivalent to forty years, Lindsey suggests in The Late Great Planet Earth, first published in 1970, that the Rapture will take place in 1981, followed by seven years of persecution under the Antichrist and then, in 1988, the battle of Armageddon and the second coming of Jesus Christ.

Lindsey, of course, was proven wrong. As the year 1981 approached and the Rapture seemed no nearer, he rechecked his end-time calculations and offered a slightly revised schedule in The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon (1980). After the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the early 1990s, however, he was inspired to offer a new end-time scenario in Planet Earth 2000 A.D. (1994): Islamic fundamentalism rather than the Red Army will be the final adversary of Jesus Christ at the battle of Armageddon, although he insists that “the ‘collapse’ of Communism is part of a masterful game of deceit engineered by Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet KGB.”⁴⁴ Still later, Lindsey offered another insight into the workings of Satan: UFO sightings, he argued, are “deceptive ruses by demons, who will soon stage a massive UFO landing to mislead earthlings into believing in life on other planets.”⁴⁵

Lindsey himself, like Father Miller, remained cheerful and unchastened even though his prophecies proved to be wrong and his revisionist works failed to achieve the same stellar sales that had been racked up by The Late Great Planet Earth. As it turned out, Lindsey had achieved something new, significant, and enduring in spite of the manifest failure of his prophecies: he played a crucial role in leveraging the apocalyptic idea out of the fundamentalist churches and into the mainstream of American civilization. Among his 20 million readers, for example, was a man who would take the book of Revelation out of the tent meeting and into the White House.

Revelation achieved its first penetration into American politics with the unlikely rise of Ronald Reagan, first as governor of California and later as president of the United States. Raised in a church with roots that reached all the way back to the era of the Second Great Awakening—and reportedly an early reader of The Late Great Planet Earth—Reagan was perhaps the first national figure outside of fundamentalist circles to openly and unapologetically affirm his belief in the imminent fulfillment of Bible prophecy.

“Apparently never in history have so many of the prophecies come true in such a relatively short time,” said Ronald Reagan, then serving as governor of California, in an interview that appeared in 1968 in Christian Life magazine.⁴⁶ And he was even more forthcoming at a political dinner in Sacramento in 1971 when he commented on the significance of a recent coup in Libya: “That’s a sign that the day of Armageddon isn’t far off,” declared Reagan. “Everything’s falling into place. It can’t be long now.”⁴⁷

Reagan, in fact, was able to cite chapter and verse to support his prediction. The incident in Libya apparently put him in mind of a Sunday-school lesson on the apocalyptic prophecies of the Hebrew Bible: “For the day is near, even the day of the Lord is near,” goes a passage in the book of Ezekiel. “Ethiopia, and Libya, and Lydia, and all the mingled people…shall fall with them by the sword.” And Reagan, apparently inspired by the sight of waiters igniting bowls of cherries jubilee in the darkened dining room, was mindful of God’s vow to bring down on Gog, the biblical enemy of Israel, “great hailstones, fire, and brimstone.”⁴⁸ Reagan alluded to these passages during his table talk and concluded: “That must mean they’ll be destroyed by nuclear weapons.”⁴⁹

Reagan carried those Sunday-school lessons all the way to Washington. “We may be the generation that sees Armageddon,” he told televangelist Jim Bakker in 1980.⁵⁰ “You know, I turn back to your ancient prophets in the Old Testament and the signs foretelling Armageddon, and I find myself wondering if we’re the generation that’s going to see that come about,” he told a Jewish lobbyist in 1983. “I don’t know if you’ve noted any of those prophecies lately, but believe me, they certainly described the times we’re going through.”⁵¹

Reagan surrounded himself in the White House with men who shared the same beliefs. “I have read the Book of Revelation,” affirmed Caspar Weinberger, his secretary of defense, “and yes, I believe the world is going to end —by an act of God, I hope—but every day I think that time is running out.” And James Watts, Reagan’s interior secretary, demurred to a question about his plans for protecting the environment for the benefit of future generations by invoking the Second Coming: “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.”⁵²

Reagan appears to have been a convinced reader of The Late Great Planet Earth.