A History of the End of the World

“Every one of Lindsey’s proposals for domestic and foreign policy,” insists Stephen D. O’Leary, “was part of Reagan’s campaign platform.”⁵³ To hear Lindsey himself tell it, Reagan was eager to win over the American military establishment to apocalyptic true belief. With the president’s blessing, Lindsey asserts, he was invited to brief Pentagon war planners on the divine implications of nuclear combat with the Soviet Union. And Reagan invited televangelist Jerry Falwell, another prominent and outspoken apocalyptic preacher, to attend briefings of the National Security Council and deliver the same sermon.

Such notions were wholly unremarkable in the fundamentalist churches of America—and they reached an even wider audience through the radio and television broadcasts of various apocalyptic preachers, both famous and obscure—but they were deeply unnerving in the mind and mouth of a man who is accompanied wherever he goes by the launch codes of the American nuclear arsenal. If the president of the United States is a true believer who is convinced that “the day of Armageddon isn’t far off,” would he not be tempted to take it upon himself to rain fire and brimstone down on the latest enemy to be seen as the Antichrist?

That troubling question was raised by network correspondent Marvin Kalb during the televised debates of the 1984 presidential campaign. Nancy Reagan could be heard to mutter “Oh no!” in the background, but the president himself was prepared with a reasonable and even statesmanlike answer. Reagan conceded that he had a “philosophical” interest in the biblical prophecies about the battle of Armageddon, and he argued that “a number of theologians” had suggested that “the prophecies are coming together that portend that.” But he concluded that it was impossible to know whether Armageddon “is a thousand years away or day after tomorrow.” And he insisted that he “never seriously warned and said we must plan according to Armageddon.”⁵⁴

Still, the issue did not go away. The New York Times editorialized on the peril posed by the “Armageddonist” advisers in the inner circle of the Reagan administration. Self-styled “gonzo” journalist Hunter S. Thompson, noting that “the president is very keen on the Book of Revelation” and pointing out a few of the weirder sights that are described in the biblical text, observed that “a lot of acid freaks have been taken away in white jackets with extremely long sleeves for seeing things like that.”⁵⁵ On a more sober note, a committee of one hundred clergy joined in imploring the president to “disavow the dogma that nuclear holocaust is foreordained in the Bible.”⁵⁶

Reagan, however, continued to affirm his own true belief in the end-time scenario of Revelation when he famously and memorably branded the Soviet Union as the “evil empire.” The phrase meant one thing to fans of Star Wars but something quite different to readers of Revelation, who were inevitably reminded of the satanic empire that is described in biblical code as “Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.”⁵⁷ Indeed, Reagan said as much in an address to the National Association of Evangelicals in 1983, when he referred to the Soviet Union as “the focus of evil in the modern world” and predicted that both the evil empire and history itself will soon end.

“There is sin and evil in the world, and we’re joined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might,” the president witnessed. “I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history, whose last pages are even now being written.”⁵⁸

Reagan was only half right, of course. The fact that the Soviet Union ended—but the world did not—posed an awkward problem for the doomsayers and, especially, the date setters. And yet, as we have seen over and over again, the true believer is not much troubled by the demonstrable failure of a prophecy, which can always be recalibrated and reissued to suit the latest turn of events. Once injected into politics and statecraft by Ronald Reagan, the book of Revelation achieved a degree of stature and influence that it had not enjoyed since Joachim of Fiore and Hildegard of Bingen served as apocalyptic advisers to the popes and kings of the medieval world.

The new respectability of the apocalyptic idea in American politics seems to coincide with its sudden popularity in American popular culture, where the imagery of Revelation began to appear in artifacts ranging from a punk-rock song by the Sex Pistols titled “I Am Antichrist” to a jingle in a Pizza Hut commercial: “Beware of 666! It’s the Anti-Pizza!”⁵⁹ And surely it is no coincidence that the best-seller status of The Late Great Planet Earth in the early 1970s was quickly followed by the release of The Omen, an apocalyptic thriller about an American diplomat who discovers that he is the unwitting adoptive father of the Antichrist.

“When the Jews return to Zion, and a comet rips the sky,” goes a bit of doggerel that figures prominently in the plot of The Omen (and neatly sums up the apocalyptic scenario according to John Nelson Darby), “the Holy Roman Empire rises, then you and I must die.”⁶⁰

Tellingly, The Omen does not actually concern itself with the end of the world. Rather, the moviemakers concoct a wholly spurious plot line that requires the hero, played by Gregory Peck, to kill the satanic child with seven daggers that have been excavated from the ruins of Megiddo, the supposed site of the Battle of Armageddon. “The book of Revelation predicted it all,” announces a doomsaying priest—but Revelation predicts no such thing.⁶¹ Indeed, The Omen “can be read as reflecting the baby boomers’ own ambivalence about parenting,” according to Stephen D. O’Leary, rather than anything that is actually to be found in Revelation.⁶²

Still, The Omen was successful enough at the box office to spawn a series of sequels, including Damien: Omen II in 1978 and The Final Conflict in 1981, and the screenwriter of The Omen returned to the apocalyptic well yet again for a network miniseries titled Revelation in 2005. A remake of The Omen in 2006 was promoted with the slogan: “You have been warned! 6-6-06.” And the memorable scene in The Omen in which the ambassador detects a birthmark in the form of three sixes on the skull of the young Antichrist conveyed the satanic meaning of 666 to millions of Americans who had never cracked open the book of Revelation. Thus did the corpus of urban legend in America come to include anecdotes about supermarket customers who refuse to accept change in the amount of $6.66 or automobile owners who send back license plates that include the number 666.

“Watching, waiting and working for the millennium,” observes church historian and pop theologian Leonard Sweet, “has become, even more than baseball, America’s favorite pastime.”⁶³

The pop-culture version of the apocalypse, however, fails to convey the soul-shaking hopes and terrors that have been inspired in the readers and hearers of Revelation since it was first composed twenty centuries ago. The end of the world according to Revelation has been depicted, literally and luridly, in a series of movies—including Image of the Beast, Early Warning, The Final Hour, and The Road to Armageddon—that were produced by Christian fundamentalists and screened only in church basements and classrooms. But whenever a secular moviemaker sets out to deal with Revelation in a straightforward way, the absence of true belief always gets in the way.

For example, Michael Tolkin’s independent feature film The Rapture is torn between a fascination with the iconography of Revelation and a horror of religious fundamentalism. To be sure, The Rapture comes much closer to what is actually depicted in Christian scripture than any of the major studio releases in the Omen series. The hero and heroine—an agnostic cop and a jaded telephone operator who favored group sex with strangers before she was born again—end up being chased down a desert highway in California by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and then rising into the heavens on the day of the Rapture. (The director used a smoke machine and a camera dolly on a darkened soundstage to create the crude effect.) But Tolkin also depicts the heroine, played by Mimi Rogers, as a religious fanatic who murders her own young daughter with a gunshot to the head in order to hasten the weeping child into heaven. As a result, the movie is a theological muddle that seems to suggest that even nonbelievers and child killers will be “raptured” on the last day. No true believer would have committed such a grave doctrinal error.

For consumers of pop culture, then, the apocalyptic idea is sometimes just another item in the smorgasbord of religious beliefs and practices on offer in contemporary America: “[T]he latest surge in prophetic interest began in the early 1970s, at the same time that Americans began showing interest in the occult, parapsychology, ouija boards, Eastern religions, and UFOs,” observes Timothy Weber. “They may simply be an example of Americans’ insatiable appetite for the unusual, spectacular and exotic.”⁶⁴ And another scholarly observer wonders if the phenomenon is “just another merchandising ploy, a cult of ‘chic bleak’ herding us into bookstores and cinemas and revival meetings to buy the latest wares of the latest self-selected messiah.”⁶⁵

The Omen may have been Revelation Lite, but that’s about as much as America was ready to embrace in the 1970s. Even The Late Great Planet Earth was a sugarcoated