A History of the End of the World

initiative” that funded the social-welfare programs of various religious organizations.

“The nation’s founders, smarting still from the punitive pieties of Europe’s state religions, were adamant about erecting a wall between organized religion and political authority,” wrote journalist Ron Suskind in the New York Times. “But, suddenly, that seems like a long time ago. George W. Bush…has steadily, inexorably, changed the office itself. He has created the faith-based presidency.”¹²²

Bush is not given to making apocalyptic pronouncements of the kind that fell so readily from the lips of Ronald Reagan. He prefers the phrase “cultural change” to “culture war.”¹²³ Bush, however, is plainspoken about what he sees as the targets of “culture change,” including abortion, gay marriage, embryonic stem-cell research, and the constitutional ban on prayer in public schools. In fact, he adopts a strikingly warlike tone in describing his self-appointed mission: “So the faith-based initiative recognizes that there is an army of compassion that needs to be nurtured, rallied, called forth, and funded,” he explained during an interview with representatives of various religious publications, “without causing the army to have to lose the reason it’s an army in the first place.¹²⁴

If Bush does not speak in the familiar vocabulary of apocalyptic fundamentalism, it is mostly because a new and updated “language arsenal” has been deployed in contemporary America. What was once called “creationism,” for example, is now known as “intelligent design”—a code phrase that means essentially the same thing—and Bush has advocated that both “intelligent design” and the scientific theory of evolution ought to be taught in public schools. What doctors call “end-of-life care” is now condemned as “euthanasia,” and Bush has called for a national commitment to “a culture of life, where all Americans are welcomed and valued and protected, especially those who live at the mercy of others.”

The fact that Bush is not a Bible thumper is itself a cause for concern among observers on both sides of the culture war precisely because they suspect that he is only concealing his true beliefs. “The nation’s executive mansion is currently honeycombed with prayer groups and Bible study cells, like a white monastery,” wrote historian and biographer Garry Wills in the New York Times. “A sly dig there is ‘Missed you at Bible study.’”¹²⁵Bush, as far as we know, does not display the placard that could be seen in the office of former Republican congressman Tom DeLay—“This Could Be the Day!”¹²⁶—but the unspoken suspicion among some of Bush’s critics is that he may secretly share the same urgent expectation.

Ironically, such suspicions are mirrored among Bush’s adversaries on the ragged edge of Christian fundamentalism. Bush pere, for example, may have boasted of being a born-again Christian, but his insider status at the United Nations, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Trilateral Commission only confirmed the worst fears of the conspiracy theorists. And when Bush fils came along, the fact that both father and son had been members of Skull and Bones, a club for undergraduates at Yale that is often called a “secret society,” took on satanic meanings. “Indeed, it may be that men of goodwill such as Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, and George Bush,” writes Pat Robertson in The New World Order, “are in reality unknowingly and unwittingly carrying out the mission and mouthing the phrases of a tightly knit cabal whose goal is nothing less than a new order for the human race under the domination of Lucifer and his followers.”¹²⁷

Any politician who embraces the apocalyptic idea, whether openly or secretly, is treading on the same trap door that has opened under the feet of presidents like George Bush, both father and son. “Millennarian movements cannot help but fall into conspiracy thinking, for they rigorously divide the world into the good and evil, the saved and the damned,” explains political scientist Michael Barkun. “Evil constitutes an ever-present threat. Only the final consummation of history will remove it.”¹²⁸But the question of whether one is good or evil, saved or damned, is wholly in the eye of the beholder, as both of the Bushes have discovered.

Today, some twenty centuries after the book of Revelation first appeared in our tormented world, the words of Jerome are even more appropriate than when he first uttered them in the fourth century: “Revelation has as many mysteries as it has words.”¹²⁹ To which we might add: and as many dangers, too.

To be sure, some readers understand the book of Revelation as a stirring manifesto of freedom and a call to self-liberation in the here and now. “Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, for instance, reflects experiences and hopes similar to the theology of Revelation,” insists Catholic scholar Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, a feminist theologian who sees “a glimpse of the new Jerusalem” in the resonant phrase of King’s 1963 sermon at the Lincoln Memorial, “I have a dream.”¹³⁰ And poet and radical priest Daniel Berrigan, after being arrested for digging a grave on the White House lawn as an act of political protest, was inspired to write a commentary of his own on Revelation in a jail cell in Washington, D.C. Father Berrigan, too, urges us to regard Revelation as a liberating rather than a fearful and hateful text.

“The book of Revelation ought to be burned, it is positively subversive!” he exults in Nightmare of God, striking a note of sarcasm. “The corporate state wastes the earth, dislocates minds, corrupts all areas of science, in its expanding military and economic adventurism—behold the Rome of Revelation. Behold also America!”¹³¹

Other readers elevate the book of Revelation to a still loftier and more ethereal plane. Theologian Jacques Ellul, for example, has been credited with a wholly redemptive reading of Revelation that purges the text of all its terror: “Rather than announcing the catastrophic end of history as our fate,” explains Darrell J. Fasching, a religious scholar who specializes in the study of religion and violence, “the Apocalypse is, he argues, the revelation of God’s freedom at work in history as mediated by radical human hope.” When contrasted with such refined and elegant readings of Revelation, the crass apocalyptic speculation on display in Hal Lindsey’s writings, according to Fasching, “is nothing short of obscene.”¹³²

“[Hal Lindsey] engages in a form of scriptural exegesis that Augustine once appropriately condemned as fantastica fornicatio,” writes Fasching in The Ethical Challenge of Auschwitz and Hirsoshima, “which might be politely translated ‘mental masturbation,’ or less politely as ‘fucking the sacred symbols.’”¹³³

What’s at stake in the reading of Revelation, however, is far more than a matter of mental masturbation. The intentionally provocative text, as we have seen, is capable of moving some men and women to madness, some to acts of violence, and some to both at once. Perhaps it was meant to do so. “It is hard to know whether gloomy speculations with the apocalypse represent real fear of its occurrence or a kind of perverse fascination with it,” observes Michael Barkun in Disaster and the Millennium. “It may, on the other hand, serve in some subtle fashion as a self-fulfilling prophecy which drags in train the very dreaded events themselves.”¹³⁴ No better explanation has been offered for the malign influence of Revelation on a man like David Koresh and the little apocalypse that took place in Waco.

That’s why some readers recoil in horror at the scenes of carnage that leave Revelation with such a bitter and even toxic aftertaste. “[T]here is no other document in either the Old or New Testament so inhuman, so spiritually irresponsible,” writes Jewish biblical scholar and translator Robert Alter, a discerning critic who has extracted new and illuminating insights from the ancient text. “There is no room for real people in apocalypses, for when a writer chooses to see men as huddled masses waiting to be thrown into sulphurous pits, he hardly needs to look at individual faces….”¹³⁵ And the very phrase that Alter chooses to describe what he sees in the book of Revelation—“huddled masses waiting to be thrown into pits”—is surely meant to remind us of Babi Yar and the other killing fields of the Holocaust.

The linkage between Revelation and the Holocaust, in fact, has been noticed by more than one modern reader. The apocalyptic idea, stripped of its biblical trappings and expressed in a wholly new vocabulary, was embraced by both fascists and Marxists in the mid–twentieth century. Hitler and Stalin, for example, were both true believers who convinced themselves that they were ordained to create a paradise on earth by ruthlessly destroying the old order and building a new one in its place. And so, as unsettling as it may be to pious Jews and Christians, some revisionists draw a line that runs from the very first apocalyptic true believers in the Judeo-Christian tradition—the readers and hearers of Daniel and Revelation—to the mass murderers who targeted the Jewish people during the Holocaust.

“It is a grotesque irony that Nazism should have unconsciously adopted a structure of belief partly developed, though not necessarily invented, by Jews,” argues Damian Thompson. “There can be little doubt that the thousand-year reign of the saints lies behind the vision of a thousand-year Reich; but a far more important influence