Jonathan Kirsch - A History of the End of the World

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.” 57Indeed, 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!” 59And 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. 61Indeed, 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.” 64And 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 and caffeine-charged version of the hellfireand-damnation sermons that were still confined to the church halls and Christian broadcasting. As the end of the second millennium approached, however, the book of Revelation would come to be used yet again as a weapon in the culture war that was being fought by Christian fundamentalists for the heart and soul of America.

No American president after Ronald Reagan has been quite so outspoken about his personal belief that the end of the world is nigh. At the same time, however, every American president since Reagan has declared himself to be a “born-again” Christian. George Herbert Walker Bush, for example, may have been affiliated with the United Nations, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Affairs at various points in his long career—all of them condemned as tools of Satan by apocalyptic conspiracy theorists on the far right wing of Christian fundamentalism—but he proudly proclaimed himself to be a born-again Christian, too: “I’m a clear-cut affirmative to that.” 66