Jonathan Kirsch - A History of the End of the World

The perceived need of American politicians to affirm their religious credentials may have less to do with their spiritual beliefs than with the sea change in American politics that took place during the Reagan presidency. Televangelists like Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, and Pat Robertson, founder of the Conservative Coalition, among many others, sought to deploy the faithful as a voting bloc and a source of financial support for politicians who adhered to certain articles of faith in Christian fundamentalism, which include criminalizing abortion and legalizing prayer in the public schools.

With 46 percent of all Americans declaring themselves to be evangelical or born-again Christians, according to a 2002 Gallup poll, the so-called Christian Right came to play a crucial role in the political strategy that ultimately achieved a Republican majority in Congress and a Republican president in the White House. 67By 1984, for example, the Republican party deemed it appropriate to invite televangelist James Robison to give the invocation at the convention where Reagan was renominated—and Robison deemed it appropriate to deliver a white-hot apocalyptic sermon to the enthusiastic delegates: “Any teaching of peace prior to [Christ’s] return is heresy,” said Robison. “It’s against the word of God. It’s Antichrist.” 68

A certain high-water mark of political activism by Christian fundamentalists in America came in 1988, when Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, declared himself to be a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. He was already on record as predicting that the end was near—“I guarantee you by the fall of 1982 there is going to be a judgment on the world,” he wrote in 1980 69—but now he found it appropriate to tone down the apocalyptic rhetoric: “There is no way I feel I’m going to help the Lord bring the world to an end,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 1985, perhaps already thinking of his own presidential ambitions. 70

The willingness of preachers like Falwell and Robertson to enter the political arena was something new in Christian fundamentalism. The apocalyptic idea suggests that politics are essentially pointless because human beings can do nothing to change or postpone God’s divine plan for the end of the world, and so saving souls is the only sound occupation for a good Christian. That’s why Christian fundamentalists in the early twentieth century regarded the Social Gospel with such contempt, and the same disdain for doing good works in the here and now continues to characterize many of the doomsayers who are convinced that the end is near.

“God didn’t send me to clean the fishbowl,” is how Hal Lindsey put it. “He sent me to fish.” 71

The woes of the world, in fact, are nothing but good news in the eyes of apocalyptic true believers who look forward to a new heaven and a new earth. “We are not to weep as the people of the world weep when there are certain tragedies or breakups of the government or systems of the world,” explained Pat Robertson in an unguarded moment. “We are not to wring our hands and say, ‘Isn’t that awful.’ That isn’t awful at all. It’s good. That is a token, an evident token of our salvation, of where God is going to take us.” 72

Other Christian fundamentalists, however, are inspired to “give the Devil ‘all the trouble [they] can till Jesus comes,’” a calling that prompts them to crusade for creationism, school prayer, and family values and against abortion, gay marriage, and pornography, among various other causes. 73Pat Robertson, for example, condemns feminism as “a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.” And when Disney World hosted a privately sponsored weekend gathering called “Gay Days,” he insisted that the toleration of homosexuality in America will result in hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, and “possibly a meteor,” citing chapter and verse from Revelation to support his prediction. 74

Some Christians, of course, seek to trouble the Devil by following the lofty moral example of the Gospels. Jimmy Carter, for example, is a born-again Baptist—a church whose members, by and large, embrace the hard-edged apocalyptic doctrine of dispensational premillennialism—and he famously invoked the strictest expression of Christian morality when he confessed to Playboy in 1976 that he “committed adultery in my heart many times,” an allusion to the Sermon on the Mount: “Whosoever look-eth on a woman to lust after her,” says Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, “hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” 75But Carter is also famous for picking up a hammer and pounding nails under the auspices of Habitat for Humanity, an act that wordlessly but eloquently alludes to the Little Apocalypse as it appears in Matthew: “For I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in.” 76

Some fundamentalist preachers endorse both faith and works. “[E]very person who is a follower of Christ is responsible to do something for the hungry and sick in the world,” writes Billy Graham in Approaching Hoofbeats: Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. “We must do what we can, even though we know that God’s ultimate plan is the making of a new earth and a new heaven.” Yet Graham also insists that all of the afflictions of the modern world that might be remedied through good works, ranging from AIDS to global warming, are sure signs that the end is near. “The Bible teaches that peoples and nations have brought this pain upon themselves by humanistic religion and man-made war,” he insists. “Almost every headline, almost every television news flash, almost every radio bulletin proclaims one truth: the rider who brings death is on his way and hell is close behind.” 77

Apocalyptic true believers, in other words, are instructed by their faith to consult the Bible to discover the inner meaning of the events, great and small, that unfold around us every day. When they do, however, they are likely to conclude that it is too late to do anything except pray that they will be among the saved when the Antichrist reveals himself. It’s an approach to problem-solving that links the author of Revelation with Ronald Reagan and, for that matter, millions of other Americans. Thus, for example, when they consider one of the most explosive human conflicts on earth—the struggle between Arabs and Jews over sovereignty in what three faiths regard as the Holy Land—some Christians cast their eyes to heaven rather than contemplating facts on the ground. For them, the fate of the modern Middle East is a matter of theology rather than geopolitics, and the birthplace of Daniel and John is now the stage on which the final act of the divine drama of the end-times is being played out.

Just as an earlier generation of Christian Zionists had thrilled at the Balfour Declaration and the liberation of Jerusalem by the British army in 1918, their latter-day counterparts celebrated Israel’s lightning victory in the Six Day War of 1967 and, above all, the liberation of the Old City of Jerusalem. Here stands the Temple Mount, the site of the original Temple of Yahweh as described in the Bible and the place where, according to the beliefs of both Jewish and Christian fundamentalists, the Third Temple will be built in the end-times. Significantly, the Temple Mount now passed under Jewish sovereignty for the first time since the Second Temple was destroyed by a Roman army in 70 C.E.

“The hands on Israel’s prophecy clock leaped forward on June 8, 1967,” writes Tim LaHaye in The Beginning of the End, an apocalyptic tract that long predates the Left Behind series, “when the Israeli troops marched into the Old City of Jerusalem.” 78