Jonathan Kirsch - A History of the End of the World

What’s puzzling goes far beyond the superficial irony of Christians befriending Jews even though they believe that their Jewish friends have already damned themselves to hell by refusing to embrace Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah. That’s the same grievance, of course, that prompts the author of Revelation to refer to his Jewish acquaintances as “the synagogue of Satan.” But the end-time scenario that motivates Christian Zionists to support Israel in the political arena also instructs them that the Jewish state will ultimately ally itself with the Antichrist—but only until the Antichrist goes to war against his allies and “slaughter[s] two-thirds of all Jews in a Holocaust worse than anything unleashed by Hitler.” 92Only the remnant of Jews who convert to Christianity in the last days will be spared, they believe, and the rest will burn forever in the lake of fire along with Satan himself.

Only rarely do Christian Zionists speak out loud about the role that they envision for the Jewish people in the end-times. Jerry Falwell, for example, once made the tactical mistake of observing in public that “many evangelicals believe the Antichrist will, by necessity, be a Jewish male.” 93He deemed it necessary to issue a public apology two weeks later at a prayer breakfast in support of Israel. But Falwell pointedly refused to disavow his remark and expressed regret only for the fact that it reached the public record. “I apologize not for what I believe,” said an unrepentant Falwell, “but for my lack of tact and judgment in making a statement that serves no purpose whatsoever.” 94

Such awkward and ugly beliefs are understandably off-putting to Jewish sensibilities—but these beliefs are also mostly overlooked by many Jewish leaders who welcome the political support of Christian Zionists. “Some [Christians] are motivated theologically, in that for the Second Coming of the Messiah, one of the prerequisites is for Jews to be safe and secure in the Holy Land,” concedes Abraham Foxman, executive director of the Anti-Defamation League. “That’s not a reason for us to reject them. I believe that when the Jews are safe and secure in the Holy Land, the Messiah will come for the first time. So what?” 95

Still, at least some Jewish observers are willing to comment on the strange bedfellowship of fundamentalist Christians and Jews. “This is a grim comedy of mutual condescension,” Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic, told the New York Times . “The evangelical Christians condescend to the Jews by offering their support before they convert or kill them. And the conservative Jews condescend to Christians by accepting their support while believing that their eschatology is nonsense. This is a fine example of the political exploitation of religion.” 96

Apocalyptic activism, in fact, has reached the highest levels of American politics and policy-making. When the Senate debated whether Israel ought to withdraw the Jewish settlements on the West Bank, for example, Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, relied on the Bible to justify the continued occupation of Hebron: “It is at this place where God appeared to Abram and said, ‘I am giving you this land,’” he declared on the floor of the Senate, quoting the book of Genesis. “This is not a political battle at all. It is a contest over whether or not the word of God is true.” 97

Very few politicians, diplomats, or generals who hold such beliefs are courageous (or foolish) enough to speak about them so openly. For that reason, it is all too easy to dismiss as a religious eccentric someone who advocates the use of the Bible as a document of American foreign policy. But, as Senator Inhofe reminds us, true belief and Bible literalism have never been confined to backwater churches where the congregants handle snakes and speak to each other in tongues. Every now and then, the apocalyptic idea explodes into the headlines and reminds the rest of us that it has been lurking in the shadows all along.

Back in the 1930s, a congregation of Seventh-day Adventists in Los Angeles found itself with an awkward problem after welcoming a new member named Victor Houteff, a Bulgarian-born washing-machine salesman. Houteff had come to believe that the Christian scriptures were composed in a secret code that only he had succeeded in solving, and he offered his own strange teachings in place of those sanctioned by the church. At last, in 1935, Houteff was barred from the congregation, and he led a dozen families to a self-imposed exile on a remote hilltop compound in Waco, Texas, where he fully expected to witness the end of the world in the company of the 144,000 followers that he hoped to gather there.

Nowadays, of course, Waco calls to mind an incident that proves how tenacious and how dangerous the apocalyptic idea can be. Back in the 1930s, however, Houteff and his followers were merely one more obscure and exceedingly odd religious community whose day-to-day lives in a remote Texas backwater were wholly invisible to the rest of America. Yet the seeds of the deadly standoff between the Branch Davidians and federal law-enforcement agents that took place in 1993 reach all the way back to the earliest stirrings of the apocalyptic tradition in the New World and, arguably, the worst excesses of Jan Bockelson, the messiah-king of medieval Münster.

Houteff adopted “Mount Carmel” as the name of his community in an allusion to the site where, according to the Bible, the prophet Elijah orders the seizure and slaughter of 450 priests of the pagan god Baal in an act of carnage that is meant to glorify the God of Israel. 98For Houteff and his followers, as for Elijah and the author of Revelation, the choice between the One True God and all other beliefs and practices is, quite literally, a matter of life or death: “It should be ever kept in mind that the very name ‘Mt. Carmel,’” wrote one observer who visited the compound in 1937, “indicates a place where we are being severely tested as to whether we will serve God or Baal.” 99

Houteff, like other doomsayers, was convinced that the return of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland was a precondition to the Second Coming, and he called his followers “Davidians” in anticipation of the restoration of the throne of King David. To keep them in “a state of perpetual readiness for the End,” he ordered that a clock in the headquarters of the Davidians at Mount Carmel be fixed at eleven o’clock “as a reminder that time was nearing its conclusion.” 100Thus roused to an unremitting state of “psychological imminence,” Houteff and the rest of the Davidians waited for the world to end on time.

Houteff, of course, did not live to see any of the remarkable events that he was able to discern in the coded passages of the Bible. Upon his death in 1955, the community shattered into contending factions, and the one that ended up in possession of the Waco property called itself the Branch Davidians. On April 22, 1959, they gathered at Mount Carmel to witness the fulfillment of a new prophecy by Houteff’s widow, Florence: “the faithful would be slaughtered, resurrected and carried up to heaven.” A journalist who covered the spectacle reported on the “pitiful” display of disappointment by those who found themselves still alive and well at the end of the day. “Of the thousand there, more or less, only one person was relieved,” he wrote. “Me.” 101

By the mid-1980s, Mount Carmel was very nearly moribund, but the Branch Davidians were reinvigorated by the arrival of a charismatic young man called Vernon Howell, a “semi-literate rock guitarist with fantastically detailed knowledge of the Bible and an overwhelming urge to uncover its secrets.” 102Howell was blessed with a glib tongue, a lively sense of humor, and “a gift for self-parody.” 103Indeed, he slyly called himself a “sinful messiah,” and he recruited a brood of “wives” out of a self-proclaimed duty to sire as many children as possible. 104As he rose to the leadership of the Branch Davidians, he acknowledged his new role by taking a new name—David Koresh.