Most of us, I suspect, greet news about the precise machinations of the European Community with all the enthusiasm we usually reserve for news about, say, Canada–we know it’s a big subject that we should probably pay more attention to, but it’s impossible to work up any real interest. Yet there are thousands if not millions of Americans for whom news about the EC has a very special meaning: those who look upon the international conglomeration as a sign of the End Times, an indication that Armageddon is on its way. I kid you not. According to many contemporary Christian fundamentalists, the EC represents quite literally the revival of the Roman Empire, the biblical beast with ten horns.
He has stumbled upon some choice material. The end of the world is a subject ripe for humor: Pizza Hut once ran a series of commercials telling customers to “Beware of 666 . . . the Anti-Pizza.” Even the believers can’t resist a joke: two popular bumper stickers read “Warning: If the Rapture Occurs, This Car Will Be Driverless” and “Beam Me Up, Lord!” You can buy Rapture wristwatches from the Texas-based Bible-Believers Evangelistic Association inscribed with the motto “One hour nearer the Lord’s Return.” In one recent novel about the final days, a New York Times headline reports the Rapture in the paper’s typically sober way: “MILLIONS DISAPPEAR WORLDWIDE; JESUS CHRIST SAID TO BE RESPONSIBLE.” (I’d love to see the article accompanying this headline: “The disappearances were the result of an event called ‘the Rapture,’ a source close to Mr. Christ said yesterday.”) Yet it’s hard to believe that much of the humor is intended. Prophecy writers are a pretty humorless bunch, always on the lookout for the footprints of Satan. Boyer reports that Van Impe was particularly alarmed that an introductory algebra textbook called 666 Jellybeans had made it into the public schools.
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Believers in Armageddon, like most who hold fervently to a set of fixed beliefs, have shown a remarkable ability to shift the details of their schema to fit the realities of a changing world–every twist of history, every missed appointment with the Lord seems to strengthen their beliefs. Van Impe, for example, still takes great pride in having predicted a “coming war with Russia” 30 years ago; the fact that the war hasn’t come and that Russia is no longer an enemy doesn’t faze him a bit, because in his heart of hearts he’s still sure the war is coming soon. Yet most prophecy believers now worry less about Gog’s invasion from the north and more about the Antichrist and the EC.
“Radicals seeking evidence of grassroots disaffection with the structure of modern society,” Boyer writes, “have ignored a rich potential source–the torrent of skeptical commentary by premillennialists, whose array of prophetic ‘signs’ included social, economic, and technological processes so broad as to be almost coterminous with modernity itself. Collectively these authors offered a strikingly comprehensive critique of mass society as dehumanizing and dangerously centralized.” Of course, there’s a big difference between dissatisfaction and radicalism. The premillennialists tend to take out their frustrations on a few familiar scapegoats: communists (real and imagined), atheists, feminists, homosexuals. Prophecy writer Tim LaHaye blamed American hedonism on the “scoffers . . . on the faculty of tax-supported colleges,” on confused hippies, feminists, and Freudians. He hoped God himself would help round up the usual suspects: “the F.B.I. may someday get help from an unexpected source–Almighty God.”
If the social and political implications of prophecy belief are hard to pin down, the psychology of premillennialism is easy enough to understand. Though some in power have held premillennial beliefs, it’s an outsider philosophy through and through. In a world that often seems to be spinning out of control, a world in which most people are powerless in the hands of the experts, the politicians, the financiers, and the industrialists, prophecy offers the security of a simple answer, a vision of a future in which the first shall be last and the last shall be first. One comes away from Boyer’s book convinced that there’s tremendous political potential–for good or evil, for progress or reaction–in the world of prophecy belief: the dissatisfactions are as real as the ideology is fantastic.
