Religion is all fun and games until someone takes their mythology too literally and then takes it to the squad car, the pulpit or the White House. It’s fun to make fun of fundamentalism, but when it comes to The Apocalypse, these playas ain’t playin’. The Daily Beast has the bad news…
It’s the end of the world as they know it. So why do evangelicals worry so much?
Say “evangelical Christian,” and most people will probably think of Biblical fundamentalism, and opposition to the sexual revolution, feminism, LGBT equality, evolution, science, and secularism of all sorts. Historian Matthew Avery Sutton, however, wants you to think of something else: the End Times.
Today, fully 77 percent of U.S. evangelicals believe that we are living in the End Times, the last period before Christ returns to Earth to judge us all. That’s compared with 40 percent of Americans, and 51 percent of Protestants overall—still high numbers, when you think about it, but imagine a huge crowd at a mega-church or Christian Right political event. Three quarters of those people believe the end of the world is nigh.
Sutton’s new book, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism, argues that this belief is not incidental to the evangelical movement, but central to it. Focusing on the birth of fundamentalism (roughly, the 1880s through 1940s), Sutton marshals quotation after quotation from the leaders of the movement.
For example: “We are on the brink of a world catastrophe and impending judgment,” said Billy Graham, who also asked, “Are the last days here?” way back in 1949.
Perhaps more disturbingly, Ronald Reagan said privately in 1971 that, “For the first time ever, everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the second coming of Christ.” One wonders if his subsequent battles with the “Evil Empire” were animated by this belief.
And the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s was Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth, which calculated the year of the apocalypse to be—wait for it—1988.
I admit, it’s hard not to read American Apocalypse without smirking at a century of such failed prophecies. Will we ever learn?
Check out the link above for the rest of the story. In the meantime, here’s Dennis Hopper and Francis Ford Coppola trying to bring on my favorite apocalypse…
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