#7: Christian Nationalists vs. The End of the World

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

‘The Hollow Men’, T.S. Eliot

Here’s the way it sounds in my head:

RUN, PATTY, RUN!

Patty was just an ordinary girl in 1970s middle America. She listened to Three Dog Night on her 8-track player. She had a pet rock. Her friends joined her on picnics in the park and there, Patty met a boy, Jim, dressed in short shorts and tube socks. Eventually, they married. All was going well… until one day, when Patty awoke to find Jim’s electric razor buzzing in the bathroom sink – but no Jim.

Recently, Jim had passed his time hanging around with the local Christian set. And not in a Doobie Brothers’ ‘Jesus is just alright with me’ sort of way. Jim had morphed into a true believer. These new friends of his talked a lot about the end of the world, about a ‘Great Tribulation’ and a ‘Beast’ (or an ‘Antichrist’). They also mentioned a ‘Rapture’, in which Jesus would arrive suddenly to take all true Christians out of the world and into heaven.

They had prodded and propounded and preached to Patty to join them before time ran out and the imminent Rapture left her behind. Alas, she had not listened. Now, Jim and his crowd were gone, along with all the world’s Christians. In the midst of this crisis, a shadowy and eloquent politician named Brother Christopher, through that most devilish of organisations, the U.N., wrested power from the world’s governments. World authority now sat with the United Nations Imperium of Total Emergency (or UNITE), with Brother Christopher at the top of the heap. Soon, he demanded everyone accept a mark of allegiance to him, without which no one could buy or sell goods.

Patty remembered the warnings of the Christians, however, about this ‘mark of the Beast’. And her refusal to accept it set off a city-wide manhunt (womanhunt?) for Patty by the full power of UNITE. They had choppers. They had cops. They had two dudes in surplus military fatigues and a Dodge Tradesman that seemed to do most of the heavy lifting. In the end, though, it was Patty’s own friends (special agents of UNITE, apparently) who sold her out. She would now face a choice: take the mark, or suffer the guillotine.

If you’re a keen student of 1970s history, you’ll be able to discern that none of the above actually happened. Instead, it’s the plot line of the 1973 Christian film, A Thief in the Night, the kind of D-grade independent picture you might say is so bad it’s sort of good. Or maybe it’s so bad it goes past good and back to bad again. For me, though, it was soon-to-be nonfiction, the basic story structure of the coming end of the world. Sitting there in my church’s Christian Service Brigade meeting room, watching Patty’s woebegone efforts to evade capture, I understood clearly the movie’s purpose.

The purpose was to scare teens and pre-teens like me shitless. Well, mission accomplished. I struggled to sleep for months, worried that I’d be ‘left behind’. But that was all part of the filmmakers’ plan to drive home the message: “Don’t be a jive turkey and end up like Patty, kids. Accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior. He’s dyn-o-mite!”

IT’S ALIVE!

This vision of the world’s ending (called premillennial dispensationalism) has proven so popular in the United States (though not many other places, really) that many American Christians believe it belongs to the most ancient of Christian tradition and thought. It doesn’t. Instead, its present form is largely the brainchild of a 19th-century Plymouth Brethren preacher named John Nelson Darby.

Darby, like a theological Frankenstein, began with a torso from the ninth chapter of Daniel, the cryptic prophecy of the ‘Seventy Weeks’¹. He stitched on a head and limbs from the Book of Revelation ². Then, he stuffed it with internal organs harvested from other disparate passages of scripture: a heart from Matthew 24³, lungs from I Thessalonians 4 ⁴ and a spleen and liver and gall bladder from Isaiah 32 and Ezekiel 38-39 and II Thessalonians 2. For whatever reason, Darby’s hideous chimera caught the fancy of the very influential preacher Dwight L. Moody and his disciples, who disseminated the teaching throughout the United States through various Bible colleges and written works⁵.

ARMAGEDDON THE FEELING THE TIME IS NEAR

The story that Darby and his modern enthusiasts spin – think Hal Lindsay or Tim LaHaye – goes something like this:

Everything was proceeding according to God’s plan with His chosen people, Israel. Until they crucified the anointed Messiah He sent them. So God decided to enact Plan B, to bench the starting line-up and put in the second string, the Christian church, the people of Jesus. We’re in there, filling our roles, playing some defence and keeping the scores close. But God hasn’t forgotten about His primary agenda with Israel. One day soon, He’ll put the starters back on the floor to finish the game.

When that happens, of course, there’ll be no further need for the services of the subs. Hence, the Rapture, where Jesus will perform a low-atmosphere fly-by maneuver and snatch up all the world’s Christians. With us safely out of the way, the final act can begin. A mysterious political figure, the Antichrist, will arise to great fanfare and unite Earth’s nations into a single entity, a one-world government, with himself in the big chair.

Like the snake oil salesman he will be, he’ll make a treaty with Israel. He’ll even help to rebuild the long-lost Jewish Temple. Won’t it be a surprise, though, when he sets his own image up in the Temple and demands to be worshipped? Too late, the Jews will realize they’ve been had. And this Antichrist, empowered by Satan himself, will be revealed as a brutal dictator. Every citizen of the world will be compelled to take this man’s mark on their right hand or forehead. Anyone who does not bear the mark will be barred from buying or selling even the most basic items.

Meanwhile, God will rain all hell down upon a renegade and unrepentant population – great plagues of scorpion-like creatures, of bloody waterways, of gargantuan hailstones, and other nasties. All will culminate in a final battle on the plain of Megiddo (‘Armageddon’) between the Antichrist and his armies and the people of God. When all hope seems lost, Jesus himself will intervene, defeating the foul forces of Hell and establishing a utopian kingdom on earth to last for a thousand years.

LaHAYE YOU, READ THE SIGNS!

For decades, American evangelicals have married this dispensationalist mindset with Christian nationalist ideology. I certainly did. Name a prominent televangelist personality of the last 30 years – Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, or a host of others – and odds are you’ll find someone who has proudly espoused Christian nationalist ideals, with ‘End Times’ thinking baked into their theology. Even Tim LaHaye, who banked millions of evangelical dollars writing end-of-the-world fiction, once headed Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, as well as founded the Christian nationalist think tank, The Council for National Policy.

The ink was still drying on LaHaye’s first two Left Behind novels when Bill Clinton won the 1996 election. To evangelical doomsayers like us, the president made an exemplary potential Antichrist:

√   Democrat / Liberal / Leftist
√   Morally ambiguous 
√   Apparent globalist mindset 
√   Friendly toward abortion activists and gay people 
√   Devilishly handsome 
√   A smooth and seductive voice 

He checked all the boxes.

Clinton was just the latest in a string of would-be global dictators we identified over the years. We made a kind of game of it, like ‘Pin the Tail on the Antichrist’. It was just one example of the sense of imminence that permeated the dispensationalist outlook of my youth. The events of the world’s last days were always just over the horizon. Any day now, the one-world government would arise. The Antichrist was destined to reveal himself at any moment. At any moment, Jesus would rapture us away.

Well, if this insidious empire and its nefarious overlord was indeed imminent, then there must be a shadowy cabal plotting its rise even now. In the hidden recesses of the halls of power, these dark-suited men must be formulating plans and pulling levers to bring to fruition their diabolical globalist agenda. Every policy of ‘the left’, every idea deemed ‘socialist’, every step toward international cooperation must be a part of the evil schemes at hand.

And there must be signs of all these things lining up, like jigsaw pieces falling into place. A war brewing here. A treaty signed there. An increase in vulture egg numbers in the Levant ⁶. Some perfect storm of events, an alignment of institutions, or of groups, or people that would connect the prophetic dots in our reading of apocalyptic texts. Yes, the signs were everywhere – if you knew where to look.

HOW PIZZA-EATING LIZARD PEOPLE WILL BRING ABOUT THE END

Now, if you’re paying the slightest bit of attention, you’ll recognize where this kind of thinking takes us: straight down Conspiracy Lane. Christian nationalism has gained infamy in recent years for increasingly absurd conspiracy theories about pizza shops and immunisations and stolen elections and Deep States and Antarctic lizard people. And as we see, heaps of Christian nationalists harbor a Left Behind outlook – and outlook prone to scouring headlines and hearsay and the always-churning religious rumor mill for intrigues and complots. In other words, the very system of dispensationalism primes you to buy into conspiracies. It convinces you there are vile secrets out there that only ‘the wise’ or ‘the elect’ will perceive.

Of course, when ‘the signs’ lead us astray, when the events we anticipate don’t eventuate, ‘End Times’ believers remain undaunted; we simply recalculate with a new set of ‘signs’. For instance, you’ve probably noticed Bill Clinton’s rise to worldwide overlordship never came to pass. These days, I doubt he could sleep through the night without getting up to pee five times or more, much less pursue a program of worldwide authoritarian rule. Yet that hasn’t stopped Christian nationalists from making the same sorts of predictions around newer, more promising candidates for Satan’s earthly minion.

DEAR JESUS: COME SOON, BUT STAY AWAY

Nor has it stopped them from thinking they can stand in his or her way. I believed this once. I believed that, somehow, a strong and self-reliant America, ruled by strident conservative government, could somehow keep the universal empire and the end of the world at bay. We could disrupt the schemes of the globalist plotters. And today’s Christian nationalists seem to believe the same thing. We can buy the world more time, they think, by making America once again a ‘Christian nation’, by electing only Republican leaders, by building up the military, by distancing the nation from the international community so she stands sovereign and alone on her own strength.

Therein lies a curious quirk: American dispensationalists want Jesus to rapture them, which means they want this one-world empire to unfold and this Antichrist to come forward; but they do everything in their power to stop these things from taking place. A paradox! Like saying, “Tom Waits’ voice is ugly” and “Tom Waits’ voice is beautiful.” Both are somehow true.

These days, I no longer scour the news for ‘fulfillments of prophecy’, or look around corners for hidden forces with globalist, anti-American, authoritarian designs. I don’t fear the would-be machinations and plots of secret regimes. Interestingly, I divested myself from Christian nationalism and abandoned Thief in the Night theology more or less simultaneously. That’s telling, I think.

In so doing, I found a better way to live. One without the worry of ending up like Patty. One with a more sober outlook on the world and with far less fear. One with far better priorities.

Until next time…

May you walk through God's world without fear.
May you see, on the horizon,
Redemption and not destruction,
Hope and not doom,
And divine love dwarfing divine wrath.

1. The prophecy talks about 70 ‘weeks’ (sets of 7 years) set aside to deal with Israel’s and Jerusalem’s sin. At the end of the 69th week, ‘an anointed one’ is ‘cut off’. The 70th week is a period of great calamity under a powerful and godless ruler. Most scholars interpret this as Palestine under the Seleucid rulers, with Antiochus IV ‘Epiphanes’ as the oppressive dictator. Darby and proponents of dispensationalism read ‘the anointed one’ as Jesus, and the godless ruler as the coming Antichrist. They ‘do the maths’, so to speak, and propose a gap between Jesus being ‘cut off’ and the eventual period of great calamity (the ‘Tribulation’).
2. Yet Darby and his theological progeny have taken little to no trouble to understand or appreciate the historical context of Revelation. For more faithful interpretations, try Reading Revelation Responsibly by Michael J. Gorman; Revelation and the End of All Things by Craig Koester; Revelation for Everyone by Tom Wright.
3. Dispensationalists equate the calamity Jesus talks about in this passage with the prophecy in Daniel (he references aspects of that prophecy), with the abomination in the Temple as the Antichrist’s image. But it’s clear that the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. is in view here.
4. This passage is used to defend the idea of ‘the Rapture’, but people like N.T. Wright, Ben Witherington and Craig Keener argue convincingly that the imagery Paul is using is of a royal visit, meaning Jesus’ final coming again, not a ‘pre-Tribulation Rapture’, is in view.
5. Most well known is the Scofield Reference Bible, annotated by Moody disciple Cyrus I. Scofield, which is, well, the Bible for dispensationalists. Universities and seminaries like (most notably) Dallas Theological Seminary, Biola University and Cairn University (formerly, Philadelphia School of the Bible) were originally founded as dispensationalist schools. DTS is still the premier seminary for the dispensationalist mindset.
6. Yes, this was a real thing. As the thinking went, if the battle of Armageddon was soon to take place, with the world’s armies destroyed, to be feasted upon (as the text states in Rev. 19:21) by hordes of birds, then God must be preparing enough vultures to meet the demand even now!

Adam Lee Benner

A teacher and writer born and raised in New Jersey’s Philadelphia suburbs, Adam writes about his former life in American Christian nationalism and the Evangelical right – and (hopefully) better ways to be Christian. He lived for several years with his wife and best friend, Renée, as missionaries in Asia before relocating to her hometown of Melbourne, Australia with their two sons.