by Brian Griffith.
Lately I’ve been hearing the word “apocalypse” a lot. People use it to describe any sort of awesome disaster, often ignoring its traditional meaning, which is something like “ultimate war.” Beyond that, “apocalypse” implies a certain kind of war, and a certain view of life. We should notice the connotation, because the worldview it reflects is the opposite of normality.
Normally, most people, especially kids, feel like their world is basically good. In the past, people of conventional values generally assumed that their parents, religious leaders, rulers, etc., must be there for a good reason. For example, the ancient Jews normally believed that their God was controlling the world. If Josiah was the king, it must have been God’s will. If plagues or invaders struck, God was probably chastising people to teach them a lesson. If good things happened it was a reward for virtue, and when bad things happened people wondered what they did to deserve it. What repentance or self-correction should they do? Like most basic assumptions, beliefs like that endured through self-confirmation bias, which was normally called “faith.” It was akin to other positive outlooks on life, like the assumption that nature, in all its moods, is a gift of the great spirit.
For this view of the world to be overturned, something has to snap. And that happened for many Jews in the second century BC, under the occupation of Seleucid Greek king Antiochus IV (r. 175–164 BCE). This ruler’s clumsy, brutal efforts to patronize puppets and root out disloyalty kindled a new kind of popular outrage. To furious Jewish rebels, this despot’s evil far surpassed that of other warlords. Not only was he plundering their people, but he seemed bent on eliminating their religion. Under these Greeks, the world was upside down. Where prosperity had been the fruit of virtue, now wealth flowed to the greatest sinners. Rather than being blessed for doing good, people were punished for following God’s laws. To patriotic zealots, it seemed obvious that demonic forces had seized control of God’s world.
In this apparently reversed reality, obeying the established rulers was no longer a submission to God’s inscrutable will—it was submission to Satan. Where people had expected the authorities to control vice, now true zealots for God called the people to destroy their wicked masters. Any faithful warriors who died in the battle to restore God’s rule would be counted as holy martyrs, destined for resurrected glory.
This basic story line—of a diabolical plot to overthrow God’s rule, a glorious revolt of the righteous, and an apocalyptic war to redeem the universe, became the prototypical conspiracy theory of Western religious history. This way of interpreting events inspired religious revolutionaries down to the present. To prepare for an ultimate war against demonic powers, the puritanical Jewish Qumran community drafted a visionary battleplan called “The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness.” Later, Christian works like the book of Revelation envisioned God’s angels joining the battle, inflicting plague after plague of divine vengeance on the evil empire of Rome, until it was wiped from the face of the earth. Numerous Christian martyrs defied orders to pledge their allegiance for the Roman “whore of Babylon.” In such popular religion, there could be no compromise with God’s enemies. The final solution to evil was an apocalypse of justice.
However, after Rome became an officially Christian empire, the rulers once again seemed to represent God’s will. In that case, rebellion against the powers of this world seemed like diabolical treason against the Lord. St. Augustine strove to discredit religious dissidents who still viewed Rome as God’s enemy, and who denounced state sponsorship of the church as an intolerable corruption. He argued that the book of Revelation was not a literal prediction of the world’s future, but an allegory regarding each person’s judgment at death. No perfect kingdom of God could ever be established in this fallen world, and the final defeat of evil would only come in heaven.
Such teaching re-affirmed that God was in control, but it only partly affirmed the world. Instead of arguing that the world was good and could be made better, Augustine claimed it was sinful by nature, and that God had appointed the rulers to control sin. The optimistic promise was that people who faithfully followed God’s appointed guides of the church and state would be raised to a better world after death.
For many ordinary laypeople, however, the medieval social order seemed less than godly. Though it seemed blasphemous, they suspected that their overlords were actually servants of Satan. Village folklore commonly portrayed the evil one as a fat, greedy “big man,” who would take everything for himself. Regarding the popular expectations of Christ’s second coming and thousand-year rule, Eugen Weber observes that “the brow-beaten folk were less interested in the millennium per se than in the extermination that would precede it: the overthrow of the oppressors, the annihilation of the clergy and Jews, the end of the rich and fat.”
In the Protestant Reformation, the old apocalyptic rebellions against demonic rulers revived, this time within officially Christian states. Somewhat typically, Martin Luther proclaimed that the Catholic pope was none other than the Antichrist. And during the ensuing religious wars of the 1500s and 1600s, approximately 300 lay prophets appeared in Germany, all of them warning that evil forces had taken over the earth, and that any who failed to eradicate sin would be destroyed in an immanent apocalypse of God. Other more learned preachers spun endless conspiracy theories of a Jewish plot to control the world and eliminate Christianity. According to the maliciously conspiratorial Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the world was increasingly ruled by a secret cabal of powerful Jews, and people of faith must unite to take it back for God. The worldwide workers’ revolution predicted by Karl Marx was a secularized version of the great apocalyptic vision.
During the early 20th century, such visions of an ultimate war increasingly shaped secular politics. A series of populist demagogues inspired mass movements calling for the elimination of evil elites. In Spain, General Franco took his political rivals not just as people with contrary values, but as agents of Satan. To restore God’s order, he purged the voter rolls in “liberated” towns by shooting everyone who had voted Socialist. Unfortunately, Europe’s Jews were unable to prove themselves innocent of masterminding a plot to destroy Christian civilization. Meanwhile in the USA, the Watch Tower Society president Joseph Franklin Rutherford (1869–1942) predicted that “our generation will see the great battle of Armageddon.” Maybe he was right.
However, after the conflagrations of two world wars, the holocaust against the Jews, and the Allied victory over paranoid fascism, a renewed sense of normalcy took hold. Most Western people felt that rationality had prevailed. In the new American-led world order, “conservative” supporters of “the establishment” generally believed that democratic debate and faith in God went together naturally for an ever-improving world. That was common sense as my mother knew it. But obviously apocalyptic religion retained its appeal and new conspiracy theorists took up the torch.
For example, a Canadian WWII navy veteran named William Guy Carr wrote a series of influential books, including Pawns in the Game (1956), Satan, the Prince of This World (1959), and The Conspiracy to Destroy All Existing Governments and Religions (1960). Carr helped to renew the popularity of “Illuminati demonology,” with its recurring call for rebellion against a world-dominating Synagogue of Satan. Reportedly, this cabal of communists, hedonists, and international bankers (including the Rothschild and Rockefeller families) was systematically establishing a godless new world order, using strategies such as radio-transmitted mind control and fluoridation of water supplies. Carr claimed to have discovered plans written by Rabbi Emanuel Rabinovich for triggering a Third World War, which would complete the destruction of civilized society and impose global tyranny under Satan. Instead of endorsing the flawed systems of democracy and free enterprise, Carr and other conspiracists insisted that the modern world’s institutions were pawns in the hands of Lucifer.
As I was growing up in the 1960s, ideas like that seemed too disreputable to worry about. Still, I heard about the surprising popularity of books like The Invisible Government by Dan Short (1962), The Great International Conspiracy by Richard T. Osborne (1974), or Hal Lindsey’s blockbusters such as The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth (1972), or The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon (1980). In 1969, Christopher Hill warned that intellectual snob historians “have ignored the lunatic fringe that believed in the imminence of the end and the necessary preliminary of the Antichrist.” And clearly, such dismissal of traditional beliefs proved quite oblivious. By 1979, William Griffin saw a trend and published an anthology of apocalyptic writing called Endtime: The Doomsday Catalogue. As he explained, “Armageddon has become a growth industry.”
Since then, apocalyptic thinking has gone mainstream in popular Christianity. Instead of claiming that God’s people will gradually establish justice and mercy, apocalyptic believers foretell the evil world’s utter destruction. The infamous Left Behind novels of end-times conflagration made the book of Revelation look like a prequel. Then a growing host of media-savvy conspiracy theorists like David Icke or Alex Jones generated popular movements for apocalyptic politics. Such preachers of moral reckoning exposed the diabolical puppet-masters pulling society’s strings, such as the network of cannibalistic pedophiles controlling America. In proclaiming the election of Donald Trump as a miraculous victory against the evil deep state, Paul McGuire and Troy Anderson explained, “The reality is that a powerful fallen angel named Lucifer is the temporary god of this world.” One section of their book Trumpocalypse (2018) was titled “Learn to Walk with God During the Countdown to Armageddon.” Maybe the poet D.H. Lawrence was right when he wrote in the 1920s that the book of Revelation “has had and perhaps still has more influence, actually, than the Gospels.”
At this point, we have two main types of “religious conservatives” in the Western world. We have patriotic law-and-order conservatives who believe that their nation’s progress is guided by God, and that citizens have a duty to serve their country. Then we have religious conservatives who believe that Satan controls our world, and people of faith must screw the system any way they can, such as making a virtue of tax evasion, blowing up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, or vandalizing electric power stations to sow chaos and bring on the apocalypse.
Sources
Boyer, Paul (1992) When Time Shall Be No More, page 11.
Cunningham, Andrew and Grall, Ole Peter (2000) The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, page 84.
Ehrman, Bart D. (2018) The Triumph of Christianity, pages 44–45.
McGuire, Paul and Anderson, Troy (2018) Trumpocalypse, pages 110, 283.
Weber, Eugen (1999) Apocalypses, pages 34, 151, 149, 185, 3, and 202.