There’s a certain kinship between end-timers of all stripe- whether they be religious, political, resource-based, or even environmental. The source of their beliefs, and the information they take as a given, obviously varies, but there’s definitely enough similarity to make you think that, even though most people who belong to one group tend to think the others are loons, they could probably get along pretty nicely if they just focused on how fucked we all are. Kinda like how fundamentalist Muslims, Christians, and Jews all tend to have no problem sitting down to plan how best to hate on women and gay people.
I finished reading Nicholas Guyatt’s have a nice doomsday last week. It’s a quick, fun read, at least as far as books about the apocalypse are concerned. Guyatt, an Englishman who’s spent much of his life in New York and Canada, goes on an investigative road-trip to catch up with the various factions of Apocalyptic Christians. He spends time with Jerry B Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, with Pastor John Hagee of San Antonio (who made a bunch of news a few months ago because John McCain aggressively courted his endorsement even though he thinks Catholics are Satanists and that Hitler was sent by god to kill the Jews so they’d form Israel), as well as a bunch of lower-rent heralds of the Apocalypse. The purpose of the book is two-fold; one, to learn how much influence these people have over US foreign policy (not as much as you’d think, still more than enough to be fucking terrifying), and two, to understand the psychology of a person who believes they’re going to be personally taken away by god some time in the very near future and brought to live in Heaven without dying while the rest of the people on Earth who weren’t as good as they were have to suffer seven years of torments and tribulations which will almost certainly result in mass deaths, unless they get tattoos that read 666 on their bodies somewhere.
I already have tattoos that read 666* on my body, so I’m not gonna get beamed up with them, but I’m not really too worried about that anyway.
Guyatt’s idea is basically that people like to believe that the Apocalypse is coming and Jesus will soon be returning because Christians are big on Heaven, but, like everybody else, terrified of dying. The Rapture is an awesome have your cake and eat it too situation, then- they get to go to Heaven and live eternally (in bodies that will look and feel better than arnold schwarzeneggar, one fella asserts), while also watching the hippies and fuck-ups pay the consequences for their mistakes, and they never have to die to get there. Because faith is rad and all, but it’s rarely strongest on your death bed.
It’s an interesting premise, but I don’t buy it in the slightest. I liked Guyatt’s book, but I disagreed pretty strongly with his conclusions about the motives of these people. Because everybody is scared of dying. But most everyone else didn’t write an escape-clause into their mythology that lets them go on to Phase II without crossing the threshold. If the Rapture (and the subsequent global world order, Antichrist, tribulations, Danzig sing-alongs, earthquakes, war in Israel that ends when Jesus rides a horse down from Heaven and personally smashes Barack Obama in the head with a mace) is a belief that is borne primarily out of a fear of dying, then why isn’t it more widespread? I mean, it’s big with about 50 million Americans, and maybe another twice that outside our wacky borders, but that is still a firm minority viewpoint, and nobody else has a you don’t have to die to go to heaven clause in their belief system.
One thing that Guyatt never really touches on, though, and which I think is a key to this whole mindset, is that people like to live in interesting times. It makes us feel important, to believe that the end of the world is going to happen and we’re going to be around to see it happen. And it makes a lot of sense now, when new frontiers seem further away than in any previous generation. The space program is dead, the land has all been explored, the ocean is covered in plastic and terrifying algae, and it’s not really anybody’s priority to see it.
So there’s a bit of envy. Everybody else got to live in a world where there were new things to conquer or explore. Now we’re more or less stuck with what we’ve got. Just a couple hundred years ago, they found what amounted to a new world on the planet, and now there just doesn’t seem to be that sort of excitement.
But what if the whole damn world ends? Then we get to live in the most interesting times of all. Everybody else who ever lived or died on the planet Earth missed out on that one. But not us. We were the important ones who were there when it all went under.
To be certain, an obsession with biblical prophecy regarding the end times isn’t brand new. I mean, the idea had to hold some serious appeal, or no one would have even written it. In the 1600’s, Guyatt discusses at length, the Apocalyptic Christian community was nearly as determined as they are now that the end was in sight, and would be happening in their own lifetimes. But the people who believed these things were people escaping from the crushing weight of European history, that force which spans thousands of years and reminds you almost casually of your own insignificance. They were trying to do battle with the ghosts of old popes and William the Conqueror. Again, the need is there to prove your own importance by being there when it all ends.
And that’s the place where religious apocalyptic thinking crosses neatly with its secular cousin. Because people are bored, and they want to believe that things will be interesting. You needn’t believe in Jesus, or his imminent return, to feel more significant than your forebears because you witnessed the collapse. You’ll find that same prophecizing, that same poring over documents in an attempt to prove that it’s really happening, that same obsessive need to shape every bit of news or data into a pre-determined conclusion, in people who are convinced that the US government is going to collapse in the next ten years as you will in a biblical prophecy expert who has a chart he uses to explain how everything that goes down in Israel was written more than two thousand years ago by a couple Jewish politicians eager to fire up their base and piss off the Romans by claiming a direct line to god.
If the Rapture happens; if the nukes go off (that one’s a bit dated now, isn’t it? Funny how the apocalypse of choice twenty years ago reads like a Yakov Smirnoff routine today); if the spectacular economic and agricultural collapse has us all foraging for berries and nuts in what used to be our neighbors’ backyards back when property rights could be enforced; if the goddamn rising temperatures wipe us out with catastrophic storms; if oil prices spike to the point where we all have to ride from home to work on the back of hard-working zonkeys…
It happens or it doesn’t. Hell, I think all of those things have some chance of happening, with the environmental collapse taking the bookmaker’s short odds and Jesus leading the righteous army of raptured Christian Warriors onto an Israeli mountaintop to wipe out the infidel forces of the Antichrist before ushering in a thousand years of peace and prosperity under the rule of King JC holding down the rear. But either way, it happens or it doesn’t, and the impulse to believe that it must be now, that these times must be more significant than any that have previously occurred because these problems are so much bigger, or so much worse, than any that have preceded them, is the exact way that humans have always responded to the fear of being insignificant. It’s bigger and better than anyone else’s era, because it’s the grand finale. This isn’t a call to inaction, or a dismissal of the significance of things that are happening, but it’s maybe a reminder that reality hasn’t matched doomsday rhetoric for almost anyone, and when end times really do come- and they’ve shown up for various people before, even if the world that ends is just the one that they’ve known all their lives- there’s rarely an effective way of predicting them.
It’s a good book, Guyatt’s. But it led me to different conclusions than he probably intended.
(*not really, mom.)
