25 JUNE 2002: “36% of
Americans believe that the Bible is the word of God and is to be taken
literally. 59% say they believe the events in Revelation are going to come
true, and nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the Sept. 11 attack.”

From TIME
Magazine:

The Bible and the Apocalypse

The biggest book of the
summer is about the end of the world. It’s also a sign of our troubled
times

BY NANCY GIBBS

What do you watch for, when
you are watching the news? Signs that interest rates might be climbing,
maybe it’s time to refinance. Signs of global warming, maybe forget that
new SUV. Signs of new terrorist activity, maybe think twice about that
flight to Chicago.

Or signs that the world may
be coming to an end, and the last battle between good and evil is about
to unfold?

For evangelical Christians
with an interest in prophecy, the headlines always come with asterisks
pointing to scriptural footnotes. That is how Todd Strandberg reads his
paper. By day, he is fixing planes at Offutt Air Force Base in Bellevue,
Neb. But in his off-hours, he’s the webmaster at raptureready.com and the
inventor of the Rapture Index, which he calls a “Dow Jones Industrial Average
of End Time activity.” Instead of stocks, it tracks prophecies: earthquakes,
floods, plagues, crime, false prophets and economic measurements like unemployment
that add to instability and civil unrest, thereby easing the way for the
Antichrist. In other words, how close are we to the end of the world? The
index hit an all-time high of 182 on Sept. 24, as the bandwidth nearly
melted under the weight of 8 million visitors: any reading over 145, Strandberg
says, means “Fasten your seat belt.”

It’s not the end of the world,
our mothers always told us. This was helpful for putting spilled milk in
perspective, but it was also our introduction to a basic human reference
point. We seem to be born with an instinct that the end is out there somewhere.
We have a cultural impulse to imagine it˜and keep it at bay. Just as all
cultures have their creation stories, so too they have their visions of
the end, from the Bible to the Mayan millennial stories. Usually the fables
dwell in the back of the mind, or not at all, since we go about our lives
conditioned to think that however bad things get, it’s not you know what.
But there are times in human history when instinct, faith, myth and current
events work together to create a perfect storm of preoccupation. Visions
of an end point lodge in people’s minds in many forms, ranging from entertainment
to superstitious fascination to earnest belief. Now seems to be one of
those times.

The experience of last fall˜the
terrorist attacks, the anthrax deaths˜not only deepened the interest among
Christians fluent in the language of Armageddon and Apocalypse. It broadened
it as well, to an audience that had never paid much attention to the predictions
of the doomsday prophet Nostradamus, or been worried about an epic battle
that marks the end of time, or for that matter, read the Book of Revelation.
Since Sept. 11, people from cooler corners of Christianity have begun asking
questions about what the Bible has to say about how the world ends, and
preachers have answered their questions with sermons they could not have
imagined giving a year ago. And even among more secular Americans, there
were some who were primed to see an omen in the smoke of the flaming towers˜though
it had more to do with their beach reading than with their Bible studies.

That is because among the
best-selling fiction books of our times˜right up there with Tom Clancy
and Stephen King˜is a series about the End Times, written by Tim F. LaHaye
and Jerry B. Jenkins, based on the Book of Revelation. That part of the
Bible has always held its mysteries, but for millions of people the code
was broken in 1995, when LaHaye and Jenkins published Left Behind: A Novel
of the Earth’s Last Days. People who haven’t read the book and its sequels
often haven’t even heard of them, yet their success provides new evidence
that interest in the End Times is no fringe phenomenon. Only about half
of Left Behind readers are Evangelicals, which suggests there is a broader
audience of people who are having this conversation.

A TIME/CNN poll finds that
more than one-third of Americans say they are paying more attention now
to how the news might relate to the end of the world, and have talked about
what the Bible has to say on the subject. Fully 59% say they believe the
events in Revelation are going to come true, and nearly one-quarter think
the Bible predicted the Sept. 11 attack.

Some of that interest is
fueled by faith, some by fear, some by imagination, but all three are fed
by the Left Behind series. The books offer readers a vivid, violent and
utterly detailed description of just what happens to those who are left
behind on earth to fight the Antichrist after Jesus raptures, or lifts,
the faithful up to heaven. At the start of Book 1, on a 747 bound for Heathrow
from Chicago, the flight attendants suddenly find about half the seats
empty, except for the clothes and wedding rings and dental fillings of
the believers who have suddenly been swept up to heaven. Down on the ground,
cars are crashing, husbands are waking up to find only a nightgown in bed
next to them, and all children under 12 have disappeared as well. The next
nine books chronicle the tribulations suffered by those left behind and
their struggle to be saved.

The series has sold some
32 million copies˜50 million if you count the graphic novels and children’s
versions˜and sales jumped 60% after Sept. 11. Book 9, published in October,
was the best-selling novel of 2001. Evangelical pastors promote the books
as devotional reading; mainline pastors read them to find out what their
congregations are thinking, as do politicians and scholars and people whose
job it is to know what fears and hopes are settling in the back of people’s
minds in a time of deep uncertainty.

Now the 10th book, The Remnant,
is arriving in stores, a breathtaking 2.75 million hard-cover copies, and
its impact may be felt far beyond the book clubs and Bible classes. To
some evangelical readers, the Left Behind books provide more than a spiritual
guide: they are a political agenda. When they read in the papers about
the growing threats to Israel, they are not only concerned for a fellow
democratic ally in the war against terror; they are also worried about
God’s chosen people and the fate of the land where events must unfold in
a specific way for Jesus to return. That combination helps explain why
some Christian leaders have not only bonded with Jews this winter as rarely
before but have also pressed their case in the Bush White House as if their
salvation depended on it.

Walter Russell mead is sitting
in his office at the Council on Foreign Relations in midtown Manhattan
on a soft June afternoon, at work on a book that was born last September.
He published an acclaimed history of U.S. foreign policy last year and
was working on a study about building a global middle class. But he has
put that aside. Piled around him now are the Koran, a Bible, books on technology
and a stack of Left Behind books. When Mead predicts that our century will
be remembered as the Age of Apocalypse, he does not mean to suggest that
the world will soon end in a fiery holocaust. “The word apocalypse,” he
observes, “comes from a Greek word that literally means ‘lifting of the
veil.’ In an apocalyptic age, people feel that the veil of normal, secular
reality is lifting, and we can see behind the scenes, see where God and
the devil, good and evil are fighting to control the future.” To the extent
that more people in the U.S. and around the world believe history is accelerating,
that ancient prophecies are being fulfilled in real time, “it changes the
way people feel about their circumstances, and the way they act. The grays
are beginning to leak out of the way people view the world, and they’re
seeing things in more black-and-white terms.”

At the religious extremes
within Islam, that means we see more suicide bombers: if God’s judgment
is just around the corner, martyrdom has a special appeal. The more they
cast their cause as a fight against the Great Satan, the more they reinforce
the belief in some U.S. quarters that the war on terror is not one that
can ever end with a treaty or communique, only total victory or defeat.
Extremists on each side look to contemporary events as validation of their
sacred texts; each uses the others to define its view of the divine scheme.

In such a time of uncertainty,
it’s a natural human instinct to look for some good purpose in the shadows
of even the scariest events˜and for some readers the theology of the Left
Behind books provides it. Some stumbled on the series by accident, and
were hooked. Deborah Vargas, 46, of San Francisco bought her first Left
Behind book in January at a Target, looking for a good read. She got much
more than she had bargained for, especially after Sept. 11. “It was almost
a message right out of the Bible,” she says. “Something within me started
to change, and I started to question myself. What was I waiting for? A
sign?” Since then, she says, her life has been transformed, and she is
now a regular in the Left Behind chat rooms. “I want to talk about it all
the time.”

Talk to the people who were
already inclined to read omens in the headlines, and you hear their excitement,
even eagerness to see what happens next. “We sense we are very close to
something apocalyptic, but that something positive will come out of it,”
says Doron Schneider, an Evangelical based in Jerusalem. “It’s like a woman
having labor pains. A woman can feel this pain reaching its height when
the child is born˜and then doesn’t feel the pain anymore, only the joy
of the happy event.” Even the horror of Sept. 11 was experienced differently
by people primed to see God’s hand in all things. Strandberg admits that
he was “joyful” that the attacks could be a sign that the End Times were
at hand. “A lot of prophetic commentators have what I consider a phony
sadness over certain events,” he says. “In their hearts they know it means
them getting closer to their ultimate desire.”

People who were strangers
to prophecy don’t always find as much comfort there. When Dave Cheadle,
a Denver lay pastor at an inner-city ministry, sent out an Internet letter
after 9/11 suggesting that Revelation was the relevant text for understanding
what was happening, he got a huge˜and frightened˜response: “People were
asking themselves whether they were ready to die. Very sane, well-educated
people have gone back to the storm-cellar thing to make sure they have
water and freeze-dried stuff in their basements.” Some had trouble reconciling
their warm image of a merciful God with the chilling warnings they were
reading. “They’re asking people to believe that we have a God who simply
can’t wait to zap the Christian flight crew out of jets so they crash?”
asks Paul Maier, a professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University
and an author of Christian fiction, who finds in the Left Behind books
a deity he does not recognize. “You can’t believe in a God who would do
this kind of thing.”

Others, already believers,
have come away from this past winter feeling a need to change tactics,
change jobs, find a new way to get the urgent message across. Rick Scarborough,
pastor of the First Baptist Church of Pearland, Texas, a Houston suburb,
resigned his pulpit this month to put all his energy into recruiting Christians
to become politically involved. “I am mobilizing Christians and getting
more Christians to vote. I am preparing a beachhead of righteousness,”
he says. Meanwhile Wyoming state senator Carroll Miller, a popular legislator
from Big Horn County, announced his retirement from politics in part so
that he could spend more time speaking at churches and men’s clubs, helping
people come to grips with the prospect of the Second Coming. “It’s very
important that we as a Christian nation know what the Scriptures have said
about these days,” he says. “I’m putting forth my personal effort for my
own sake as well as for my family and friends.”

Miller knows people who have
prepared Bibles with the relevant passages indexed about what will occur
during the Tribulation, so that their left-behind friends and relatives
will know to prepare for the earthquakes and locusts and scorpions: when
“the sun became as black as sackcloth and the moon became as blood.” After
a while, sightings of the Antichrist come naturally: when U.N. Secretary-General
Kofi Annan tells the World Economic Forum that globalization is the best
hope to solve the world’s problems, when the forum floats the idea of a
“united nations of major religions,” when privacy is sacrificed to security,
the headlines are listed on the prophecy websites as signs that the Antichrist
is busy about his business. “He’s probably a good-looking man,” says Kelly
Sellers, who runs a decorative-stone business in Minneapolis, Minn. “I’m
sure he’s in politics right now and probably in the public eye a little
bit.” Sellers has read every Left Behind book and is waiting for the next
one˜”anxiously.” “It helped me to look at the news that’s going on about
Israel and Palestine,” which, he believes, “is just ushering in the End
Times, and it’s exciting for me.”

His sister-in-law Jodie thinks
technology is a key to hastening the End Times. “‘When Christ returns,
every eye shall see Him,'” she quotes from Revelation. Thanks to CNN and
the Internet, “we’re getting to a place where every eye could actually
behold such an event.” The books were enough to persuade Sandra Keathley,
a Boeing employee in Wichita, Kans., not to buy Microsoft’s Windows XP,
because she has heard rumors that it carries a method of tracking e-mail.
(In fact, the software had an instant-messaging bug that was later fixed.)
If the Antichrist were to come, she fears, “and you want to contact another
Christian, they could see that, trace it.”

The growing audience for
apocalyterature extends even into mainline Protestantism, a tradition that
has spent little time on fire and brimstone. “I would go for years without
anyone asking about the End Times,” says Thomas Tewell, senior minister
of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in midtown Manhattan˜hardly a hothouse
of apocalyptic fervor. “But since Sept. 11, hard-core, crusty, cynical
New York lawyers and stockbrokers who are not moved by anything are saying,
‘Is the world going to end?’, ‘Are all the events of the Bible coming true?’
They want to get right with God. I’ve never seen anything like it in my
30 years in ministry.”

There has never really been
a common religious experience in America, and that is as true as ever now:
some ministers report that these days when they announce they will be preaching
on the Apocalypse, attendance jumps at least 20%. But elsewhere church
attendance is back down to where it was before Sept. 11, and those pastors
see little sign of existential dread. Pastor Ted Haggard, who started a
church in his Colorado Springs, Colo., basement that now has 9,000 members,
attributes the surge in End Times interest to the Christian media empire
as much as anything else: “Because of the theology of our church, I don’t
think we’re close to a Second Coming,” he says. “But many of the major
Christian media outlets believe that there is fulfillment, and people respond
to that. People love gloom and doom. People love pending judgment. No.
1, they long to see Jesus, and No. 2, they look for the justice that Jesus
will bring to the earth in his Second Coming.”

Go into a seminary library,
and it’s hard to find scholarly books on apocalyptic theology; academics
tend to treat this tradition as sociology. They see End Times interest
rising and falling on waves of cataclysm and calm. Masses of people became
convinced the end was nigh when Rome was sacked in 410, when the Black
Death wiped out one-third of the population of 14th century Europe, when
the tectonic shudders of the Lisbon earthquake in 1755 caused church bells
to ring as far away as England, and certainly after 1945, when for the
first time human beings harnessed the power to bring about their total
destruction, not an act of God, but an act of mankind.

America, a country born with
a sense that divine providence was paying close attention from the start,
has always had a weakness for prophecy. With its deep religious history
but no established church, this country welcomes religious free-lancers
and entrepreneurs. Both the visionaries and the con artists have access
to the altar. It took the shocking events of the last mid-century to draw
apocalyptic thinking off the Fundamentalist margins and into the mainstream.
The rise of Hitler, a wicked man who wanted to murder the Jews, read like
a Bible story; his utter destruction, and the subsequent return of the
Jews to Israel after 2,000 years and the capture of Jerusalem’s Old City
by the Israelis in 1967, were taken by devout Christians and Jews alike
as evidence of God’s handiwork. Israel once again controlled the Temple
Mount, a site so holy to Islam and Christianity as well as Judaism that
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s simple act of visiting the mount
was sufficient to ignite the current Palestinian uprising. The Temple Mount
is the location of al-Aqsa Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam, and
is also the very place where Christians and Jews believe a new temple must
one day be rebuilt before the Messiah can come. An Australian Evangelical
once set fire to the mosque to clear the way, and to this day security
remains exceptionally tight for fear that those who take Scripture literally
might not just believe in what the prophets promised, but might also try
to help it along.

But it took something more,
a pre-eminent theological entrepreneur, to bring a wider American audience
to the apocalyptic tradition. Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth,
published in 1970, became the best-selling nonfiction book of its decade;
Time called Lindsey “the Jeremiah of our generation” for his detailed argument
that the end was approaching. “That’s the first book I ever read about
last days, and it changed my life,” says George Morrison, pastor of Faith
Bible Chapel in Arvada, Colo., where average Sunday-morning attendance
is 4,000. “All of a sudden, I was made aware that wow, there’s an order
to this thing.” Lindsey’s explanation of the Bible’s warnings came just
as a backlash was stirring against ’60s liberalism, an echo of the 18th
century reaction to the Enlightenment. Lindsey caught the moment that launched
a decade of evangelical resurgence, when for the first time in generations
believers organized to put their stamp on this world, rather than the next.

The election of Ronald Reagan
brought “Christian Zionism” deeper into the White House: Lindsey served
as a consultant on Middle East affairs to the Pentagon and the Israeli
government. Interior Secretary James Watt, a Pentecostalist, in discussing
environmental concerns, observed, “I don’t know how many future generations
we can count on until the Lord returns.” Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger
affirmed, “I have read the Book of Revelation, and, yes, I believe the
world is going to end˜by an act of God, I hope˜but every day I think time
is running out.” It was no accident that Reagan made his “evil empire”
speech at a meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals.

It never seemed to hurt that
Lindsey’s predictions passed their “sell by” date: during the Gulf War,
sales of his book jumped 83%, as people feared Saddam Hussein was rebuilding
Babylon and dragging the world to its last battle. Nowadays Lindsey sees
his early warnings being vindicated almost daily. “The Muslim terrorists
are going to strike the U.S. again and strike us hard so that we cease
to be one of the world’s great powers,” he says. “It’s not far off.” When
he wrote his best seller, he says, not many people took prophecy seriously.
“I was called a false prophet for saying there’d be a United States of
Europe back in 1970, but there is one now. People have watched this scenario
continue to come together, and that’s why so many people today are believing
we are in the midst of last days.”

Actually, the more Evangelicals
became involved in politics, the more they engaged with the world here
and now, the more interest in End Times theology drifted back into the
realm of entertainment. And many argued that was a healthy sign. Not all
Evangelicals embrace End Times theology, and some see in it a dangerous
distraction. Jesus said that when it comes to the time of judgment, “no
one knows, not even the angels in heaven, but My Father only.” In that
light, if Christians are called to put their faith in Christ, whatever
trials they face, then it undermines that trust to try to read the signs,
unlock the code, focus on what can’t be known rather than on what must
be done: heal the sick, tend the poor, spread the Gospel.

It is one thing to become
politically active to deploy that Gospel to improve people’s lives, another
to try to promote a specific religious scenario. Intercessors for America,
a 30-year-old prayer ministry, helps keep people politically connected
through e-mail alerts and telephone-prayer chains. The June 11 Prayer Alert
implored, “Lord, raise up government leaders in Israel, the United States
(and worldwide) who will not seek to ‘divide the land,’ and who would recognize
the unique significance of Jerusalem in God’s end-time purposes.” A refusal
to consider Israel’s withdrawal from any occupied territory would tend
to complicate the peace process: virtually every proposal has involved
a land-for-peace swap. Yet at the same time, “if this wave of terrorism
continues without a meaningful peace treaty soon,” predicts John Hagee,
pastor of the 17,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, “the
sparks of war will produce a third world war. And that will be the coming
of the End Times. That will be the end of the world as we know it.”

To the true believers, that
seems less a threat than the fulfillment of a promise. “If we keep our
eyes on Israel, we will know about the return of Christ,” says Oleeta Herrmann,
77, of Xenia, Ohio. “Everything that is happening˜wars, rumors of war˜in
the Middle East is happening according to Scripture.” Herrmann is a member
of the End-Time Handmaidens and Servants, a group of global missionaries
who preach the Gospel with an emphasis on End Times teachings. Sept. 11
is proof of her belief that the Second Coming of Christ is “closer than
it ever has been,” Herrmann says.

And therein lies the central
paradox in this wave of End Times interest. If you believe the end is near,
is the reaction hope, or dread? “Even though the Left Behind series has
been popular, many people still think of the End Times as negative,” wrote
Kyle Watson on his prophecy news website, AtlantaChristianWeekly.com. He
thinks believers should be excited about the end of the world. “Try viewing
prophecy and current events [as] how much closer we are to being with Christ
in heaven.”

That impulse to hope for
a good ending is one Cal Thomas, the conservative columnist, sees even
in the disciples’ questions for Jesus. He cites Bible passages in which
the Apostles press Jesus for clues about how the future unfolds. “This
is intellectual comfort food, the whole Left Behind phenomenon, because
it says to people, in a popularized way, it’s all going to pan out in the
end,” he says. “It assures them, in the midst of a general cultural breakdown
and a time of growing danger, that God is going to redeem the time.” Evangelicals
who had felt somehow left behind in secular terms, by a coarse culture
and a fear of general moral decay, welcome arguments that even the most
tragic events may be evidence of God’s larger plan. In fact, you don’t
have to be religious to be hoping for that as well.

˜With reporting by Amanda
Bower/New York, Rita Healy/ Denver, Marc Hequet/St. Paul, Tom Morton/ Casper,
Adam Pitluk/San Antonio, Matt Rees/ Jerusalem, Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles,
Melissa Sattley/Austin and Daniel Terdiman/San Francisco