The Apocalyptic Imagination (article)

Excerpts from a speech given at the International Psychohistorical Association Convention, June 10, 1994, with the permission of the author.

What is this apocalyptic we all talk of now? Is it a mood we are in, or something that began with the creation of culture? Does it have a content? Surely, it must be more than a mood. It seems even to have a topography: these united apocalyptic states, this America. We live in it and are of it.

Certainly it’s everywhere, in the gods of nuclearism and the reincarnated hopes of New Ageism, equally among the lowly and the empowered of Wall Street. Elsewhere in the culture some swear by the truth of the apocalypse in flowing robes and shaved heads or in plush churches with neon crosses hanging over giant altars. Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition would like to take over the Republican Party and create a theocratic state: Pat the Ayatollah — an image we will probably be spared because he is so stupid. Billy Graham drew 750,000 people to Central Park a couple of years ago. The only hope for secularists was that Paul Simon had earlier drawn a million. A slender reed.

It’s not new, this concern with the end of the world, but it has renewed vitality in the nuclear age. As Robert Jay Lifton has put it, nuclear threat breaks our natural and organic connection with death. And without ultimate meanings at the individual or collective level, however that is symbolized, we have little on which to ground our lives and on which to center ourselves. At some level we live “as if” lives, pretending to a psychologically false coherence and integrity. For at least several decades it has been impossible for anyone with only one eye half-open to fully trust a human future. And the consequences, which we are only just beginning to understand, are enormous.

Most strikingly, with a loss of ultimate meaning comes violence. Among the Christian fundamentalists the violence is not always readily apparent, for the theory so deftly shifts agency. We fail God’s hopes in this last and final age (in the elaborate theory of premillennial dispensationalism) and in anger He wreaks havoc during tribulation; Antichrist is a man, born in 1948 to coincide with the creation of Israel many believe, in whom Satan literally dwells; and at the final judgment (the second death for nonbelievers) God rewards and punishes according to starkly simple criteria set out in John 3:3. In such an ideology we are passive agents, victims of divine judgment and genocide. That’s what the book of Revelations describes: Biblical genocide.

But the violence of the apocalyptic, at least as we live with it, also comes much closer to home. In the theology of the Nation of Islam, a large-headed and disgruntled scientist, Mr. Yacub, exiled 6,600 years ago from Mecca to the island of Patmos, no less, (where John received his vision that makes up the book of Revelations), this Yacub maliciously created from among his 59,999 followers the race of blue-eyed white devils. Such stark imagery controls the historical narrative among the dispossessed in a racist society that creates an underclass and is then surprised when its inhabitants riot. (The cost of rebuilding south-central Los Angeles, if in fact it is ever carried out, will be two-tenths of 1 percent of the cost of the S&L bailout. It puts looting in some perspective). But it’s the full-scale race war we really fear, that explosion of rage we can barely name but which at some level we know would have a certain justice to it. Riots are the

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apocalyptic foreplay, one might say. They generate the desire to hurry it up and get it over with.

It’s made us all thanatoids sitting in front of our TV’s. In such a deformed culture that has always been stubbornly Christian and is now solidly fundamentalist (according to current polling data 90 percent of Americans believe in God, well over a third believe in the reality of the devil, the same percentage expect to be raptured, half believe in angels, and 80 percent expect to be called before God at the final judgment to answer for their sins as described in Revelations 20), it is hardly surprising that fundamentalist ideology makes the most apocalyptic sense. Certainly in numbers it has the votes, for it grips the imagination of a quarter of the population (that’s some 60 to 70 million people).

I’m interested in the fundamentalists as a kind of distilled essence of what I call the endism in our culture (with endism defined as the location of the self in some future narrative). The fundamentalist eschatology tells an odd, if evocative, story about the approaching end of human history and God’s re-created universe after the return of Jesus. One woman I interviewed, for example, whom I call Mary, told me that God, in preparation for the great battles that mark the end times, is “plopping out” more boys than girls. God will then “destroy this world and heaven by fire, melt it down, and there will arise a new city, the new Jerusalem.” Rev. Lester, in turn, a Baptist minister, takes acute pleasure in the punishment awaiting nonbelievers, whose biological death will be gruesomely violent and can only await the terrors of eternal damnation in the lake of fire after their resurrection and second death. “I’m kind of looking forward to all this stuff,” he said, following a long description of end-time horrors. Monroe, a former CEO himself who went through a conversion experience in his 40s and became a missionary to the rich and powerful on Wall Street, spoke to me of the “astounding GNP” and the “super productivity” of the earth during the millennium. And, finally, Otto, a meek man and fervent believer in his late 40s, stressed the reversals during the millennium, when those nonbelievers who survive tribulation will at best drive the buses and take out the garbage while the resurrected and now eternal faithful rule with Jesus from Mt. Zion in Jerusalem.

But we should not mistake symptom for cause, or reaction for event. In the most profound sense, the disease is human-created threats to existence, whether with a nuclear bang or an environmental whimper, to paraphrase

T. S. Eliot. The best we can do is react, like the fundamentalists searching with their “signs” for empirical evidence of the unknown. It is by our own hands that the end of human life is now scientifically possible, by our own hands that we have created these vast and irrational structures of potential destruction. It is one thing to imagine the end, another to make it real.

The imaginings, of course, have a long history, from roots in Zoroaster (as described recently by Norman Cohn in Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come) and from there into Judaism and early Christianity, to the dread that gripped Europe before the Year 1000, to powerful millenarian movements in the middle ages, and to the fin-de-siecle movement in the 19th century that began in France in the 1880s. As Elaine Showalter has noted, out of such chaos come many forms of social distress, especially sexual ones, which she connects to the gender anxieties of the late 20th century. I am more impressed, however, by the way Susan Sontag joins nuclear threat to our ongoing encounter with AIDS. Steven Jay Gould has estimated a quarter of the world’s population could die from AIDS before it’s all over. That’s well over a billion people. It’s not “Apocalypse Now,” says Sontag, but “Apocalypse From Now On.”

Can we avoid it? I don’t know, but I have been impressed by two things in my work with fundamentalists. One is the way they authentically touch the real. They sing and talk of blood running up the bridles of their horses, but is that stranger than living a numbed “as if” life? Touching death and letting in the terror of ultimate destruction can warp you psychologically, but perhaps their cry gives voice to what otherwise lies even more dangerously buried in the American self. They are unsteady, these fundamentalists, no doubt about it, and in social life pursue policies that we must firmly resist. But there is a certain

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authenticity in their read of our psychohistorical condition. I would prefer that Christians were centered on the Sermon on the Mount. But it may be that the fundamentalist shift in emphasis to the book of Revelations speaks to a deeper truth.

Second, among the fundamentalists the only ones I have found who can play with apocalyptic ideas and yet draw vital energy from them that fully supports a human future are in those communities of suffering, especially among blacks, whose lives approximate that of the early Christians tragically suffused with actual violence and persecution. These are people who know from the end time. They live it on a daily basis. But in contrast with so much of white fundamentalism, in them standing at the brink empowers rather than deadens, and magical notions of the return of Jesus work together with passionate commitments to rebuild torn families and neighborhoods, run soup kitchens and special after-school programs for troubled adolescents. Rev. Charles, whom I know well, of an end-time church in Harlem is quite clear about his political role as a black leader. He preaches in the major key of the apocalyptic and is a literalist in his reading of the Bible, but he was explicit in an interview that if he hadn’t been a minister he would have been a revolutionary.

The Biblical story that Rev. Charles felt made the most sense out of his life history and commitments was that of Jonah. This “first and greatest evangelist” was a messenger of God sent to warn the citizens of Nineveh that they risked destruction unless they repented of their evil ways. Jonah, who at first resisted carrying out God’s commandment by fleeing (just as Rev. Charles delayed his “calling” in the ministry), eventually accepted his responsibility. He then reached Nineveh in time and convinced its inhabitants of their impending doom and the urgent need for them to repent of their sins. The citizens of the city fell down and worshipped, and even the king put on sackcloth and sat in ashes. Similarly, Rev. Charles saw his role as that of warning a doomed people of the need to beg God’s forgiveness. “I think one of the roles of our church or any end-time church,” he said, “is to make people aware.” They then must change “their life-style and their attitude toward life,” he continued, “and their attitude toward God, and their attitude toward each other.” It is only the pressure of destruction that can force such a radical transformation; standing at the edge of the Apocalypse, Rev. Charles felt, was a powerful motivator.

The ironic end of the Biblical story, however, which was hardly lost on Rev. Charles, is that Jonah’s success and the repentance of Nineveh only bought some time. As the book of Nahum, which is the sequel to that of Jonah, makes clear, after about a century God in fact carried out the destruction of the city so totally that it disappeared from the face of the earth. For Rev. Charles, who commented in the interview on this final end of Nineveh in a near whisper of terror, such is the paradox of faith and action. He sought to instill hope within awareness, or soon someone without “God in his heart” will “push the button.” At best we can only buy time, and even that takes a huge effort and commitment. But we cannot give up, even though our ultimate destruction is assured. We must and can only act in a godly way to make a human future worthy of muting God’s fury. It is an ambiguous lesson, to be sure, but perhaps it is the only spiritually honest theology in an age of real and evil threats to human existence.

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