Note: What this article does not inform is
that the philosophy of Roman Catholic "Jesuit Futurism" is the milieu
which has produced the modern-day chimera and prophetic
mycelium that infests the Christian-Evangelical-Zionist
mind and their agenda to manufacture the ersatz State of 'Israel' and the
its apocalyptic nemesis the "Great City" of "Babylon"
in order to politically manufacture a self-fulfilling prophecy of
Armageddon and their prophetic golden age "Millennium"
(1,000-year Reich) overseen by the Clerico-Fascists -- cf also my
other post re the "Christian"-Zionist origins of political
Israel originally being a Jesuit
eschatology.
When U.S. Foreign
Policy Meets Biblical Prophecy
By Paul S. Boyer,
AlterNet
February 20, 2003
Does the Bible foretell regime change in
Iraq? Did God establish Israel's boundaries millennia ago? Is the United
Nations a forerunner of a satanic world order?
For millions of Americans, the answer to
all those questions is a resounding yes. For many believers in biblical
prophecy, the Bush administration's go-it-alone foreign policy, hands-off
attitude toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and proposed war on Iraq are
not simply actions in the national self-interest or an extension of the war on
terrorism, but part of an unfolding divine plan.
Evangelical Christians have long
complained that "people of faith" do not get sufficient respect, and that
religious belief is trivialized in our public discourse. So argues Stephen L.
Carter, a Yale University law professor and an evangelical Christian, in his
1993 "The Culture of Disbelief." Carter has a point, at least with reference to
my own field of American history. With notable exceptions, cultural historians
have long underplayed the importance of religion in the United States,
particularly in the modern era. Church historians have produced good work, but
somewhat in isolation, cut off from the larger currents of cultural and
intellectual history. That is changing, as evidenced by Mark A. Noll's
magisterial "America's God: From Jonathan Edwards
to Abraham Lincoln" (2002). But,
over all, the critics are on target.
However, I would vigorously challenge
Carter's related complaint that religious belief plays little role in shaping
public policy. In fact, religion has always had an enormous, if indirect and
underrecognized, role in policy formation.
And that is especially true today, as is
illustrated by the shadowy but vital way that belief in biblical prophecy is
helping mold grassroots attitudes toward current U.S. foreign policy. As the
nation debates a march toward war in the Middle East, all of us would do well
to pay attention to the beliefs of the vast company of Americans who read the
headlines and watch the news through a filter of prophetic belief.
Abundant evidence makes clear that
millions of Americans � upwards of 40 percent, according to some widely
publicized national polls � do, indeed, believe that Bible prophecies detail a
specific sequence of end-times events. According to the most popular prophetic
system, premillennial dispensationalism, formulated by the 19th-century
British churchman John Darby, a series of last-day signs will signal the
approaching end. Those will include wars, natural disasters, rampant
immorality, the rise of a world political and economic order, and the return
of the Jews to the land promised by God to Abraham.
In Darby's system, the present
"dispensation" will end with the Rapture, when all true believers will join
Christ in the air. Next comes the Tribulation, when a charismatic but satanic
figure, the Antichrist, will arise in Europe, seize world power, and impose
his universal tyranny under the dread sign "666," mentioned in Revelation.
After seven years, Christ and the saints will return to vanquish the
Antichrist and his armies at Har-Megiddo (the biblical Armageddon), an ancient
battle site near Haifa. From a restored Temple in Jerusalem, Christ will then
inaugurate a thousand-year reign of peace and justice � the Millennium.
That scenario, which Darby ingeniously
cobbled together from apocalyptic passages throughout the Bible, was
popularized in America by expositors like Cyrus Scofield, whose 1909
"Scofield Reference Bible" became a best seller. More recently,
dispensationalism has been promulgated by radio evangelists; paperback
popularizers; fundamentalist and Pentecostal pastors; and TV luminaries like
Jerry Falwell, Jack Van Impe, and John Hagee.
Hal Lindsey's "The Late Great Planet Earth" (1970), a slangy update of Darby's teachings, became the nonfiction
best seller in the 1970s. Today's Left Behind series, a multivolume fictional
treatment of dispensationalism by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, has sold 50
million copies since the first volume appeared, in 1995. Volume 10, The
Remnant, topped the The New York Times's bestseller list for several weeks
last summer.
During the cold war, Lindsey and other
prophecy gurus focused on the Soviet Union, citing a passage in Ezekiel
foretelling the destruction of a northern kingdom, Gog, which they interpreted
as Russia. Today's popularizers, however, spotlight the Middle East and the
rise of a New World Order led by their own "axis of evil": the United Nations
and other international bodies; global media conglomerates; and multinational
corporations, trading alliances, and financial institutions. This interlocking
system, they preach, is laying the groundwork for the Antichrist's prophesied
dictatorship.
As for the Middle East, the popularizers
view Israel's founding in 1948, and its recapture of Jerusalem's Old City in
1967, as key end-times signs. They also see the Jewish settlements in the West
Bank and Gaza, and a future rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple on a site
sacred to Muslims, as steps in God's unfolding plan. The most hard-line and
expansionist groups in Israel today, including Likud Party leaders, have
gratefully welcomed this unwavering support. When Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu visited the United States in 1998, he called first on Falwell, and
only then met with President Clinton. (Dispensationalist dogma also
foretells the mass slaughter of Jews by the Antichrist and the conversion of
the surviving remnant to Christianity, but those themes are played down by
most current popularizers.)
On the basis of such beliefs,
dispensationalists denounce any proposals for shared governance of Jerusalem.
As Hagee writes in "Final Dawn Over
Jerusalem" (Thomas Nelson, 1998):
"Christians and Jews, let us stand united and indivisible on this issue: There
can be no compromise regarding the city of Jerusalem, not now, not ever. We
are racing toward the end of time, and Israel lies in the eye of the storm.
... Israel is the only nation created by a sovereign act of God, and He has
sworn by His holiness to defend Jerusalem, His Holy City. If God created and
defends Israel, those nations that fight against it fight against God."
Dispensationalists also oppose any scaling back of Jewish settlements in the
West Bank or Gaza, since those areas lie well within God's grant to Abraham,
recorded in Genesis 15:18, of all of the land from "the river of Egypt" to the
Euphrates.
In this scenario, the Islamic
world is allied against God and faces annihilation in the last days.
That view is actually a very ancient one in Christian eschatology. Medieval
prophecy expounders saw Islam as the demonic force whose doom is foretold in
Scripture. As Richard the Lionhearted prepared for the Third Crusade in 1190,
the famed prophecy interpreter Joachim of Fiore assured him that the Islamic
ruler Saladin, who held Jerusalem, was the Antichrist, and that Richard would
defeat him and recapture the Holy City. (Joachim's prophecy failed: Richard
returned to Europe in 1192 with Saladin still in power.) Later interpreters
cast the Ottoman Empire in the Antichrist role.
That theme faded after 1920, with the
Ottoman collapse and the rise of the Soviet Union, but it surged back in the
later 20th century, as prophecy popularizers began not only to support the
most hard-line groups in Israel, but also to demonize Islam as irredeemably
evil and destined for destruction. "The Arab world is an Antichrist-world,"
wrote Guy Dury in "Escape From the Coming Tribulation" (1975). "God says he
will lay the land of the Arabs waste and it will be desolate," Arthur
Bloomfield wrote in "Before the Last Battle �
Armageddon," published in 1971 and
reprinted in 1999. "This may seem like a severe punishment, but ... the terms
of the covenant must be carried out to the letter."
The anti-Islamic rhetoric is at fever
pitch today. Last June, the prophecy magazine Midnight Call warmly endorsed a
fierce attack on Islam by Franklin Graham (son of Billy) and summed up
Graham's case in stark terms: "Islam is an evil religion." In
Lindsey's 1996 prophecy novel, "Blood Moon," Israel, in
retaliation for a planned nuclear attack by an Arab extremist, launches a
massive thermonuclear assault on the entire Arab world. Genocide, in
short, becomes the ultimate means of prophetic fulfillment.
Anticipating George W. Bush, prophecy
writers in the late 20th century also quickly zeroed in on Saddam Hussein. If
not the Antichrist himself, they suggested, Saddam could well be a forerunner
of the Evil One. In full-page newspaper advertisements during the Persian Gulf
war of 1991, the organization Jews for Jesus declared that Saddam "represents
the spirit of Antichrist about which the Bible warns us."
Prophecy believers found particular
significance in Saddam's grandiose plan, launched in the 1970s, to rebuild
Babylon on its ancient ruins. The fabled city on the Euphrates, south of
Baghdad, which included one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, owed
its splendor to King Nebuchadnezzar, the same wicked ruler who warred against
Israel and destroyed Jerusalem in 586 B.C., for which impiety, according to
the Book of Daniel, he went mad and ended his days eating grass in the fields.
In Revelation, Babylon embodies all that
is corrupt, "a great whore ... with whom the kings of the earth have committed
fornication." It stands as the antithesis of Jerusalem, the city of
righteousness, and Revelation prophesies its annihilation by fire. Since
Babylon cannot be destroyed unless it exists, Saddam's ambitious public-works
project is seen as an essential step toward prophetic fulfillment.
Charles Dyer's "The Rise of Babylon: Sign of the End Times" (1991) elaborates the theme. Along with the
emergence of modern Israel and the European Union (forerunner of the
Antichrist's world system), writes Dyer, Saddam's restoration of Babylon
signals the approaching end and offers "thrilling proof that Bible prophecies
are infallible." "When Babylon is ultimately destroyed," he continues,
"Israel will finally be at peace and will dwell in safety."
That theme resonates powerfully with
today's calls for Saddam's overthrow. Indeed, the cover illustration of Dyer's
book juxtaposes Saddam and Nebuchadnezzar. Hal Lindsey's Web site recently
featured a cartoon of a military aircraft emblazoned with a U.S. flag and a
Star of David and carrying a missile with a label targeting "Saddam." The
caption quoted the prophet Zechariah: "It shall be that day I will seek to
destroy all nations that come against Israel."
All of these themes converge in
the Left Behind novels. As the plot unfolds, the Antichrist, Nicolae
Carpathia, becomes secretary general of the United Nations. ("I've
opposed the United Nations for 50 years," boasts one of the authors, Tim
LaHaye, a veteran activist on the religious right.) Carpathia moves
the U.N. from New York to a rebuilt Babylon, laying the groundwork for
the simultaneous destruction of both the city that in the grammar of
dispensationalism represents absolute evil and defiance of God's
prophetic plan, and the organization that more than any other
prefigures the Antichrist's satanic world order.
To be sure, some current
Bush-administration policies trouble prophecy believers. For example, the
expansion of Washington's surveillance powers after 9/11 (led, ironically, by
Attorney General John Ashcroft, darling of the religious
right) strikes some as another step toward the Antichrist's global
dictatorship. Counterbalancing that, however, other key administration
positions � its hostility to multinational cooperation and international
agreements, its downgrading of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, its muted
response to growing Jewish settlement in Palestinian territory, and its
unrelenting focus on Saddam Hussein � strike prophecy believers as perfectly
in harmony with God's prophetic plan: a plan that will bring human history to
its apocalyptic denouement and usher in the longed-for epoch of righteousness,
justice, and peace.
Academics do need to pay more attention to
the role of religious belief in American public life, not only in the past,
but also today. Without close attention to the prophetic scenario embraced by
millions of American citizens, the current political climate in the United
States cannot be fully understood.
Leaders have always invoked God's blessing
on their wars, and, in this respect, the Bush administration is simply
carrying on a familiar tradition. But when our born-again president describes
the nation's foreign-policy objective in theological terms as a global
struggle against "evildoers," and when, in his recent State of the Union
address, he casts Saddam Hussein as a demonic, quasi-supernatural figure who
could unleash "a day of horror like none we have ever known," he is not only
playing upon our still-raw memories of 9/11. He is also invoking a powerful
and ancient apocalyptic vocabulary that for millions of prophecy believers
conveys a specific and thrilling message of an approaching end � not just of
Saddam, but of human history as we know it.
Paul S. Boyer, a professor emeritus of
history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and currently a visiting
professor of history at the College of William and Mary, is the author of
"When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture"
(Harvard University Press, 1992).
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