I am incredibly proud of my wife for having dealt with a telephone call from a concerned cousin with a great deal of patience while offering wise yet direct answers (as well as questions).
The phone call related to the end of the world and the “information” that the cousin in question had been getting from someone named Alex Jones.
It only took a couple of peeks around the internet (adding, of course, some additional keywords like “charlatan” to make sure I didn’t just get Jones’ fan pages) to learn a bit about this individual. He makes outlandish claims. He is so problematic that he is viewed as a liability at best by other conspiracy theorists and by other wacky Christians. That’s without the cynics who think he’s just another charlatan who is in it for the money.
The “information” this cousin had heard was typical conspiracy theory end times stuff that has been around since the 1970s (if not indeed longer, in other forms). The idea of chips in passports or even under your skin, a single world government, it’s all been standard fare in these circles for three or four decades.
Let’s think about that for a second: we’re supposed to believe that there is a New World Order that has sufficient conspirators and technology to take over the world, and yet the secret has been out for about 40 years and they still haven’t managed it? That’s not a very successful New World Order. I’ll be honest, any conspiracy that has had its cover blown 40 years ago and still hasn’t managed to achieve its aims is unlikely to be more successful now.
The irony is that these conspiracy theorists always talk about a loss of freedom, curtailing of liberties. And yet this nonsense thrives best in America, precisely because of the freedom of speech that allows them to spew their nonsense anywhere on the web, in books, on TV, and in plenty of other places – although you still have to pay if you want the DVD with all the details. Conspiracy theorists have long known how to milk people’s fears for money. And unfortunately the Christian emphasis on faith, on being countercultural, and on expecting persecution leaves many gullible souls open to being taken advantage of by charlatans.
A key factor, however, in all conspiracy theory end times New World Order angles on things is Americacentrism. It isn’t that people are starving daily in other parts of the world that leads them to believe that these are the end times. It isn’t that other people have had their freedoms curtailed for generations that is a sign of the end. It is a downturn in the U.S. economy that is treated as a foreboding omen, even if at the worst point in the latest depression most Americans are still far better off than most people around the world at the height of American prosperity. It is rumors about concentration camps for Christians in Indiana (that one made me laugh out loud) that worry American end-times oriented Christians, who seem to live in blissful ignorance that there are real camps elsewhere on the planet.
It is this Americacentrism that leads to the reading of the Book of Revelation as being about the present. It is simply too much for the American ego to bear the obvious truth glaring at us from the pages of the Book of Revelation itself, speaking to us in a voice that sounds strangely like Dr. Phil’s: “It’s not about you.” The meaning of the text is perfectly clear. It addressed Christians in the time in which it was written, made not-that-subtle references to the Roman Empire and emperors (not just the number 666, but also the city on seven hills), and provided the clearest evidence in the verse that woke me from my own misguided apocalyptic frenzy in Revelation 17:9-11, where we are told that the beast’s seven heads represent kings, “five of which have fallen, one of which now is, and one of which is to come”, as well as an eighth who belongs with these others. If this wasn’t true in the time when the author wrote the book and sent it to the churches in his time, then you are making him a liar and what he wrote to be lies. He didn’t write “When Alex Jones, or Hal Lindsay, or Tim LaHaye arrives and provides the key to interpreting what I’ve written, it will then be true that five have fallen, one now is…” But because we so desperately want to be at the center of things, we ignore the plain meaning of the Bible, which even in one of the hardest books to interpret is plain enough that Christians ought not to be so easily hoodwinked.
Perhaps the key to reading the Bible and understanding it is indeed to watch less Alex Jones and more Dr. Phil. It’s not about you. That doesn’t mean it’s not relevant to you. But when you are so eager for the book to be written directly to you that you are willing to ignore the clear evidence that it was written first and foremost for other people in another time and place, you’ve not only fallen into the trap of misinterpreting the Bible. You’ve done so motivated by one of the sins that Christianity has historically condemned, namely egotism, egocentrism, the belief that it is all about me. That, more than anything else, is at the root of much misguided and mistaken misuse of the Bible, and much else besides.
But of course, once you’ve bought into this worldview, it is easy to dismiss a voice like mine as yet another servant of the New World Order, in cahoots with the evil one. But it remains the fact that other countries censor their citizens’ access to the internet, and the fact that people are openly speaking against the supposed New World Order is strong evidence against their own claims about a New World Order. And so I invite you to start over at the beginning. Don’t take my word for anything, and don’t take theirs. Be skeptical of everyone who is telling you something. Don’t believe me just because I am not asking you to buy a DVD to get the full story. Be skeptical even so. Dig beneath the surface. Just don’t assume that the people who are saying things you agree with aren’t “tickling your ears”, for the Bible has warned you about precisely that. If you don’t like what I’m saying, that suggests that at least I’m not in the ear-tickling business. But of course, most people have at least someone who likes what they are saying. So even that can’t be your guide. You’re just going to have to take the time to investigate. Otherwise, you’re entrusting your soul and your money and perhaps even your leadership in various other ways to people who may or may not be telling you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. You can’t assume that just because someone’s claims are peppered with Biblical allusions that what they are saying is “what the Bible says.”
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