They Want It Darker

Yesterday I wrote about religion scholar Matthew D. Taylor. Today Taylor wrote about Left Behind.

Taylor’s “How ‘Left Behind’ Got Left Behind” is a sharp overview of one of the biggest changes from 20th-century white evangelicalism to the evolving shape of 21st-century white evangelicalism — a change in eschatology.

Rapture Christianity — the “premillennial dispensationalism” of Billy Graham and A Thief in the Night and Hal Lindsay and Left Behind — is essentially pessimistic about society. It teaches that the world is just going to keep getting worse and worse until Jesus comes back to whisk away Christians before God tortures the rest of humanity to death over the next seven years. That’s all prophesied and there’s nothing anyone can do to change it.

Given that outlook, Rapture Christianity doesn’t inspire its adherents to engage in politics or, really, in any form of “social action” to try to change the world for the better. Dwight L. Moody talked about the Rapture Christian’s main duty of “save all you can” in the “lifeboat” of the church, because the boat is sinking and there’s nothing that can be done to change that.

But despite that, some of the most ardent proponents of Rapture Christianity have been extremely involved in politics. Some — like Left Behind author Tim LaHaye, have been extremely involved in extreme politics. LaHaye was a lifelong Bircher who worked hard to create ultra-conservative political institutions in the hopes of transforming society over the course of generations. He also insisted, for every one of his 90+ years, that the Rapture was imminent, near-certain to occur before the end of this decade (the 1960s, then the 1970s, then the 1980s, then the 1990s, then the 2000s …), and it was all gonna burn and there was nothing anyone could do to change that.

I tried, for a long time, to make sense of this before ultimately realizing I couldn’t impose coherence where there wasn’t any.

Guys like LaHaye and Pat Robertson were also influenced by “Christian Reconstructionism” — the far-right Christian supremacist ideology that underlies the various strains of “dominionism” on the white Christian right. None of that was premillennialist or easily reconcilable with Rapture Christianity. But hey, LaHaye and Robertson were large, they encompassed multitudes.

Anyway, Taylor doesn’t fall into the trap of thinking that if the CharisMAGA “prophets” and televangelists of the New Apostolic Reformation are not pre-millennialists then they must be post-millennialists. Their thinking is all far messier, less thought-through, and less systematic than these abstract theological categories.

This new thing is also tonally very distinct from postmillennialism. It’s not as naively optimistic. And it’s a whole lot more bloodthirsty. It’s vision for the future it wants and how to get there is less like Walter Rauschenbusch and more like Hutu Radio.

So Taylor doesn’t call these folks postmillennialists. He argues, rather, that they are stumbling toward some kind of new eschatology, and he suggests a name for it:

This up-and-coming eschatology is not as cohesive or systematic as dispensational premillennialism. It’s not as patiently optimistic or as content with gradual social reform as the postmillennialism of old. Instead, the predominant new charismatic eschatology hopes for a dramatic, militant Christian end-times revival to sweep the globe dramatically battling back the kingdom of darkness. If we could capture this theological vision of the future in a phrase, it would be “victorious eschatology.”

Proponents of victorious eschatology denounce the Dispensationalists as “defeatist” and “escapist,” too willing to sit on their hands and wait for Jesus to fix the world. These new leaders instead anticipate that the church will have to fight like (and against) hell to bring God’s kingdom to the earth, because Satan and his demonic minions will never cede the world without a fight. Victorious eschatology is optimistic about the future, but that optimism is premised on its adherents’ willingness to bring spiritual war to all non-Christian culture.

Interesting. But, again, I’d caution anyone trying to make sense of their theology to remember that the assumption that it possesses sense remains an as-yet-unproved thesis.

Some earlier musings on the eschatological conundrum of 21st-century white evangelicalism in America: