For the Love of Armageddon

“It’s pure spiritual abuse to tell children we’re living in the end times,” an acquaintance said recently. “It causes trauma to tell kids, at the beginning of their lives, that the entire world is about to end.” (I’m paraphrasing from memory.) This acquaintance has suffered years of religious trauma from her evangelical upbringing, and is dedicated to ensuring no kid endures what she endured.

However, this comment underscored for me exactly how much younger my acquaintance is than me. She believes that this apocalyptic message is both uniquely religious, and particularly new. Since I don’t travel in highly conservative religious circles, and I don’t have kids, perhaps some parts of the message have changed. Yet I grew up in Reagan’s America, where the constant threat of massive nuclear conflagration defined my, and everybody else’s, childhood.

I’ve written before about how my generation grew up with two all-encompassing cultural messages:

1. With hard work and determination, you can be anything you can dream; and
2. We’re all going to die at any minute

I came along late enough that schools had abandoned the delusion of duck-and-cover drills for nuclear war. Nevertheless, we grew up hearing how the bombs would inevitably drop a week from next Tuesday, and nothing we did could prevent it. In the 1980s, Armageddon wasn’t a religious dogma, it was a looming reality permeating American lives. Religious and secular Americans differed only on what we believed would follow: salvation, or devastation.

Perhaps most important is that, in the popular memory, these years enjoyed (if that’s the word) a degree of popular unity scarcely seen before or since. As the Cold War reached its climax, the Reagan coalition managed to corral Americans into a political alliance that swept the presidential elections three consecutive times, the only time one party has done so since World War II. All powered by fear of imminent flaming death.

This unity didn’t really exist, of course; memory has a whitewashing effect. Oh, the Reaganite electoral domination was real. But America’s largest-ever anti-state protest occurred on June 12^th, 1982, when a ban-the-bomb rally pulled a million people to New York’s Central Park. Reagan, as President, dominates our 1980s mythology, but that was also Gary Hart’s heyday. Hart’s 1988 presidential bid was considered a cinch, before Lee Atwater blitzed him.

Support for the Cold War gave Americans a shared sense of identity. Ironically,
opposition to the Cold War often had the same effect.

But for many American conservatives, that perceived unity was totally real, and totally tied to two facts: religion, and the Cold War. They forget that a Democrat, Jimmy Carter, ushered the term “born again” into America’s political lexicon. Instead, for them, it was the power duo of Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell. Reagan, like Donald Trump, spoke the language of Christianity, without much darkening a church door as an adult.

People who believe their culture’s heyday existed in the past, usually pinpoint that heyday approximately thirty years ago. And thirty years ago as I write is 1993. Thirty years ago, the Cold War had ended, putatively behind Reagan-Bush’s muscular displays, giving America over to Bill Clinton, who guided the country through a profoundly diffuse era of moral wishy-washiness. Conservative Christians in 1993 already mourned the unity provided by death from above.

Seriously. To my eternal regret, I was one of them back then. I know what it means to miss the moral certainty you once had.

When Christian Conservatives, at least of the American stripe, yearn for the Apocalypse, they aren’t really asking for anything described in the Bible. Maybe they want the Lion of Judah, but they have no patience for the Lamb Who Was Slain. What they really want, is the perceived social unity and moral swagger they remember themselves having when Reagan’s muscle and Falwell’s religiosity dominated America’s political map.

Western civilization has always contained the ability to destroy itself. Indeed, Western civilization has already collapsed, twice, and there’s no reason to believe it won’t do so again. This time around, though, the consequences will be much more dire. Whether through nuclear war, as I grew up anticipating, or through climate change, as currently seems more likely, when this civilization collapses, it will leave the Earth a lifeless, uninhabitable husk.

I’ll agree that telling children Armageddon is imminent causes trauma. Perhaps that’s why so many elder GenXers shuffle through life, dead-eyed and disengaged, because we’re still recovering from Reagan’s malaise days. But the apocalyptic message also offers something to unify behind, and that’s something today’s body politic sorely lacks. Apocalyptic Christians aren’t malicious; they simply miss the days when imminent death offered cheap, easy unity.