American Apocalypse

Matthew Avery Sutton

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780674744790
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2015The first comprehensive history of modern American evangelicalism to appear in a generation, American Apocalypse shows how a group of radical Protestants, anticipating the end of the world, paradoxically transformed it."The history Sutton assembles is rich, and the connections are startling."
— New Yorker " American Apocalypse relentlessly and impressively shows how evangelicals have interpreted almost every domestic or international crisis in relation to Christ's return and his judgment upon the wicked…Sutton sees one of the most troubling aspects of evangelical influence in the spread of the apocalyptic outlook among Republican politicians with the rise of the Religious Right… American Apocalypse clearly shows just how popular evangelical apocalypticism has been and, during the Cold War, how the combination of odd belief and political power could produce a sleepless night or two."
—D. G. Hart, Wall Street Journal " American Apocalypse is the best history of American evangelicalism I've read in some time…If you want to understand why compromise has become a dirty word in the GOP today and how cultural politics is splitting the nation apart, American Apocalypse is an excellent place to start."
—Stephen Prothero, Bookforum

1

JESUS IS COMING

JESUS IS COMING.

At least that’s what William E. Blackstone assured thousands of anxious Christians in 1878. A wealthy Chicago real estate developer and friend of evangelist Dwight L. Moody, Blackstone felt energized by the chaos he saw around him. The dapper man with bald head and prominent mutton chops believed that the Bible laid out a series of signs that would indicate when the end was nigh. The signs were starting to appear.

Certain that time was running out, Blackstone decided to take up a pen and draft Jesus Is Coming to warn as many people as possible about the imminent apocalypse. To illustrate how close the world was to Armageddon, Blackstone cited various signs that touched on almost every aspect of modern life. The precarious states of capitalism and democracy represented one ominous indication that the apocalypse was near. “We believe,” he wrote, “if we can rightly read the signs of the times, that the godless, lawless trio of communism, socialism and nihilism” are “preparing the way for Antichrist.” Other signs lined up perfectly with the conditions that inspired Mark Twain’s novel The Gilded Age. Blackstone viewed “oppressing monopolies, systematic [s]peculation and fraud” as important indicators that the days were numbered. Others had to do with moral issues, such as the rising circulation of “obscene literature,” which had provoked a series of so-called Comstock laws constraining the publication and sale of such works. The future as Blackstone saw it was bleak. “Surely then this wicked world, which is so radically opposed to God, and under the present control of His arch enemy, is not growing better. On the contrary, judgment, fire and perdition are before it. Perilous times are coming.”¹

Despite Blackstone’s expectation of such a dire future, his sentiments did not drive him or his fellow believers to apathy or indifference. “We neither despair, nor fold our hands to sleep,” the businessman-theologian explained. “On the contrary, we are filled with a lively hope.” Explaining that millennial convictions sparked action rather than ennui, he continued, “Surely this positive conviction of coming doom is a mightier incentive to action than can be the quieting fallacy that things are moving on prosperously and that EVEN THE WORLD IS GETTING BETTER.” While critics accused men and women like Blackstone of otherworldliness, their convictions seemed to have the opposite effect. Preparing for Jesus’s return fostered intense, relentless engagement with the world around them.²

The publication of Jesus Is Coming signaled the beginning of a radical new religious movement that eventually transformed the faith of millions in the United States and then the world. By the time of Blackstone’s death in 1935, over a million copies of his book had been printed in multiple editions in forty-eight languages, making it one of the most influential religious books of the twentieth century.³

Blackstone’s gloomy prognostications combined with his call for action appealed to a small but significant group of Americans. Whether driven by innately cynical dispositions, challenging personal circumstances, or simple restlessness, a handful of Christians from all regions, classes, levels of education, and walks of life determined that they were living in a shallow and meaningless age. Grasping newspapers in one hand and the prophetic books of the Bible in the other, they looked for encompassing solutions to their own—and the world’s—problems. They found one in the resurrection and reconstruction of an ancient Christian tradition of millennialism. Following the lead of past generations of Christians, they used the Bible to decode history. Their sacred text provided them with secret knowledge of ages past, present, and to come. Their faith fostered a powerful sense of purpose and personal identity, it helped them make sense of the challenges around them, and it provided them with a triumphant vision of the future. It offered them the promise of transformation and redemption in a world that seemed void of both. It also served as a call to battle rather than as a justification for withdrawal. God had given them much to do and very little time in which to do it. Positive that Jesus was coming soon, they preached revival and engaged directly and aggressively with their culture. Their efforts to remake the world while standing at the eve of Armageddon inspired the rise of a revolutionary new expression of Christianity.

Americans like Blackstone living in the mid- to late nineteenth century faced many disquieting circumstances. The Civil War had claimed six hundred thousand lives and yet the nation remained divided in significant ways. Presidential politics reached an all-time low in 1876 when disputed electoral college votes sparked a constitutional crisis that culminated in the “corrupt bargain” that put Rutherford B. Hayes into the White House. In exchange for the presidency, Republicans brought Reconstruction to an inglorious end, essentially abandoning recently emancipated slaves to their former masters. The government’s actions bred increased cynicism about national politics and fostered discord and nascent racism.

The economy had also faltered. It began contracting in 1873 and did not recover for over half a decade. Hungry and frustrated, workers increasingly turned to unions for help, which led to the expansion of groups like the Knights of Labor. Unions proposed alternative ways of organizing the economy and criticized laissez-faire capitalism and abusive labor practices. In 1877 railroad employees working for some of the most powerful, modern corporations in the nation went on strike. They brought rail traffic to a standstill across the country. Various governors called on state militias and then federal troops to crush the uprising, inciting violence. Such events highlighted the mounting class divisions and labor unrest in the United States. Meanwhile, farmers, facing depressed prices, began to organize as well, laying the foundations for the Populist revolt of the 1890s and for the emergence of a new form of protest and dissent.

The development of new technology reshaped the rhythms of daily life and erected novel and unfamiliar patterns of mobility and communication. In 1878, Thomas Edison established the Edison Electric Light Company. Before long, urban Americans no longer based their schedules on the rising and setting of the sun. Railroads spread across the continent and cables established communications networks around the United States and with Europe. Time became something Americans sought to measure, predict, and control. Within a few decades the automobile, film, and then radio would further transform American culture and indeed the environment, both urban and rural, by shrinking time and distance through new modes of transportation and communication. Some Christians saw such technological innovations as evidence that the world must be edging toward Judgment Day.

Controversies over race and ethnicity came to the fore in the late nineteenth century as the population diversified. Millions of immigrants, including record numbers of Catholics and Jews, flooded into the country, raising anxieties among native-born whites as Protestant power began to wane. Many immigrants settled in urban areas, joined by thousands of Americans fleeing the nation’s farms. Bustling but dirty and overcrowded, cities took center stage in American political and social life in the early twentieth century along with a growing sense of uprootedness and anomie. The expansion of dense urban populations broke down traditional means of moral surveillance, creating a sense of insecurity and disorder.

In the aftermath of Reconstruction, white and black Americans continued to redefine their relationships to each other. During the late 1800s southern state legislatures put a series of Jim Crow laws into effect, codifying segregation, while de facto segregation continued to characterize much of the North and West. African Americans living at the turn of the century faced innumerable challenges as race and racism shaped Americans’ approaches to just about every facet of life from politics to entertainment to religion. White radical evangelicals, like almost all white Christians in this era, most often prioritized race over theology. They made the color line much harder to surmount than any theological boundaries.

Changes abroad influenced Americans’ lives and sense of themselves as well. In the race for empire, European and Asian states aggressively worked to expand their power and territories by carving up Africa, the Pacific, and parts of Asia. Meanwhile, the United States did the same, expanding beyond the North American continent in search of new territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The world seemed to shrink as different peoples came into closer contact with one another, not as equals but in hierarchies derived from color and religious creed. Understanding the new geopolitical structures that resulted from imperialism, colonization, and nationalism kept busy those who used the Bible to assess the significance of geopolitics. Comparing international news to arcane prophecies required a lot of work and patience.

As Americans approached the end of the century many hoped for a better future for themselves and their world. They celebrated how far the United States had come in fulfilling its “Manifest Destiny” as it stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific. They believed that democracy and the free market provided the kinds of unlimited opportunities represented in Horatio Alger’s popular rags-to-riches stories, and they embraced a new era of scientific innovation, which they hoped would help humans achieve their full potential. But the period between the Civil War and World War I proved deeply unsettling as well. Individuals’ lives, like the nation as a whole, remained in flux. While some Americans interpreted change as progress, others believed that it created insecurity. The latter struggled to control the pace and direction of events. In the face of so many challenges, many Americans longed for peace and stability.

Religion served as one source of hope and encouragement for many people. Conservative churchmen appealed to tradition, doctrine, and creeds in their effort to keep humans’ lives grounded. Their work offered stability and consistency to countless Christians. Theologically liberal Protestants, meanwhile, sought new ways to apply Christianity to the many questions and issues facing the nation. They adapted religion to a changing population by emphasizing the person and ethics of Jesus over traditional doctrines and creeds. They viewed God as immanent in the world and as working through it rather than transcendent, and they stressed human reason over supernatural revelation. Liberal Protestants interpreted theology as the product of the evolution of ideas rather than as a fixed set of immutable truths. Religion, like humankind, was progressively ascending an evolutionary ladder over time. Some liberal Christians even began to question the nature and authority of the Bible itself. In the late nineteenth century they adopted a literary-critical approach to interpreting the sacred text called higher criticism, which raised serious questions about the authorship, historicity, and dating of certain biblical books. Their conclusions seemed to undermine traditional views of the scripture’s accuracy and authority. The Bible, they believed, was great literature that spoke to the human condition rather than a book of scientific or historical truths delivered in propositional form. Nevertheless, the differences between liberals and conservatives were not always clear or distinct. In many cases, liberal-leaning and conservative-leaning men and women worked and fellowshipped together, exchanging ideas and beliefs. This lasted until World War I, when the impact of the global crisis fractured mainstream American Protestantism.⁴

Near the turn of the century some leading theological liberals began to call themselves “modernists.” Drawing on the modernist movements in art, literature, and culture, they focused on the process of being Christian. They interrogated their faith with the goal of making it relevant to the contemporary world. In so doing, they abandoned notions of an absolute, objective, external, orthodox religion. Instead they emphasized the practice of believing, of asking questions of themselves and their faith and then embarking on an intellectual journey in search of answers to those questions. The process of embracing faith rather than the ends of defining and claiming it became the substance of modernist Protestantism.⁵

Theological modernism took shape in part through the Social Gospel movement. Social Gospel leaders sought to apply the message of Jesus to current conditions in new ways. For generations evangelicals had integrated social concern with their ministries, but Social Gospelers went a step further by prioritizing activism and good works over doctrine and by reading the latter through the lens of the former. They worked with a broad base of activists and contributed to and drew on the latest social science research as they focused on alleviating the destructive social and environmental conditions that caused so much of the poverty and despair they witnessed around them. Downplaying individual sin, they served Jesus not by preaching the gospel but by transforming their communities. In articulating solutions to the problems they witnessed, they advocated structural over individual solutions, which often called for substantial transformations of American society and the economy. They developed new partnerships, realizing that enacting the types of reforms they envisioned required time, political mobilization, and alliances with the state.

Whether conservative, creedal Christians, innovative liberals and modernists, or something in between, most late nineteenth-century Protestants felt optimistic about the future. They longed for the coming of the millennium, a thousand-year period of peace, prosperity, and righteousness described in the book of Revelation, which they hoped to help inaugurate through their own good works. They believed that the return of Christ would mark the conclusion of the millennium. As a result they identified as “postmillennialists,” based on their conviction that the second coming of Christ would occur after the millennium. A few, however, identified as amillennialists; they believed that the millennium was more metaphorical than literal.

While postmillennialists, both conservative and liberal, offered Americans an enthusiastic vision of the future, a group of radical white evangelicals kept a skeptical eye on much of what was occurring around them. Living amid the rise of the modern university system, massive urbanization, political turmoil, and significant Catholic and Jewish immigration, a determined group believed that true Christianity, and perhaps their way of life, was under siege. They feared that churchly conservatives had lost the authentic radicalism of New Testament Christianity and had failed to make faith relevant to the world’s changing conditions. They viewed liberal Protestantism and movements like the Social Gospel as troubling distortions of Christianity that had seemingly transformed religion into little more than a shallow nostrum for curing temporal problems.

As radical evangelicals tried to make sense of the changing times, they began to find in the scriptures verses that they had not noticed before, while vague and obscure passages came into sharper focus. Informed by their historical context, their reading of church history, and the work of a few relatively obscure European apocalypticists, they came to the startling conclusion that they were not preparing the world for a godly millennium. Instead, they were living in the end times—the period of history predicted by biblical writers thousands of years earlier that would immediately precede the battle of Armageddon and the second coming of Jesus. Rather than waiting for the kingdom of God to appear through moral reform or personal regeneration, they saw tribulation and death looming on the horizon. For them time was short and humankind was careening toward an inevitable apocalyp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Prologue
• 1. Jesus Is Coming
• 2. Global War and Christian Nationalism
• 3. The Birth of Fundamentalism
• 4. The Culture Wars Begin
• 5. American Education on Trial
• 6. Seeking Salvation with the GOP
• 7. The Rise of the Tyrants
• 8. Christ’s Deal versus the New Deal
• 9. Reviving American Exceptionalism
• 10. Becoming Cold Warriors for Christ
• 11. Apocalypse Now
• Epilogue
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index