ONE
It has been an intriguing, frightening, yet familiar thing for me to watch the U.S. Evangelical movement and culture succumb to the lure of pre-millennial eschatology and engage in fantasies of a long-foretold battle with the Evil One on the Middle Eastern plains of Megiddo.
It’s familiar because I watched my own Irish, Baptist pastor, father feed his flock with this end-time dream over 50 years ago. It’s frightening because of the way this eschatology has been allied to what I see as a Republican plot to subvert democracy in the United States and an escalated engagement in Israeli affairs that puts the fragile safety of the international order at risk.
It’s also intriguing for me because I watched my father’s gradual disenchantment with this bleak eschatology. I sensed that his love-affair with the end-times had been rooted in personal insecurity, educational deficit, and the community stress in which he was immersed as pastor. His passion for the Second Coming did fade and this offers me hope for the U.S. Evangelical movement and culture.
TWO
In the late 1960s my father became obsessed with books authored by American pre-millennial theologians. Then he started to preach to his flock that the “signs of the times” were indicative of the Second Coming of Christ, known as “the rapture,” in which the “saved” would be “caught up to meet their Saviour in the air” and everyone else would be left behind to face the rule of the Man of Sin and the terrors of Armageddon.
There were many sleepless nights for youngsters like me, worrying that our conversion experiences might be inauthentic, and thus we would be “left behind.”
One sign of the times for Dad (and several other like-minded Protestant pastors in Northern Ireland) was the growth of the European Common Market – the forerunner of the European Union - which was regarded as the godless, incipient kingdom forecast in prophetic Biblical books such as Daniel and Ezekial.
Another sign was the Biblically predicted, unsettled nature of a world dominated by wars, famines, and earthquakes as they appeared in information overload on the nighttime news on my dad’s newly bought TV screen.
Another sign for an intense Bible reader such as my dad was the hermeneutic fall-out from the recent Six-Day War in which the Israeli military had routed the Arab coalition ranged against it and occupied the rest of Jerusalem, paving the way for the return of Our Lord who would come in glory, as forecast in Scripture, to reign in the Holy City and to set up his millennial Kingdom of Righteousness there.
THREE
This stark embrace of a fiery end to the current world order coincided with the beginning of the civil strife known as the Northern Ireland Troubles. By 1970, Northern Ireland’s identity as a British, majority-Protestant part of the island of Ireland was under dire threat. A struggling Catholic minority had sought reform, but hard-line pro-British forces in the Northern Irish state now saw this as a revolution to be suppressed.
By 1970, the state was convulsed by riots and shootings. By 1972, sectarian assassinations, mass-incarceration, and a car-bomb campaign were the order of the day. The local parliament in Belfast was dissolved and the Northern Ireland state which my father loved seemed close to collapse. An enforced union with the deeply Catholic and impoverished Irish Republic to the south loomed in his mind. Existential danger was everywhere, especially for young people in my father’s church who now joined the police to stem the tide of insurrection.
I now think that the “end times” thinking which pre-occupied my dad’s mind as Northern Ireland lurched towards violence was indeed a prophetic insight, but not relating to a global or cosmic turmoil; rather it was an anticipation of a very local Armageddon.
FOUR
But it also interests me to think of the way in which my father and his kind were left vulnerable to premillennial ‘scholars’ whose books - written in the late 1960s and early 1970s - tried to tally a lurid poetry of subjugation, conflict, and victory from the Jewish scriptures with current world events. The present-day millennials in the U.S. are their heirs.
Such “scholars” and their followers failed to note both then and now that many Christian “experts” in “prophesy” had gone before them. Earlier prophetic interpreters had convinced themselves and their followers that the end was nigh - only for the world to keep on turning as the centuries passed.
In one example of many such previous attempts to make Scripture into a codebook for feverish geopolitical warnings, Biblical “experts” in Britain had once seen the Emperor Napoleon as the “man of sin” arising out of the godless French Revolution.
But what made Dad vulnerable? He had been a shy, miserable schoolboy in the infant Northern Ireland state of the 1930 s. He would be classed as dyslexic nowadays but back then, though he was a bright young fellow, he was classed as a lazy dunce. Experiencing evangelical conversion at 16, he joined a local Baptist church that held tenaciously to self-certainty and eschewed the denominational and theological diversity of Christianity as an unsound manifestation of theological impurity.
In churches such as these, creationism had already end-stopped historical thinking and now, eschatology could put a stop to constructive social and political reform.
Dad was invited to be a Baptist pastor at the age of 22 and proceeded to educate himself through fundamentalist correspondence courses, second-hand copies of the works of famous Victorian preachers and then, as I have already noted, through alarmist prophetic books bought from America whose dark prognosis for humanity probably chimed consolingly with his mood of growing disappointment at the failures of his own ministry and his own community’s growing fear that their British, Protestant identity was about to vanish.
In recent times I have written a poem that addresses my father’s prophetic career and in doing so I have entitled it Hedge School, a reference to the term used throughout Irish history for informal learning undertaken by those debarred by poverty or systemic discrimination from the established educational order.
HEDGE SCHOOL
When he began his sermons
On the End of Days in 1969,
He told us how we all
Had access on each Scripture page
To this, the inside story of the age
Where we would find the Antichrist,
The ten-horned beast,
The Kings of North and East
And West all gathering with fleets
Of tanks to take Megiddo’s plain -
And all these things encoded
In God’s ancient prophecies,
After the Rapture of ourselves, the chosen ones,
Caught up from classroom desk.
And milking-shed to meet Him in the air.
I know now that the man
Had suffered in his own schooldays,
With hands both beaten red
For misspelt essays handed in - until
He hid his schoolbag in the hedge
Then tucked himself inside his bed
To read his grandad’s history books
And works of prophecy
That saw truths in the Bible’s words
He’d try one day, himself, to understand.
FIVE
I’m glad that my father’s enthusiasm for prophetic ministry faded. He moved to a more successful post in Belfast. Then on retirement as a local pastor and preacher he took on a remarkably successful role with a Christian mission in India and South East Asia. Professional success had arrived despite the early badge of stupidity and the dull years spent ministering to an uninspiring and difficult little flock.
There was new respect for a world-straddling 75-year-old Bible teacher. On one occasion I saw a photo of him travelling around Ho Chi Minh City on the back of a moped. This exhilaration was amplified by the effects of immersion within an Asian cultural experience into which a pre-millennial thinking governed by Western anxieties did not readily fit.
Also, the worst of the local violence dwindled in the 1990s and despite the memories of “The Troubles,” Dad could see that Northern Ireland still existed. Anxiety faded.
I’d also like to think that my later interactions with him on an adult-to-adult basis throughout the latter part of his life may have helped. This period involved conversations that may have enabled him to sense the need for questions as well as certainty, and the moral need for a long view that offered generosity to the world and made his pre-millennial calendar feel unpleasant. I feel pretty sure that many other pre-millennial pastors of my father’s generation were troubled autodidacts with all the cognitive insecurity that that can bring.
I am also intrigued that fundamentalist views like those espoused by my late father were held by some influential local pro-British politicians in Northern Ireland. Many of these politicians were self-tasked with ‘holding the fort’ as the status quo of the northern state came under threat. Religious views have a way of seeping up from the level of the pew and the pulpit to become adversarial postures for those self-tasked with maintaining disputed power.
But the capacity of one small region of the United Kingdom in the north of Ireland to destabilise the world is too miniscule for consideration. What’s problematic about pre-millennialism in the United States of America today is that it is a military and cultural superpower and one which seems threatened by internal and external change.
The U.S. is seen as a lodestar of democratic governance by many, yet it is armed to the teeth with weapons, both domestically and internationally. It’s ability and willingness to meddle in the political cockpit of the Middle East and Muslim-dominated parts of Asia, armed with killer weapons, lust for resources and end-times fantasies of tribulation and apocalypse, means that an eschatologically driven foreign policy has the capacity to wreak the kind of havoc in which millions might die in a region that has already seen so much vying for power and civil destruction.
SIX
But as I have promised at the start of this article, my thoughts on the matter contain the hope that change is possible. My dad’s preoccupation with end-time thinking did not spring up out of nowhere and when the conditions were right, he lost interest in eschatology as a means of ordering his world and the world of those to whom he felt exercised to preach.
My father’s youthful cognitive bafflement had been given answers by an ideology that promised to explain everything and foretell everything, into which he journeyed as self-taught boy with low self-esteem, unable to access the powerful remedy to one-sidedness and intellectual powerlessness that an extended liberal education can and should offer. Becoming a preacher, housed in a pulpit several feet above contradiction, was no remedy for his insecurity.
I would hope that readers of this article in North America will make their own judgement as to whether there is anything positive to be gleaned from my story. They must permit me to make sone suggestions.
It seems to me that vast swathes of Evangelical America have struggled with the pace of political, demographic, ethical and cultural change in the country that has been a birthplace of a dizzying range of recent technological and scientific revolutions.
As a result of that kind of “future shock,” Evangelicalism has recoiled from the new realities and gone on its own perilously inward-looking journey, keeping dialogue at bay, often by home-schooling its children, sending its youth to “sound,” non-pluralist Christian colleges and, perhaps most importantly of all, enclosing itself within the echo chamber of a partisan media.
The task ahead is to undertake a campaign for the disempowerment - and in many cases the dismantling - of an Evangelical silo culture. Evangelical families must be incentivised to let their youngsters learn about the world in a multicultural educational system.
And the licensing of TV and radio stations to disseminate what is, frankly, news so partial that it is a mix of incitement and propaganda must be curtailed. The capacity of social media institutions such as Facebook and Twitter to erect autonomous cognitive worlds and to carry information dressed up as fact must be challenged.
We think it wise and humane that other industries follow a path which is regulated by concerns regarding health and wellbeing. Yet under the banner of “freedom” we allow media companies to help turn citizens into unquestioning, uninformed bodies of believers, thus rendering possible the kind of naked polarization seen in the USA today and facilitating the unmitigated growth of an unbalanced end-time philosophy that can ends up shaping international policy with scary results.
SEVEN
The Evangelical world view which saturated my father’s mind well over half a century ago had a very dark colour. In his end-time thinking humans were powerless to arrest cosmically ordered change and the only answer was to make sure that we all got on the right side of a righteous, punitive God before the Rapture happened, triggering a divinely ordained military conflagration. And out of that year zero a bright millennial future would, he hoped, emerge.
As his personal happiness increased, as the guns disappeared from his streets and as he travelled the world and talked to his son and was exposed to the vast and often troubled yet exhilarating conversation that humanity has always had with itself, the functionality of a pre-millennial framework greatly lessened.
If a positive self-redefinition of the U.S. Evangelical movement and culture is to occur, an obsession with “Make America Great” will need to be modulated by a humbler, happier kind of self-acceptance. However, looking at this from the place called Northern Ireland, I’d recommend that the churches in the U.S. get busy on fomenting a nationwide self-acceptance through a million conversations about the past, present, and future of Christianity in the country. Talking to those from whom you differ profoundly is vital.
Doing this work means taking another look at what authority means, whether it is the authority of a man or an institution (and it usually is a man) to interpret a religious text dogmatically or confer blessings on a national leader or political party.
I do believe that looking together at things makes for an education in otherness which can usher in a joyful enlightenment. I wrote a poem about this kind of education. I want to end my essay with a quotation from that poem, celebrating an enlightenment that comes without a sense of failure incurred by a punitive authority but is experienced as a freedom to enjoy God in the infinitely diverse melodies of existence.
‘And now, although my father tumbled down
The school-house steps in Crossgar Square,
Thrown out for sums undone,
And easy words misspelt, misread,
I’m standing still, one generation on, with
Leather schoolbag filled by storybooks,
And gazing in delight at Olive Stephenson
Who plays the Skye-boat song on trembling keys,
And asks us boys and girls to sing along,
While sun streams in from the oblong blue
Of that high gymnasium window.’
Philip’s latest book The Illustrated History of Flight depicts his upbringing in more detail and includes a selection of his poems, including the ones which are referenced in this article. It can be acquired from his website at www.ptorr.com