Hal Lindsey has died, at 95 years old, a long life by any standards, and massively consequential, even though you may have never heard of him. Author of The Late Great Planet Earth, the largest-selling “non fiction1” book of the 1970s, Lindsey made his name and a fifty year career out of apocalyptic speculation. Late Great was famous enough that Orson Welles narrated the film version; Hal Lindsey has influenced your life, whether you know it or not. Though it never occupied a central place for me, when I was a child Late Great was a staple in the lives of people I knew. I was aware that some folks believed we were living in the end times, and that geo-political events could be - should be - interpreted through the lens of the Book of Revelation. Lindsey’s book sorta kinda maybe predicted the Second Coming of Christ would occur around 1988, asserted that the fortunes of the modern State of Israel mattered to the whole world2, and helped give new life to a psycho-social tribe that sees that pretty much everything - from the number of letters in Ronald Wilson Reagan’s full name3 to the proliferation of bar codes, and to natural disasters occurring in particular places - as a sign that the clock of the world is currently five minutes to midnight.
When Hal’s predictions didn’t come true, he wrote new books with new predictions. It is sometimes easier to double down on failure than to face the terror of uncertainty. If a mind - and a fortune - has been built on radical misinterpretation, what’s a false prophet to do?
Yet false prophets are people too. Hal Lindsey was nice to me once. I was researching a PhD thesis about people who believe the pope is the antichrist, comparing folks in northern Ireland with folks in the US. Turns out theology is geographical. The northern Irish believers lived in a society segregated on lines of Protestant/British-Catholic/Irish division, and so believing that the pope was the antichrist reinforced a separatist social structure (and vice versa); but the US believers didn’t live in a society segregated on such grounds, so it the meaning of their anti-Catholic theology was less impactful. So far, so not rocket science - or at least it shouldn’t be so complicated for people to question why we believe what we believe, and the role played by the cultures in which we live.
Anyway, back to Hal Lindsey’s niceness. For the thesis, I interviewed him at the Southern California TV studio from which he was still broadcasting nearly thirty years after the publication of Late Great Planet Earth. It was an entirely pleasant, even warm meeting, in which he took time to explain his theology like a kindly grandfather. He listened to me with interest talking about my research, and he made it clear that he didn’t believe the pope was the antichrist though he could understand why some people do. All of this was said with gentleness and a sweet teacherly way of making complex concepts comprehensible; he could have been discussing the right way to plumb a bathtub. He gave me a copy of his best-known book (he had a stash in the trunk of his convertible), signed it with an encouragement to good things, and that was that.
I don’t think he was a bad guy. For one thing, I don’t think anyone is a bad guy - people do bad things, mainly because of bad stories they believe about themselves or others. I think Hal Lindsey was part of a culture that has missed the point, not only of religion, but of life itself. Just as it is dangerous to believe your own propaganda (or negative stories about yourself), it’s really risky to listen only to your own sect. The apocalyptic speculation sect hurts itself, because it is married to fear. It hurts others, because it encourages a cataclysmic vision of tomorrow, which leads to separatism today. It distorts the lives of its adherents, because it misleads them into thinking that they are special, and that this moment in history is more special - or distressing - than any other. The fact that that is, simply, not true is not the only problem. Believing you are special - or more special than anyone else - isn’t just poisonous for the growth of the soul, but can cause us to act in ways that are deeply harmful to others. Unless it leads to self-giving love, “special” is antithetical to the evolution of a world in which each person experiences mutual recognition, bringing our gifts with humble confidence that they will be used, and sharing our needs with the reassurance that they will be met. Everyone beneath their vine and fig tree, in peace and unafraid.
But the apocalyptic speculator/collapsarian industrial complex actively mistrusts peace. It spreads unnecessary fear like a virus, misleads its adherents into wasting much of their lives on trivia or falsehood, and drives policies and behavior that harm vulnerable people. The answers given by Hal Lindsey and people who have followed in his wake are not the blueprint for a better world.
But it’s also not helpful to reject the questions that apocalyptic speculation asks, for they sometimes go to the heart of the matter.
How do we make sense of reality, which must include both understanding history and taking the future seriously?
What should we do with “the news”?
What is religion for?
What are people for?
Who belongs?
What is to be tended?
There is a simple answer to all these questions, and we can devote our lives to discerning and experiencing an endlessly complex embodiment of that same simplicity. At the risk of over-certainty, here’s the simple answer.
The answer is to devote yourself to love, of God (which includes opening to the necessity that if God is “real”, then God is vastly bigger than any human concept could contain), of neighbor and enemy alike (which includes a commitment to allowing the definition of neighbor to expand and include all human beings, and perhaps all life), and self (which includes taking life seriously enough to discern the stories we’re telling, and let them be radically challenged and enlarged in the direction of becoming more truthful, and more helpful).
The path includes a willingness to seek mentoring and accountability from people and sources whom we know to be wiser than us; to be ruthless with our own lies - and when we’re not sure of something, to say so.
It involves naming our fears when we have them - it is entirely natural to express anxiety about the state of the world. Apocalyptic (and other) conspiracy theories often seem to be responses to the simple unpredictability of life. We yearn for the idea that someone is control, and it’s sometimes easier to imagine that a shadowy cabal is behind the scenes running things than it is to learn to live with uncertainty. It’s much better to form meaningful communities with people committed to a conscious journey of spiritual and psychological growth, seeking and subject to the wisest contemplation of life, the universe, and everything.
And it involves a revolutionary dedication to resisting the trivialization of life. Apocalyptic speculation is often a form of gossip no deeper nor more edifying than the way supermarket tabloids ogle celebrity illnesses or divorces. If the apocalyptic speculation of The Late Great Planet Earth and its ilk had produced generations of readers known for loving their neighbors, caring for Earth, and building bridges with enemies, I’d be urging you to buy it. But the real risks of the current moment are ignored or distorted in apocalyptic speculation. In my experience, the more into such end-times gaming a person is, the more their lives are in danger of being utterly colonized by trivia.
Trivia is the enemy of experience, and apocalyptic speculation is the antithesis of life.
What will save us is not a future climactic moment when a magic fella appears in the sky, sweeps the in-crowd up into heaven, and kills people we don’t like.
What can save us - does save us, will save us is a clear-eyed thirst for beauty which is truth, and truth which is beauty. Let that notion work on you enough, and you will become the kind of person who contributes to the end of climate crisis, of us versus them stories, of authoritarian cultures. The kind of person who knows that the true meaning of “apocalypse” is “revelation”, and that the revelation we need is that of mutual recognition among all humans and the ecosystem of which we are a part.
Read a wise book, have people over for dinner, be kind to your neighbors, care for the least of these, have eye contact with the person at the grocery store checkout. Nurture care for the soil and water on your street. Don’t lie to yourself, either about your over-stated propaganda, or diminishing inner monologue.
There’s a poetic-“religious” way and a scientific-“secular” way to describe the antidote: Imagine that you are indeed made in the image of an ineffably benign Being, or from the shavings of light that have traveled ten thousand years to become you. Either way, being human is bigger news than the end times. We owe it to ourselves, and our neighbors, and the world, and the future to take the value of our own lives seriously enough.
Join us for the in-person Porch Gathering, March 13th-15th, 2025, near Asheville, NC. Details at www.theporchgathering.com
