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- [00:00]
Matthew Avery Sutton
They see him as this kind of external savior.
- [00:04]
Greg Carey
We know we fight a physical battle, but ultimately grounded, as the President said, and a spiritual battlefield.
- [00:11]
Interviewer
Applying an apocalyptic lens to foreign policy.
- [00:14]
Matthew Avery Sutton
They see him as somebody that God is using, helping prepare American Christians for the end Times.
- [00:19]
Interviewer
Beasts, plagues, cosmic war, the whore of Babylon, four horsemen, catastrophic last days, ways of breeding the world.
- [00:27]
Anathea Portier-Young
It's just horror upon horror upon horror.
- [00:30]
Greg Carey
They're taking different parts of Revelation, other parts of the Bible, almost like a jigsaw puzzle.
- [00:35]
Anathea Portier-Young
This is the Old Testament language of wrath, of holy war.
- [00:40]
Matthew Avery Sutton
If Israel is going to take on the Antichrist, would you want to be on the side of Israel?
- [00:43]
Interviewer
What's more mobilizing than feeling like you're on the right side of God's plan? So I get it. In America, apocalyptic thinking has repeatedly surged at moments of crisis. During the Cold War, evangelicals read global conflict as a countdown to the end. After 9 11, similar language returned. And today, figures around Donald Trump and some of his supporters have framed him not just as a political leader, but a divinely chosen figure in a cosmic struggle between good and evil. Tens of millions of American evangelicals subscribe to a worldview in which support for Israel is tied to biblical prophecy. And conflict in the Middle east is not just geopolitics, but a trigger for the end of the world. The return of Christ, the battle of Armageddon. It's not a fringe phenomenon. Pew found in 2022 that 39% of U.S. adults believed that humanity was living in end times, while the survey from this year said nearly one in three Americans believed the world would end in their lifetime. Whatever people mean by that individually, the wider pattern is clear. Large numbers of Americans remain highly receptive to catastrophic last days ways of reading the world. So what happens when politicians start using the Apocalypse as not just a metaphor, but a script? Because they believe it, or they know others do. The idea of America having a divine purpose in world history is older than the United States itself. Christopher Columbus ended his life convinced that his Western voyages to America were part of divine providence, even compiling a book of prophecies that treated his journeys as bound up with sacred events. The first Puritan settlers then crossed the Atlantic not to build a neutral republic, but to establish a godly commonwealth. John Winthrop's City Upon a Hill. An exemplary society watched by heaven and by the world. The same people, mind you, that would go on to enslave indigenous Americans and execute witches in the name of God. But anyway, even Harvard, founded in 1636, emerged from that same religious project. Originally intended to educate clergy in the New England colonies. By the time of the American Revolution, providentialism, the idea that America was singled out by God with a special destiny, was already deeply embedded. Even founding fathers, whose private beliefs were unorthodox or deist, still reach for that language in public, because Americans had become accustomed to reading war, liberty, and national survival through a sacred lens. So to properly investigate why biblical prophecies stopped being symbolic and started shaping foreign policy, military language, and the moral imagination of America, we need to first look at the origins of apocalyptic thought itself and what those texts were originally intended to do. I spoke to Anithea Portier Young, a professor of Old Testament at Duke Divinity School, and she specializes in apocalyptic literature.
- [04:01]
Anathea Portier-Young
Apocalypse comes from a Greek noun, apokalypsis. And if we break that down into its. Into its parts, it means removing a veil. So the idea of stripping away what's preventing you from seeing things as they are are. In terms of the scholarly definition of apocalypse, there's a widely accepted definition among scholars that was first developed by a team of scholars in 1979 that begins with the idea that when we say apocalypse, as historians, we're talking about a literary genre. And it's a particular form of revelatory literature that will typically involve a revelation from a supernatural, otherworldly being to a human figure from the ancient past. And it's going to have a temporal dimension and a spatial dimension. It's often going to involve some kind of judgment.
- [05:04]
Interviewer
When do we get the first apocalyptic text in the genre?
- [05:09]
Anathea Portier-Young
So our first examples come from likely the third century bce, which is we. And I should say these are the first examples that we currently have copies of, and we don't have any of the copies from that original moment in time. So we're relying on copies that we have, for example, preserved in the scrolls that were found at Qumran. But our earliest examples that we know of are found within a text that we refer to as First Enoch. And. And there are five major sections of First Enoch. Two of those come likely from the third Book of the Watchers and the astronomical book. And they're a little bit different than the apocalypses that we see emerging in the second century. The historical apocalypses that are more familiar to most people, and that includes the Book of Daniel. But those first apocalypses have some really interesting cosmic dimensions. The Book of the Watchers, Enoch is given a tour of the cosmos, and in the astronomical book, we learn about the actions of the heavenly luminaries. All of the things that we would think about from a more scientific standpoint, but that they are affecting and shaping what happens on earth.
- [06:42]
Interviewer
What was happening at the time when those first examples were written? And how groundbreaking would they have been in terms of the imagination and this landscape that you just described? A cosmic tour.
- [06:59]
Anathea Portier-Young
So if we go back to that period in time just before we're in the period of Alexander the Great, in 333, Alexander the Great establishes the largest empire the world has ever seen through conquest. But he's also very, very interested in the spread of Hellenistic culture. When Alexander the Great dies, and he does not live to a grand old age, when he dies, there is no clear successor. He had four generals. Those generals warred with each other and they carved out his empire. And two of them in particular, Seleucus, with his capitals in Mesopotamia and in Syria, and Ptolemy with his capital in Alexandria in Egypt. There are no fewer than seven wars fought between these two empires on the exact territory that includes Judea, Samaria, Galilee. And so the people, by the time we get to the third century, the people living in this region are constantly subjected to warfare by the armies of these competing generals. They're subjugated by one, then they're subjugated by the other. And so, so these apocalypses in part, are their way of responding to that experience, pushing back against these sort of totalizing narratives of the Hellenistic empires and telling a different story about what was happening.
- [08:51]
Interviewer
And what story did they tell?
- [08:53]
Anathea Portier-Young
Well, the book of the watchers in particular, builds on a myth that we find evidence of in Genesis 6. In Genesis 6, there's a story of the sons of God, which is a way of talking about angels or semi divine beings. The sons of God came down to earth because they wanted to have intercourse with human women. Catholic school It's a very unusual story. Genesis chapter six just. We just get a very short mention of it. And in the book of Genesis, that's the event that precedes the flood, because after. After that sort of forbidden union that has crossed boundaries and broken barriers, really, it becomes a way of thinking about how evil enters the world and enters human hearts. And you know, what we read In Gen Genesis 6 is then, you know, human hearts are just set on evil all the time. And this is what precipitates God's action in the flood. So that story becomes a framework for thinking about what was happening in the midst of these wars of the successors of Alexander the Great. In effect, they are portrayed as these fallen angels. They're portrayed as the ones who are violating boundaries and whose Violence is churning up the earth and spreading further evil upon the earth.
- [10:39]
Interviewer
Fear and hope. Where would you put these stories? Is the reckoning something to be looked forward to? Is it exciting or is it terrifying
- [10:51]
Anathea Portier-Young
in terms of the audience, that is, the intended audience? Absolutely. We're way over on the hope side of the scale. The fear is what's already present. When we think about the apocalypses, we're more familiar with, for example, Daniel or the Book of Revelation. And in Daniel 7, you have this sequence of for beasts. In Revelation, it's just horror upon horror upon horror. But the horrors were things that the audience was already experiencing right there in the present moment. And so the books were not trying to cultivate the horror. They weren't trying to get people to feel a new fear. They were trying to name that fear and respond to it. And by showing its character, showing the character of these empires as something truly horrific, they could then disarm them and lean into the hope.
- [12:03]
Interviewer
Can we zoom in on the Book of Daniel? What are the most significant elements that you think need to be brought to someone's attention so that they understand it,
- [12:15]
Anathea Portier-Young
to understand the Book of Daniel? So first, I think understanding the historical situation in which that book emerges. So we're very accustomed to a history of interpretation that looks at that sequence of kingdoms, for example, in chapter 7, and tries to plug us in, find that you are here moment, which usually means identifying what's going on in the time of the audience with either either the fourth beast, which is the most horrible beast, all mutated and devouring everything, or we're in the fifth kingdom, the humane and just and righteous kingdom that receives dominion. So we have this history of trying to fit ourselves into which moment are we in, instead of recognizing that for the original composers of this book and its early audiences, it was about the moment they were in. So if we can understand that moment, we're going to understand what the book is trying to do. And that moment was historically a really unprecedented experience of religious persecution that was driven by the political ends and machinations of the Seleucid Empire, one of these Hellenistic empires that I mentioned before. And it was a time when to be faithful to the demands of Torah would mean death. Because of this situation of religious persecution and within the framework of Jewish tradition, there was an understanding that in this life, if you were faithful, if you chose to be obedient to Torah, there would be rewards in this life, and that God would likewise respond to wickedness and unfaithfulness with various negative consequences. But something else was happening now, it had been flipped and people who were choosing to be faithful were being martyred. And so in this context, to understand the Book of Daniel, we need to see it as responding to that historical moment and the theological crisis of that moment. And the book wants more than anything for its audience to have the courage to remain faithful even in the face of death.
- [15:12]
Interviewer
When the Book of Daniel talks about beasts and monsters, what are these images actually referring to?
- [15:20]
Anathea Portier-Young
So each of the beasts in the Book of Daniel, and particularly chapter seven, gives us this sequence of four beasts that have dominion over some part of the known world. And they represent empires and a sequence of empires that had, that had rule over large portions of the ancient West Asian world and to some extent the ancient Mediterranean world as well. And for the most part, these were also empires that had subjugated Judah over a sequence of centuries. And so they represented
- [16:13]
Matthew Avery Sutton
one.
- [16:13]
Anathea Portier-Young
The experience of subjugation and foreign rule and the loss of autonomy for Israel, for Judah. And their monstrous form was meant to show that in a host of ways they violated the, let us say, the God ordained order of things. They went against what we would think of as the natural order God. In the theology of the Book of Daniel, God appoints sovereigns, God appoints kings over nations. And in itself, that is not the horrific thing. But when a ruler and when a nation asserts its power in a way that oppresses, in a way that exploits and devours, that's the violation. So the imagery that's used to craft this symbolism is very much drawing on earlier imagery that we find in, in the prophetic books, especially of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible. And, and we see, we see, for example, a lot of borrowing from imagery in the Book of Ezekiel as well as others. And so to a significant extent, what they're doing in these apocalyptic visions is developing imagery that's already familiar in new and creative ways. Would the allegory itself have been transparent is another question. So in the Book of Daniel itself, Daniel has a vision and then collapses to the ground and says, I can't breathe, and I don't know what any of this means. It's not self evident, it's not immediately transparent. But within the book, after Daniel expresses that confusion, that lack of understanding, the angel that is present in the vision begins to explain it to him and tell him. That interpretive step within the vision itself helps the reader in that ancient context to understand exactly how to interpret the vision, the symbolic vision that's been shown.
- [18:53]
Interviewer
You've mentioned that these ideas are an evolution of earlier Examples of symbolism. How are Jewish apocalyptic texts in the Old Testament transformed and taken up by later Christian ideas?
- [19:11]
Anathea Portier-Young
Great, great question. So as early as Mark's gospel, for example, Mark 13, in Jesus's discourse on the Mount of Olives, he borrows from both the Book of Joel, which is widely considered by scholars to be what we would call proto apocalyptic, a prophetic book from the Hebrew Bible that anticipates the development of apocalyptic literature. And that was a very rich source for later apocalyptic thinkers and writers. So he draws on the Book of Joel and its imagery of cosmic turmoil like the sun and the moon will go dark and stars will fall and so on. And he also draws on Daniel 7 and he tells his audience, at this time of war and cataclysm, you will see the one like a, like a human being or the, you will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds. And within the Gospel traditions, Jesus is, is identifying himself as that, that Son of Man, that human One in Daniel 7 that receives dominion after the destruction of the fourth kingdom, this beastly kingdom of the, of the Hellenistic empires. And so we see very early in Christian tradition the, the appropriation, reinterpretation of those prophetic and apocalyptic traditions to, to understand who Jesus is and to understand the kingdom that Jesus is inaugurating. And, and of course the Book of Revelation is deeply influenced by the Book of Daniel. So that fourth kingdom, that fourth beast in Daniel 7 will get adapted to portray the beast that is Rome in the Book of Revelation. And what it's doing is moving that you are here, dot from the 2nd century BCE into the 1st century cell and reinterpreting that imagery for that new moment.
- [21:28]
Interviewer
In our little pre interview chat, you said something really interesting about what drew you to this study in particular. And you said it was the way that the same scripture or the same source could be interpreted in vastly different ways by different groups of people. Could you tell me a bit more about that in terms of how apocalyptic literature can be interpreted so differently and any reflections you have, I suppose, on how that still continues?
- [21:56]
Anathea Portier-Young
Yeah, the earliest apocalypses are very clearly a literature of resistance. They're a literature that is giving courage and hope to those who have been subjugated, dominated and oppressed. And a fascinating thing we see in the history of the interpretation of apocalyptic literature is how quickly that genre, but even a specific example of the genre like the Book of Daniel, was interpreted for the exact opposite purpose to support the power of an empire. We see it in, for example, in the history of European colonial empires where that that fifth kingdom in Daniel 7, the kingdom that is given eternal dominion and is portrayed as holy and righteous, is identified with a colonizing power and becomes, in effect, divine right to conquer the world. And in the present day, we see apocalyptic traditions, whether Daniel, Revelation, or a mishmash of those, along with various other texts and interpretive traditions, being used to justify all forms of political violence, being used to justify assaults on sovereign nations, and so on. And this is so far from what the authors of Daniel understood, that they were commending for their audiences, which was to simply be a witness, even at the cost of their lives, but that the constant. The constant urge to plug ourselves in and say, this is either license for us or courage for us, Right, That's a perennial temptation. And draw.
- [24:19]
Interviewer
That brings us to the text most people now associate with the Apocalypse, Revelation, the final book of the New Testament, written by the apostle John. And it is a strange, feverish vision of beasts, plagues, cosmic war, the whore of Babylon, four horsemen, the fall of earthly evil, final judgment, and the creation of a new Jerusalem. So to understand the real purpose of the text, I spoke to Greg Carey, who is a leading scholar of the New Testament at Moravian University School of Theology.
- [24:53]
Greg Carey
The book tells a story, and it is the story of John's visionary encounter with the risen Jesus. So it is entirely visionary literature with a great deal of symbols, a great deal of conflict, but it is a story of his experience and also a story of the fate of the world, because it imagines immense conflict between God and demonic forces that ultimately resolves in God's city, the new Jerusalem coming to heaven, and there being peace, prosperity, beauty, and all of that forever. But to get there, there's a great deal of gore and suffering and strangeness in the language.
- [25:37]
Interviewer
We'll get into the strangeness more for sure. What was happening in the world at the time that Revelation was written?
- [25:46]
Greg Carey
Yeah, Revelation is written in large part in response to the reality of these Jesus followers trying to maintain what the book calls their witness, their faithfulness in the midst of Roman imperial culture. And so Roman imperial culture is, we often imagine, pagan in the sense of not religious. It's highly religious. And wherever a citizen of a city or a dweller of a city would try to make a living or attend banquets or anything like that, there would be religious observances. Part of John's argument is that those religious observances are idolatry and condemned by God. Part of his argument is that the Roman Empire itself is violent, exploitative and oppressive. So there's the matter of what we might call religious purity, worship, but also the matter of relating to an imperial economy that's built on violence and exploitation.
- [26:57]
Interviewer
Revelation is full of unforgettable imagery. I remember reading it for the first time when I was at Catholic school. And we've got beasts, cosmic battles, Babylon. What do these symbols represent?
- [27:12]
Greg Carey
I would be hard pressed to explain every symbol in Revelation, of course, but
- [27:16]
Interviewer
why don't you pick a few that you think are the most important for me to understand?
- [27:22]
Greg Carey
There is a great conflict, yes, a great conflict between the Lamb, which is Revelation's primary symbol for the risen Jesus, and the beast or sea monster, which is Revelation's primary symbol for Rome. Revelation uses another symbol for Rome, an unfortunate one, the prostitute, often translated the great. And in this conflict, the saints, the holy ones who follow Jesus, are experiencing persecution from the beast and its allies. So the Lamb goes to war and essentially the beast is destroyed. It's alignment with Satan. Satan is thrown, cast down and judged. And the great city, Babylon, the prostitute is also destroyed to create room for this new heaven to descend to earth. So in some ways it's, it's a fantasy literature about the elimination of Roman domination and its replacement with the rule of Jesus.
- [28:33]
Interviewer
How would people at the time have engaged with Revelation after it was written? Would they have largely read it, I suppose, listened to it, heard somebody else recite it? And would they have immediately made the connection and decoded those symbols themselves?
- [28:51]
Greg Carey
I'm convinced that in part, John is writing to people who won't get all of the images and references that are there in the book. But on the other hand, the conflict, the recognition of the conflict between beast and lamb, I think they would get. And in fact, I think very likely the first response to Revelation would have been controversy, because what it's asking these Jesus followers to do is absolutely withdraw from the trappings of Roman society. And that's an extreme thing to ask of people who have social networks and also who might be economically vulnerable. So we don't know this for a fact, but John mentions people he disagrees with in those Christian assemblies that there would have been conflict over how to respond to the book.
- [29:50]
Interviewer
Do we know from historical sources if it did make a big splash at the time, the extent of the controversy that it caused?
- [29:58]
Greg Carey
We have no idea what the immediate reaction was. What we find out is people keep making copies of the book and distributing it, which is what's happening with other literature, Jewish, Christian, otherwise in the world. And it's becoming read in early Christian assemblies beyond those seven so it's beginning to spread in popularity. And eventually, when Christians start gathering their holy books together, you know, this process we would call forming the Bible, Revelation is showing up in many of them and eventually becomes part of Jerome's translation of the Bible into Latin. So it becomes part of the Bible. One thing we do know is that in the fourth century, as Christians were gaining more and more influence, access to imperial power, they began interpreting Revelation differently. So it was considered a kind of resistance literature against Rome. But when you actually are the people influencing and running Rome, then you might tend to spiritualize the book. And that's what begins to happen in the 4th century.
- [31:08]
Interviewer
I know these questions are difficult, but what do you see as the mechanism for that transformation? Why did they start using it in that way? What was going on?
- [31:18]
Greg Carey
Revelation isn't the only text like it that ancient Jews and Christians produced. We call them apocalypses, which is just the Greek word for revelations. And that literature seems to have enjoyed flurries of popularity. The first flurry seems to have been the Jewish revolt against the Seleucid Empire in the second century, before the Common Era. And the second, though, seems to happen after the Jewish revolt against Rome, the first one, and Rome's destruction of Jerusalem. Revelation is part of a cluster of Jewish apocalyptic texts that emerge at that time. And we can compare it and its imagery and influences to them. So I think people would have been prepared to read Revelation in that context.
- [32:15]
Interviewer
So when people talk about Revelation like it's a code book for the future and it contains prophecies that will unfold, what would you say?
- [32:24]
Greg Carey
Well, I would say it's not that. I would say a few things about it. I would say the book names its audience, and those are ancient people. And it begins and ends by saying it's describing things that are about to happen soon. So presumably for those same people, I think those are pretty simple things to understand. We can also understand Revelation as, again, part of this literary movement that is addressing cultural and political circumstances of its own day. So the people who form these very complicated end time scenarios, what they're doing is they're taking different parts of Revelation and other parts of the Bible, and almost like a jigsaw puzzle, cutting and then putting them together in their own order.
- [33:16]
Interviewer
And that happens so often when there are modern interpretations of historical things. And the further back we go, I think the more vulnerable it is to becoming a jigsaw puzzle. What do modern readers then get from creating this jigsaw puzzle and inserting themselves into the narrative of Revelation? If they do. And this apocalypticism thinking that be approaching?
- [33:44]
Greg Carey
I think the way you ask the story gives a hint. By participating in that world where they think they understand revelation as a key to the events they're living in now, it can give meaning to their own lives. They can say, you know, we're the people who are living in this story. What we do has ultimate significance and it has a bonus benefit. And we're the only ones who know what's going on. And in that way, those ways of reading Revelation aren't that different from conspiracy theories, which provide the same kind of benefits for people who buy into them.
- [34:20]
Interviewer
Why do you think people need something like revelation? For them to feel like their lives matter and they're significant?
- [34:27]
Greg Carey
Oh, that. That is a great question, because I don't think you can universalize the people. It's not like they're sitting around having meaningless lives, many of them. But you might discriminate between. In many churches where this kind of end time teaching is common, almost everyone would nod and affirm it. But what about the people who are buying the books and visiting the websites over and over again, watching the YouTube videos that are laying out this scenario? I do think for them, it's a sense that their lives are enhanced by playing this role in history. There's also an entertainment value. There's a pleasure to knowing what other people don't know. But I think, I think the main thing is that it's like a hobby that gives you structure and relationships in other contexts.
- [35:23]
Interviewer
Why did it become especially popular in the United States?
- [35:29]
Greg Carey
There's always been a fascination with Revelation in the United States. But I think a couple of things about the United States made this kind of reading spread more rapidly. One of, one of the things is that those who founded some of the colonies thought they were creating a model of God's kingdom on earth. And so they had this big vision for Christian society. And Revelation uses this image of the New Jerusalem and what is the society going to be like? But I think the other part is that the United States was founded from colony to colony by such a wide diversity of religious affiliations associated with them. And that made religion in the United States somewhat entrepreneurial from the beginning, even the colonial days. And it also made it unregulated. Right. There's no official church hierarchy that determines what happens with religion in the U.S. and so, you know, as you get people interpreting Revelation as, you know, providing a map for what's about to happen in their future, and you see that happening, those movements are becoming. They're getting their own adherence. The final thing I would say is we have a big split in American religion late in the 19th century, early 20th century, between those who are embracing critical science, academic biblical studies, the notion of evolution, and Christians who are rejecting modernity that eventually we call fundamentalist and evangelicals. And in their world, this set of teachings and preoccupations just flourishes wildly where it didn't with the more traditional, we say, mainline denominations that had come over directly from Europe.
- [37:38]
Interviewer
You've explained how Revelation was not intended as a prophecy of what's to come and that its audience is made explicit. What are the risks, then, when people apply this kind of rhetoric to politics and foreign policy in particular?
- [37:56]
Greg Carey
We have. I'll put it this way. There are two directions people go with this way of reading the Bible. One is the story of rapture theology that says things must get worse and worse before Jesus can return. So there's really no point in working for environmental activism, for global peace, for justice or reconciliation. The focus is entirely on a more narrow set of moral concerns in that world, because things are going to get worse. But the other stream, and one that is really growing in the United States and around the world, it's becoming disruptive in our politics, is the belief that Christians are the ones who will do the work that will bring the kingdom of God to come on earth. And so they are working and achieving a lot of influence by trying to shape the course of history themselves. And I just add, those two streams of interpreting Revelation have been around a long time.
- [39:07]
Interviewer
What is it most important for readers of Revelation to resist doing as they're reading the text?
- [39:18]
Greg Carey
So I think I understand your question to be, how could readers engage Revelation constructively Now?
- [39:25]
Interviewer
Yes, that's a better way of putting
- [39:26]
Greg Carey
it, I think, when, and I'm speaking as a Christian, when we read the Bible, our best approach should be to read it in a dialogue or in curiosity, not to simply try to download biblical text and turn them into something that directly gives us instruction. And I would say in Revelation in particular, more than any other New Testament book, at least confronts that question of absolute loyalty in the face of conflict or danger. I think that's why it was meaningful in early Christian circles in the first couple of centuries and maybe into the third. But I also think we should be careful because not every situation is a life and death sort of thing. And so we should read Revelation with hearing that challenge are there, those moments, and there are have been in history, there may be in our lives when followers of Jesus are called to absolutely stand firm in conviction, regardless. In the United States, we could name that in our civil rights movement, for
- [40:41]
Interviewer
example, given that you're a scholar of the New Testament and you've explained to me, with very little knowledge of this, other than having read Revelation, I think, twice, how to understand this. Why is there a gap then, between scholarship that is rooted in its history and context and what is being preached in certain churches by people who obviously engage with the material in depth all the time? What's the reason that they don't understand what you've just explained to me?
- [41:17]
Greg Carey
I'm going to try to give a succinct answer because it's a complicated question. At least in the United States, when it comes to religion, expertise doesn't count. You know, people have their own opinions and they might ask me, oh, well, you know, you're a professor. You have these publications, these degrees. Yeah, but I think. And isn't it a matter of opinion? But the other part is the amount of marketing and publishing activity that's gone on to support that Rapture theology is enormous. And when people used to go to actual bookstores a lot, there would be Christian bookstores, they would have whole sections divide, devoted to this prophecy teaching. And so, you know, as an academic, I feel successful if I sell a thousand books. My mom was reading these Rapture theology novels, you know, that are flying off the shelves
- [42:22]
Interviewer
listening to Anathea. And Greg, what I'm left with is something quite different from how these texts are often used today. These were not written as blueprints for the future. They were written to make sense of power and suffering. But over time, something shifts. The beasts stop being Rome and start being whoever the enemy is today. And Revelation, this strange symbolic text rooted in a very specific historical moment, gets pulled forward again and again and treated as if it's describing now. So to discover how these ideas worked their way into the bloodstream of American identity politics and foreign policy, I spoke to Matthew Avery Sutton, one of the leading historians of American evangelicalism and apocalyptic thought. Well, I have just finished Chosen Land, and I must say, if we're being honest here, seeing as we're discussing the Bible, I have had very bad Covid. So I thought to myself, I'm going to be strategic and I'm going to read, like, the latter chapters and the early chapters, because I'm quite tired. I read the whole thing. I thought it was so interesting. I genuinely couldn't put it down over the weekend. So thank you.
- [43:33]
Matthew Avery Sutton
I appreciate that. And it's not short, so thank you.
- [43:36]
Interviewer
It's not short, but it felt short. So for the benefit of our viewers who have not had the chance to read your book yet, can you explain why, first of all, what is pre millennial apocalypticism and why have these beliefs been so enduring in the United States?
- [43:55]
Matthew Avery Sutton
Yeah, so it's really hard to use these multi syllable words. And so I really try to avoid that kind of stuff, but you can't avoid it with this topic. So for much of early US history into the 19th century, Protestants basically ruled the nation. White Protestants ruled the nation. And they had a very optimistic, hopeful sense of where the world was going and where time was going. And they really believed that they were building the kingdom of God on earth. And so this is part of why the book title is Chosen Land, because they really thought the United States might be the new Israel, the new chosen land. But things began to unravel with the Civil War and then the rise of Darwinian theories of evolution and some more sophisticated kinds of literary criticism that forced people to rethink how they understood the Bible. And so for a particular group of American Christians, they thought, you know what, maybe things aren't getting better, maybe they're getting worse. Maybe we're going the wrong direction in terms of time and history. And what that did was it drove them back to the Scriptures. And they began rereading Daniel and Ezekiel and some passages that some of Jesus's sermons in Matthew and then the book of Revelation. And they read it through new eyes and they thought, you know, instead of these as clues to how we're going to build the kingdom of God here on earth, maybe they're actually clues that we're living in the end times, that the apocalypse is imminent, that the second coming of Jesus is right around the corner. And so there was a real pivot that then gives birth to what we call fundamentalism. And the term fundamentalism is used so broadly and so generically today, but it was very specific. In the 1920s, it was a group of white Protestants who called themselves fundamentalists. And they believed that they were returning Christians to the fundamentals of the Scripture. And, and one of those fundamentals was that Jesus was coming back, and he was coming back very soon. And it was going to be this kind of apocalyptic, chaotic return. So I realized I didn't actually answer your question. So premillennialists. They are premillennialists. And the way the term evolved is that most Christians believe that we're moving towards a millennium thousand years of peace and prosperity. And the question is, is the Apocalypse going to happen before that or at the end of it. And for the premillennialists, they believe it's going to happen first. And so we're not going to see the kingdom of God on earth because until after this chaos comes, till this cataclysm, and so then the millennium is going to come after that.
- [46:08]
Interviewer
And you mentioned that when groups believe this, let's take the 1920s as an example, that they interpret their world as having signs that they might be living in end times, that it could be coming. What sorts of things are they seeing?
- [46:25]
Matthew Avery Sutton
So in the 1880s and 1890s, when this movement is really developing, they laid out a sign, series of signs. They said, you know, global wars was going to be a huge one because Jesus said in the last days, there's going to be wars and rumors of wars. They also had these kind of obscure prophecies from the Old Testament, and they thought that they could use those prophecies to understand kind of the evolution of different geographic spheres of the world, like where nations were going to line up for this great war. The other thing that grew into an obsession with them is understanding the role of Jews in the state of Israel. They believe that the return of Jews to the Middle east was going to be a massive sign that Jesus's return was eminent. And this comes out of a kind of an obscure statement that Jesus made about when the fig leaf, the leaves of the fig leaf begin to bloom, then you'll know the end is near. And they believe that the fig leaf or the fig tree was a symbol of the Jewish nation. And so when the Jewish nation reblooms, then we know we're going to be near the end times. And so they lay out all these signs pretty early on. And then when we move towards World War I, they say, see, we're right. We told you there were going to be major global wars and rumors of wars. And then with the rise of Zionism and then the return of Jews to the Middle east and then certainly the creation of the state of Israel in the late 1940s, all of these things became mutually reinforcing and convinced them that in fact, the last days were here.
- [47:48]
Interviewer
In your book, I remember in the 1880s, I think you talk about William Blackstone, who's a Chicago businessman who has Zionist ideas and he writes about them at that stage. How fringe are these beliefs? And then what role does World War I and then ultimately World War II play in making them more mainstream?
- [48:10]
Matthew Avery Sutton
That's a great question, because I don't think that they would have become so mainstream if it wasn't for the World wars. And so in the late 19th, early 20th century, these are folks who are kind of everyday Baptist, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, who are organizing through prophecy conferences. They're like meeting in New York City or meeting in Chicago to talk about what they're thinking, about what the signs of the times are. They're beginning to launch new magazines. A few of them, with some money, begin to open up new Bible colleges because they believe if the end is near, you want to get as many people saved as quickly as possible. But it's really kind of a slow growth until World War I. And then the movement really explodes because it looked like the fundamentalists could better explain what was happening in the world and where it was going relative to any other group of Christians, that they were the ones who had said, things are going to get really bad, while their more liberal counterparts had said, no, no, no, we're going to build the, you know, make the world safe for democracy. We're going to create peace and prosperity. The League of Nations is going to solve all of our problems. So then when we hit the 1930s and the rise of fascism and Nazism and Communism, well, Communism had been around, of course, earlier. But this then supercharges their movement because it becomes even more clear to them at least, that everything that they have been predicting for a couple of decades now is coming to fruition. And then the creation of the state of Israel is just the next step. The development of atomic bombs and the recognition that humans could actually destroy the world on their own becomes another major sign. And so the signs are always evolving. They're always changing. They're always specific to each generation, but they're able to. The theology itself is malleable enough that they can apply it to whatever's happening around the world.
- [50:05]
Interviewer
You highlight a paradox in your work that when people believe that the world is ending, instead of withdrawing, there's the impulse to become more politically active. Tell me more about that. And then how prevalent these beliefs have been at the center of power from World War II onwards.
- [50:30]
Matthew Avery Sutton
So that was one of the questions that I had that launched this research, was, I didn't understand, looking in the 1980s at someone like Jerry Falwell, who's building the Moral Majority, but is also an apocalypticist, he also believes the world might end at any moment. Or Billy Graham. I mean, Billy Graham, from the beginning of his career in the late 40s all the way through his death in the 2010s, he is constantly preaching that the second coming of Jesus is imminent, but he's simultaneously meeting with Richard Nixon or meeting with Ronald Reagan. And so there are these religious leaders who are preaching apocalypse, but then also engaged in the real world of modern day politics, the US and around the globe. And so I wanted to understand that and what I realized and really it's what they say, if you, if you read them carefully, really listen to what they're telling you, it's that if you believe the world is going to end at any moment, that means Jesus is coming back and he's coming back in judgment and he's going to hold you accountable for what you've done. And so you don't have time to just, you know, climb up to the top of the mountaintop and just pray and wait. You've got to be active, you've got to be engaged, you've got to be preparing the world for his return. And that means you have to be as aggressive as possible about making converts and about building the kind of structures that will allow you to make converts. And so in the case of right wing politics, it's about having a federal government that is going to accommodate Christian beliefs, Christian ideology, that is going to support missionary work in terms of foreign policy, and that is going to make sure the United States win the Battle of Armageddon finally comes, that the United States is on the right side. And so another piece of that means being extraordinarily pro Israel, because it means that if Israel is going to take on the Antichrist in the end, then you want to be on the side of Israel. And so that becomes another major theme. And so all this is to say a lot of traditional scholarship thought that apocalyptic movements were indifferent to modern politics. And I found just the opposite, that they in fact are more involved in politics than those who are not apocalyptic thinking.
- [52:33]
Interviewer
One of the lines of investigation that I'm guessing is quite difficult is when are politicians opportunistically deploying this language and when do they actually believe it? And I noticed in your book there was something I found really interesting. You quoted another book speaking about President Bush after 9 11, and he was said to describe the confrontation that had been willed by God and that they were fulfilling biblical prophecy. And obviously there's hyper religious language around 911 from both sides and also during World War II, how Roosevelt was encouraged to play up religious motivation for American intervention and support. So in your mind, when you look at presidents and you look at key political actors, how much of it is opportunism and how Much of it is belief.
- [53:32]
Matthew Avery Sutton
For Roosevelt, he wasn't so much an apocalypticist, but he believed that religion was central to the war in ways that I don't think we've fully appreciated. And so when he identified the four freedoms, one of them was freedom of worship. And he said, this is why we're fighting. We're fighting to protect people's right to worship as they wanted. And he saw what the Nazis were doing with freedom of religion as really detrimental as the. To what Americans thought about their place in the world. And so. So religion becomes very important to the American role. It becomes very important to the Cold War crusade for Truman and for Eisenhower. They tap into this apocalypticism some, but where it really takes off is with Reagan, that Reagan had clearly been reading, and he told people, I mean, he talked about this, that he had been reading these apocalyptic books by these American evangelicals. And at one point, he told Wolf Blitzer, when Wolf Blitzer worked for the Jerusalem Post, that he thought the worlds were really lining up, as Old Testament prophecy had indicated. The irony here, though, is that Reagan could simultaneously believe that biblical prophecy was being fulfilled, but also didn't work on arms control, that he didn't think it was his job to speed the world to Armageddon. He believed it was his world to kind of hold off Armageddon, even though he recognized that it might be imminent. That George W. Bush passage that you talked about, that was from a journalist, Jacques Chirac had apparently told this journalist that George W. Bush brought up biblical prophecies when he was talking about the wars in the Middle East. And so it's not entirely clear how much Bush believed this or didn't believe this. But certainly presidents have recognized its power and its influence. And really, today, Pete Higseth is tying into these kind of ideologies when he's talking about what's happening in Iran at this moment.
- [55:19]
Interviewer
Before we get to Hegseth and Trump's inner circle, you mentioned the Cold War. And I'm curious, when America was on the brink of nuclear confrontation, what impact did that have on people who believe in evangelical apocalypticism? Trip me up there. There's too many syllables in these words. As aforementioned evangelical apocalypticism, we can throw in pre millennialists.
- [55:47]
Matthew Avery Sutton
Yeah. So exactly. This is the other thing that I found in my work is it. It's actually. You would think it would kind of leave people with a sense of doom and gloom and the sky is falling, but it does just the opposite, because, you know, the world is always chaotic. The world is always unpredictable. We never know what is happening and where there's going to be a new problem, whether it's economic or political or in terms of a military confrontation. And what apocalyptic theology does for the true believers is tells them we can look backwards and you can see that everything is leading up to this point. And then we can look forward and say things are going to get worse. But not for you. You're the ones who are going to be saved. You're the ones who are going to be pulled out of this chaos, who are going to be pulled out of this horror, who are going to be pulled out of this Armageddon. And so, in fact, it's a really comforting theology in an ironic way that offers a lot of hope to the folks who are on the inside, and it also gives them special knowledge. That's what apocalyptic thinking does. It's that, you know, something that everybody else is missing. And so when you see turmoil, when you see chaos, when you see problems, you can understand why it's happening. And so it becomes really effective in those ways and gives people a sense of meaning in otherwise turbulent, meaningless times.
- [57:03]
Interviewer
How influential is evangelical. Oh, my goodness. Honestly, I am going to punch something after this. How. How influential is evangelical apocalypticism in the Republican Party today?
- [57:20]
Matthew Avery Sutton
It's ebbed and flowed. There are moments when it seems to have a lot of influence and a lot of prominence, and then times when it. When it drops. And of course, the Republican Party itself has not been that closely aligned with evangelicals until the 1980s, until the new Right activ activists who were trying to drive the party to the right, built these alliances with people like Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham and others. But what is clear now is that as the party has evolved and as the role of the religious right has evolved, I think it's very prominent and it's kind of a hodgepodge. But President Trump, because of his demands for absolute loyalty, a lot of the kind of mainstream leaders of the religious right didn't support him in the primaries in 2016. And so he really pushed them away. You know, he's not very forgiving of those who don't support him from the start. And he replaced them with a lot of folks who had been more marginal in the evangelical coalitions. And these were folks who really believed in apocalyptic prophecy. These were folks who also had a really high sense of spiritual warfare, as they would describe it, who really were obsessed with the Middle east. And we're obsessed with kind of angels and demons and the Antichrist. And they have moved to the center of President Trump's coalition and to the center of his religious advisors. So I don't imagine he believes a word of this. I don't think he takes religion that seriously at all in his personal life. But for those around him, it's central. And for people like Mike Huckabee, our ambassador to Israel, this is the theology that he was raised on, that he believes, that he preaches. That is at the core of how he understands the world and where the world is going.
- [59:02]
Interviewer
Trump isn't personally religious in any conventional sense, as you just noted. So where's the cognitive dissonance here? What accounts for the support from these fringe evangelical groups and how they see President Trump and his role in the world and potentially his role in end
- [59:21]
Matthew Avery Sutton
times thinking yeah, as an American citizen and a human being, I don't love what's happening, but as a historian, it's. It's endlessly fascinating, and it really is just amazing to watch. And it's not what I would have predicted in 2016. I had no idea things were going to go the way they would, or that evangelicals, white evangelicals, would be such staunch supporters of President Trump. But they have really modified their theology, and they do this in every generation. Every group does. Like they. They have to apply their faith to whatever's happening at the time. And this is particularly true in the United States because of separation of church and state, which is one of the major themes in Chosen Land. How these folks are entrepreneurial, how they are innovative, how they modify their beliefs and their systems and their ideologies to fit what's going to work for the American people at that moment, at that time. But the way they've done this with President Trump and with his both domestic policy and his foreign policy, is they see him as this kind of external savior. They talk about him as King Cyrus, this Old Testament king who was not Jewish, but who saved the Jews from the Babylonians, and who had a real instrumental role in playing this kind of position that God wanted him to play, even though he was not one of them. And so they see President Trump as a similar kind of figure who is helping prepare the American people, prepare American Christians for the end times, even though he himself is not one of them. And so they see him as essentially somebody that God is using to accomplish his purposes in this world. And so they want to support him in doing that, even though he doesn't align with them in terms of his personal morals or his own ethics or his own religious views.
- [61:00]
Interviewer
You've mentioned twice now you've qualified when you've been speaking about evangelical leaders and said white, is there a racial element to the apocalyptic movement?
- [61:12]
Matthew Avery Sutton
There absolutely is. This was another fun thing that I discovered in writing the book was to parallel or to compare and contrast black Protestant Christians with whites who had the exact same theology. And so there are black leaders in every generation who are apocalypticists, but what they do is they look at the geopolitics of apocalypticism very differently. So in the 1910s and 20s, at the height of Jim Crow segregation, they would say, the Antichrist is not over there in the Soviet Union. You know, it's. It's not Lenin. The Antichrist is American white supremacists. The Antichrist is these American segregationists, that they're the ones who are exercising this kind of horrible apocalyptic kind of persecution and tribulation. And so in every generation, you can have folks of different races who will start with the exact same theological presuppositions and then take their politics and entirely different ways. And so I call them liberationists, that they have this kind of liberationist theology that sees Jesus as liberator, who, when he creates the millennium, it's going to make all things right. It's going to create racial equality, gender equality, you know, support for LGBTQ rights, and it's the God of the Exodus, not the God of persecution.
- [62:34]
Interviewer
To what extent does Trump's inner circle hold apocalyptic or end times belief? What can you tell?
- [62:44]
Matthew Avery Sutton
It's always so hard to know, but certainly his religious advisors very much do. Some of the folks close to him, I think, are pretty sophisticated and have a pretty good understanding of this. Paula White Cain, who's been his closest spiritual advisor in both of his terms, very much, I think, is. Is influenced by this. Many of his kind of public advocates, the folks who serve as his liaisons to different Christian communities, very much are true believers. We mentioned Mike Huckabee, Pete Hegseth, because of his personal evolution, I don't know that he knows theology very well at all. I would, frankly be surprised if he knows theology very well. But he certainly seems to have imbibed the kind of apocalyptic language and the apocalyptic thinking from his limited time in church. And so that seems to be the framework that he's using for understanding Iran and what's happening in the Middle East. And that's actually probably where it gets a little scarier, is you have folks who have a real sophisticated sense of this theology who might be, you know, might have been advising George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan. And then you have the Pete Higgs s who probably have a more superficial sense of it. And then that's where. Where things get very. Make me very nervous, make me very anxious.
- [63:58]
Interviewer
And for those who do have a sophisticated sense of this theology, what do they see as the role for the Middle east and particularly Israel today?
- [64:09]
Matthew Avery Sutton
So they believe that ultimately Israel needs to have a strong and powerful state, that it probably needs to expand its borders in the night, not the 90s, the 2000, early 2000s, when George W. Bush was talking about his two state solution, there were a lot of really angry evangelicals who believed that that land was Israel's and should not be divided with the Palestinians. Pat Robertson made a big point about this. This is what has influenced Jews going
- [64:37]
Interviewer
into Palestine, is, is part of the prophecy, isn't it?
- [64:41]
Matthew Avery Sutton
Yeah, so they go back to. Yeah, so they go back to the kind of Old Testament boundaries, and they believe that ultimately Jews will control much of the Middle east, much of these Old Testament boundaries, which is what Mike Huckabee alluded to a few weeks ago and got into some trouble. So they believe, though, that as this happens, that something is going to trigger a war in the Middle east, because when the Jews control Israel, when they build Israel, when they make it a strong state, they're going to somehow discover some kind of resources. And different generations have had different theories about what those resources would be, but that other parts of the world were going to want. And so ultimately there was going to be a coalition or will be a coalition of nations led by the Antichrist, who will go to war against Israel. When it looks like Israel is right on the verge of defeat, that's when Jesus is going to return with his army of angelic saints. And then ultimately they're going to vanquish the Antichrist after this kind of horrible apocalyptic war, this literal battle of Armageddon that's going to happen in Israel. And then at that moment, Jesus is going to then establish the millennium, going to establish this thousand years of peace and prosperity. And everybody who survives, who is a Christian is going to live happily ever after. And in this scenario, Jews also have to convert. They have to be Christians. And so people like Mike Huckabee and Billy Graham before him didn't want to emphasize this because it was always, you know, controversial because they were trying to build alliances with Jewish leaders. But at the same time, their theology says if you don't convert, you burn in hell.
- [66:09]
Interviewer
Apart from it being a bit mad and divorced from its historical context, what are the dangers of Americans in society and in government applying an apocalyptic lens to foreign policy. And instead of just seeing geopolitics, seeing some divine plan unfolding,
- [66:33]
Matthew Avery Sutton
it certainly scares me. And looking at the historical record, we could have assumed that Ronald Reagan would have been hell bent on triggering Armageddon based on his own apocalyptic thinking. And he wasn't. So in that sense, the historical record says this is not as dangerous as it could be or potentially might be. But where I think it does get very dangerous is if it is shaping difficult politics in the Middle East. And especially thinking back as we were just talking about George W. Bush and the two state solution, if the two state solution is what's going to bring peace to the Middle east and American evangelicals are putting pressure on US Presidents to not support that, that's a problem, then your religion is driving your foreign policy. And that's really dangerous. Rather than just having kind of a real politic that's trying to figure out a foreign policy that's going to work for a, a diverse and pluralistic world. And so that, that's probably where the scariest elements are. There have been other places, you know, I'm thinking about China, that evangelicals have been very active because they've wanted to protect or try to not protect, but try to increase missionary activity in China. Try to, you know, kind of break the seal. Yeah, break the seal of the Communist party. And so they interpret China sometimes in apocalyptic theologies as one of the great end times enemies of the true faith, enemies of God's chosen land, or chosen lands if it's Israel and the United States. And so there are ways in which American evangelicals are trying to shape where we're going in lots of different directions. But certainly today the Middle east is at the front and center of that process.
- [68:14]
Interviewer
Where I could see that being particularly problematic if pressure is coming from evangelicals, is that if you frame things in those terms, it makes off ramps and compromise look like religious betrayal.
- [68:28]
Matthew Avery Sutton
That's just it. That's the true danger of apocalyptic theology in terms of even just domestic politics, is that you don't compromise because you are absolutely right. There is no room for negotiation. There is no room for finding a middle ground. That it's absolute black and white, right and wrong. And that's one of the other things that I argue in the book that's less about the foreign policy, but is about our current polarization, is that we have created in the United States, in the religious right gaining power in the Republican Party over the last 40 or 50 years. What it has done is hyped up the polarization because the old school of just figuring out what do we have in common and where can we agree to disagree, that just doesn't exist anymore. And a lot of the responsibility for that should be laid at the feet of the religious right of these religious activists who see the world in absolute terms.
- [69:19]
Interviewer
Matt, what do people most misunderstand about the relationship between evangelical end times thinking and political power in America today?
- [69:27]
Matthew Avery Sutton
I think it's probably a little bit of what we've talked about in the sense that it drives so much of the activism that we wouldn't have the political success of American evangelicals and before them, fundamentalists, if it wasn't for their apocalyptic sense of urgency, their sense of momentum. And, you know, we can see it in the twenties, we can see it in the 1950s, we can see it in the eighties, and we can see it now in the 2000s, that if you believe the world is ending at any moment and that time is running out, you just don't have time. You know, you're the football player who's got to get that last touchdown, you got to get the ball over the line because there's just not enough time to try again. And so it creates a sense of urgency that I think makes it hard for those who are outside of that world to compete, because they don't necessarily have that sense of urgency. You know, when we think about old school social gospel, you know, liberal Protestants or Catholics or Episcopalians, like, they, they have the benefit of time. You know, they can do a little good here and a little good there, and it's going to be okay because we're just slowly trying to build the kingdom of God on earth. But if you're an evangelical, you don't have that luxury. And so they have been able to move themselves to the center of American politics because they've recognized that that was what they believe Jesus was calling them to do. In savvy, conservative political leaders have recognized that energy and that passion, and so they have harnessed it for their own purposes as well. So that a George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump may not believe everything that the evangelicals believe, but they know that they're really important, they're really powerful, and they're really reliable. And so they're going to keep them at the center of their constituency, regardless of what. What they agree with or disagree with, because it's going to be important for their political success, for their political careers for sure.
- [71:20]
Interviewer
What's more mobilizing than feeling like you're on the right side of God's plan for Armageddon as an experiment, if we suspend our knowledge of what's actually happening in the world at the moment, what countries would fit most neatly into the enemy category? As evangelical Christians see it, the passages
- [71:48]
Matthew Avery Sutton
that they use are vague enough that they apply it in lots of different ways. So in the 30s, it was Mussolini in Italy, because Mussolini was going to rebuild the Roman Empire. And that was their sense, was that the Antichrist was going to be the leader of the rebuilt Roman Empire. And so that has always kept them focused on Europe, made them worry about the European Common Market and then now the European Union, because they believe that any kind of global conglomeration is going to open the door for the Antichrist to consolidate power and to undermine individual national sovereignties. So that also makes them very suspicious of the United Nations. And so we can certainly see where President Trump's criticism of the UN aligns with evangelicals criticisms of the UN Even though it's for very different kinds of reasons. There's vague references in the Book of Daniel to the East. And So in the 40s, it was Japan. They believed that Japan was going to be this enemy empire. And then that has shifted to China with the communist revolution there during the 80s and 90s, it was Saddam Hussein that there was talk, evangelicals believe that Saddam Hussein might be rebuilding Babel, that they thought historic Babel was somewhere in Iraq and that maybe he was going to help set the stage for the Antichrist through that. And so it's a malleable thing. And the evangelicals themselves, like many Americans, just don't know their own histories. And so one of the fascinating things about this project is when evangelicals read it, they begin to realize, they become more self aware, that maybe their theology is not as absolute as they thought, because it changes with every generation and it changes with geopolitics. Oh, and the last thing, sorry, I should also say Putin, Putin, of course, that they very much believe that, that Putin is helping set the stage for the Antichrist, that he is often the enemy. And then that's where we have these kind of tensions with some folks on the far right who really like people like Putin or people like Orbit on Orban. Sorry, now I'm butchering my words. But, but there, there is this way to try to understand these leaders and how they fit, but it's always changing.
- [73:56]
Interviewer
What really struck me making this episode was how elastic apocalyptic thinking has always been. Right from its earliest Jewish forms, apocalyptic texts were used to make sense of particular threats, rulers and empires. And across centuries, it's been reapplied to new enemies and new types of spiritual warfare. Across different cultures and millennia, there's the same habit of mind. This aggressor, this war. This moment must be the final one. And once the course of history is imagined as a final, divinely scripted confrontation, politics changes shape, opponents stop being rivals and become enemies of God. Compromise starts to look like betrayal, and political actors become instruments of destiny. That is the danger when apocalyptic thinking stops being a private way of interpreting suffering and becomes a way of shaping armies, elections, and foreign policy. History should make us cautious or relieved, because again and again, people have been certain that the end was imminent around the year 1000. The failure of Jesus Christ to return to Earth in 1844, as predicted by American preacher William Miller, known as the great disappointment during the panic around Halley's Comet. And actually this year, according to Messiah Foundation International, the dates pass. Fingers crossed. The world continues. The real question then, is not why apocalyptic predictions keep failing. It's why, despite all the failure, they remain so seductive. And what happens when people with real power begin saying that this time the end is really at hand? Thank you for watching history uncensored. If the apocalypse comes, beat me.