Back to the Fundamentals

PETER: hosts, what impresses me about Jess’s story about the Millerites is the way that news spreads. The instant community that emerges with this focus on the end of the world and that particular date, gives it this wonderful focus. And, you know, this tells us something about the emergence of mass culture in America, and the importance of technology to that. I mean, what drives this is the religious press.

ED: Yeah, that’s exactly right, Peter. We don’t think about the press being so religious, but America was saturated in religion the 1820s and ’30s and ’40s. You can just hear the steam presses rolling, turning out this material to be mailed all over the country, over the new post roads, and the new mechanism of the post office. You can just hear the telegraph keys clattering, spreading the news. It really does tap into a moment that would have been impossible to have imagined, really, just a couple of decades earlier.

PETER: It’s the great paradox of the antebellum period, the period before the American Civil War. Americans are flying apart, all across this great landscape, but they’re finding new ways to connect with each other. And it’s through print that they’re doing it. It’s through the news. And you know, the news about end times is the most urgent and important news you can imagine.

ED: If you’re just tuning in, this is BackStory. And today, we’re talking about visions of into the end of the world in America. a couple of decades after the Civil War, in the 1880s and 1890s, a new version of apocalyptic thinking started taking root among a small group of conservative Protestants. They weren’t limited to a specific denomination or social class. But while there were pockets of them around the country, they were concentrated in the cities of the North.

BRIAN: That’s where society was in the midst of some of the most profound changes. The influx of Catholics and Jews was radically altering the balance of local politics. And the growing power of universities was giving rise to the social sciences and Darwinian theory, things that challenged a strictly biblical interpretation of the world.

MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON: So all these things really concern them, trouble them, push them back to biblical text. And so they begin to read it with new eyes.

BRIAN: This is Matthew Avery Sutton, a scholar of early Christian Fundamentalism.

MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON: And what they begin to see is that there’s another message, a different message. And it was a much darker, ominous message.

ED: Much more ominous than what? Well, up until that point, the basic understanding among Protestants had been that through their good works they could help usher in 1,000 year Millennium of paradise on earth, at which point Christ would return.

But according to this ominous new reading of the Bible, there would be a period of terrible, cataclysmic, apocalyptic suffering before the Millennium. Now fortunately for them, good Christians would be spared that suffering. They would be raptured up to heaven first.

MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON: And with Christians out of the way, a new world leader is going to emerge offering peace and security to the world, which is now in chaos. And this leader will, in fact, be the Antichrist.

BRIAN: The Antichrist would ultimately be vanquished by Christ and his followers in the Battle of Armageddon, ushering in those thousand years of paradise on earth. This made the vision premillenial since the Second Coming would occur before the Millennium.

ED: And so, rather than work to bring on the golden age themselves, these premillennialists looked for a series of signs that the end times were near. And over the first few decades of the 20th century, they found those signs almost everywhere they looked. Portents, like the rise of Hollywood, more open sexuality, women working outside the home, women voting, even women advocating publicly for access to birth control. All of these were instances of the moral degeneracy that this group of Christians associated with the end times.

BRIAN: But Matthew Sutton told me that there was also a complex set of geopolitical signs, signs that were also borne out in the 19 teens and 1920s.

MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON: The major ones, or among the major ones was World War I, because they believed that in the last days there would “wars and rumors of wars,” quoting Jesus’s prediction on that. They saw the capture of Jerusalem by the British and the establishment of Palestine as a homeland for Jews as another major sign, because they had been predicting that for 20 or 30 years.

BRIAN: And as I understand it, one of the indications was what, today, or even by the mid 20th century, we might call a super state, or a strong centralized government.

MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON: Right. There’s some obscure verses in the book of Daniel which talk about four kingdoms. One would be a great northern kingdom, which they identified as Russia. And they had also believed there would be a kingdom in the East. And that one, they were more vague on which actual nation that was. But, of course, as we moved towards World War II, they identified Japan with the Eastern kingdom.

The final kingdom is going to be the kingdom of the Antichrist, which is in literal, geographical Rome. And they talk about it as a super state that’s going to be defined– really, essentially, it begins with democracy and gives way to Totalitarianism. And then it’s going to consolidate power. And it’s going to bring other kingdoms under its rule.

BRIAN: So when Roosevelt was elected, democratically elected, what was the reaction initially? And how did that change?

MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON: Right. And by that time premillenialists were beginning to call themselves fundamentalists. And fundamentalists were very suspicious of Roosevelt. They were concerned that Roosevelt wanted to repeal prohibition. And they didn’t like his vision for the state, and for his plans for using the government to combat the Great Depression, which was well under way by 1932, and then 1933, when he takes office.

And here was a guy who, at the Democratic National Convention in 1932, on the first set of ballots, got 666 votes. And, of course, 666 was traditionally the number, or the sign of the Antichrist. And then in 1937, when Roosevelt tried to increase the size of the Supreme Court, what fundamentalists see happening there is, here’s a guy who’s already got the Executive Branch in his pocket. Congress is doing everything he wants to do, at least in their mind. And then he’s trying to pack the Supreme Court to make sure that the Judicial Branch is going to follow his lead. And so this is a guy who looks like he’s on a power trip.

BRIAN: And just to be clear, in the sequence you laid out originally, the rapture occurs before the appearance of the Antichrist.

MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON: Right. So all of this is just foreshadowing the coming Antichrist. So they didn’t actually believe Roosevelt was the Antichrist Now they weren’t so sure about Mussolini, because he was actually in Rome. They thought he might actually be the Antichrist. But Roosevelt was just the guy who was going to get the United States into line behind the Antichrist.

BRIAN: And Matt, if I could play the role of Antichrist advocate, if that’s a phrase. Is it truly their vision of end times and apocalypse that is informing their political views? Or aren’t these people just libertarians or conservatives who are using phrases from the Bible to justify what they fundamentally feel politically?

MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON: Right, and it’s a little bit of both. And I think if we ask that question about the generation in the 1930s and 1940s, it was truly driven by their fear of the state and what the state represented. I mean, there are some roots of it in the 1910s.

The Bolshevik Revolution is one turning point, and that kind of fear of Communism in the US in the 1920s. But it’s really with the rise of Roosevelt that we have the articulation of a clear fundamentalist anti-statism.

BRIAN: That is really driven by their religious beliefs.

MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON: Yes, I absolutely believe so. Yeah. And part of it is, there is no other common denominator to explain it. I mean, it’s not just class, it’s both poor and very, very wealthy, in some cases. It’s not just rural or urban, it’s both. But the common denominator is this premillenial apocalyptisism. And they explain it that way. That’s the language they use.

And it has a lot of benefits for them, because, if you feel like you’re on the outside looking in, if you feel like you’re powerless, if you feel like the nation is moving in the wrong direction, you have the last laugh. You’re the only one who knows what’s really happening.

BRIAN: Right.

MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON: You have the scoop on where history is going, who’s going to win, how it’s going to end. And so it gives you a sense of self-confidence, and a sense that you can endure the troubles and tribulations of your own generation of war, of depression. Because in the end, you’re going to be redeemed. You’re going to be sanctified. You’re going to be saved.

BRIAN: Can you give us a sense of how many people there are over the course of the 20th century, who actually subscribe to the views that you’ve just been describing? And some of the cycles, why this waxes, why this wanes.

MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON: You know, in The first half of the 20th century, it was a growing part of American Protestantism, but it was still a minority position, even among Protestants. When polls have been done in the last 30, 40, 50 years, it’s shockingly high numbers of Americans. I think not quite half. I think the most recent polls it’s around 40% that says they believe Jesus return by– I believe the way that poll was worded was 2040.

They may not be aware of the apocalyptic theology behind this idea of Jesus’s second coming, but they know the end results. And the end result is that all true Christians will be raptured and that Jesus is going to come back. However, in the last 10 or 15 years, they have really downplayed that idea, that it’s not nearly as prominent now as it was certainly in the 1930s, or even in the 1970s.

And what explains that, in part, I think, is the fact evangelicals have become so powerful. They have began to have so much influence in American life that it’s much harder for them to present themselves, or frame themselves, as this outsider despised, disinherited minority sort of denouncing American culture in the American mainstream.

But I think the presidency of George W Bush really represents another of another one of these turning points in which evangelicals realize that they do have power, that they, in fact, are the American state. And so I think there’s sort of a milder, softer form of evangelicalism that has developed that embraces this world, because it makes more sense to embrace this world if you actually can influence policy in the most powerful nation in the world.

ED: Matthew Avery Sutton is an Associate Professor of History at Washington State University. And he’s the author of Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America.

[MUSIC – AVETT BROTHERS, “SIGNS”]

ED: We’re going to take a short break, but don’t go anywhere. I’m poised to push the (ECHOING) doomsday button.

PETER: Oh, ho, ho. You’re listening to BackStory. We might be back in a minute.

[MUSIC – AVETT BROTHERS, “SIGNS”]