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Book Review: ‘American Apocalypse’

Book Review: ‘American Apocalypse’

Before writing this review, I Googled “Hillary Clinton Antichrist.”  The top hits were news stories about Ryan Zinke, the Republican nominee for Nebraska’s only House seat, who at a campaign stop earlier this year declared the former Secretary of State the devil incarnate. Like other politicians’ apocalyptic pronouncements, this one caused a stir, some chuckles, some shrugs. Labeling American politicians and world leaders the Antichrist, and claiming the end-times are nigh and Jesus will return soon, are staples of our political lexicon. Yet despite their recurrence every election cycle, they are still seen as fringe, serving as easy fodder for ridicule by pundits, comedians, and the denizens of social media.

Zinke’s Antichrist remark stemmed not from a casual effort to discredit the Democrat Republicans most love to hate, and it was not a throwaway barb snatched from the pages of a Left Behind thriller. Matthew Avery Sutton’s American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism shows that Zinke, a former Navy SEAL, was giving expression to an impulse long embedded in the intersection of conservative white evangelicalism and American politics and foreign policy. Sutton, a historian at Washington State University, argues that this form of evangelicalism, a precursor to today’s religious right, did not, as most histories have maintained, isolate itself from political affairs. Instead, Sutton shows how an apocalyptic theology that burgeoned in the late 19th and early 20th century coalesced as a definitive American religious-political movement during and immediately after the First World War, laying the groundwork for an enduring entanglement between white conservative evangelicalism and contemporary politics.

At the heart of Sutton’s argument is a repudiation of the theory of the fundamentalist retreat, which he supports with ample and fascinating evidence. The conventional history of American fundamentalism holds that its adherents, shamed by the outcome of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, and long wary of injecting themselves into the earthly realm, withdrew from public life entirely. Sutton maintains that this version of events misapprehends the history, and, more crucially, obscures the inroads evangelicals made well before the Scopes trial in melding their unique apocalyptic ideas with politics, both at home and abroad.

Sutton, a biographer of trailblazing evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, draws on his intimate knowledge of the fundamentalist terrain of the period. This is insightful and valuable, but the standout of Sutton’s work is his deep archival dive into a previously unplumbed world of late 19th and early 20th century prophecy conferences, sermons, fundamentalist publications, and letters from citizens and demagogues alike to editors, policymakers, and presidents. The text is peppered with reproductions of pamphlets, photographs, and even apocalyptic cartoons from the period, a thrill for nerdy appreciators of the ephemera of popularized American religion.

In telling this story, Sutton persuasively shows how this early apocalyptic expression in white American evangelicalism formed the basis for what he calls “a different kind of morally infused American politics, one that challenged the long democratic tradition of pragmatic governance by compromise and consensus.” This politics of apocalypse presaged later conflicts over wars, both cold and real, and even today’s congressional obstructionism.  In creating an “absolutist, uncompromising, good-versus-evil faith,” Sutton observes, “evangelicals have transformed the lives of countless of individuals and established a new form of radical politics.”

Several internal and external events merged to bring this about. Apocalyptic-minded white evangelicals were inspired first by William Blackstone’s 1878 publication of Jesus Is Coming, an attempt to read the Bible as a roadmap to current and future events. Blackstone, who later played a prominent role in lobbying for the creation of the state of Israel, drew on writings from across the pond, notably those of Irish evangelist John Nelson Darby, who brought his dispensationalist theory of the end-times on a tour of the United States in the 1860s and 70s.

At the time, pre-millennialism — which holds that the world is careening toward a period of tribulation with the Antichrist at the helm of a one-world order, only to be vanquished by the returning Jesus at Armageddon, followed by a one-thousand year reign of Christ over the Earth — had fallen out of favor. Darby, and in turn Blackstone and other American evangelical promoters, revitalized it. Pre-millennialism “gave the fundamentalist movement its most definitive shape and character,” Sutton writes. Fundamentalist preacher and editor J. Frank Norris considered it “the most vital doctrine of all,” as it served as a litmus test for theological orthodoxy.

But nothing, Sutton writes, has equaled the impact of the 1909 Scofield Reference Bible, an annotated text by evangelist Cyrus Scofield, which “has been guiding Christians through the intricacies of pre-millennialism — whether they realize it or not — ever since.”

While Blackstone and Scofield had immeasurable impact on the masses, white male elites, Sutton argues, shared and reinforced pre-millennialist theology through publications and conferences, which have also left an indelible print on a cottage industry of prophecy that still exists today. These white male elites purposefully injected themselves into affairs of state, currying favor with politicians and presidents. Several decades after the publication of Jesus Is Coming, Blackstone — far from withdrawing from politics — sent President Woodrow Wilson prophecy-laced missives, warning that the Rapture was imminent, and praying that “God will provide a fit Successor to guide our nation through the Tribulation Period.”

World War I was a pivot point, Sutton writes, as it thrilled pre-millennialists into believing that God’s plan for Jesus’ return was being set into motion. The early pre-millennialists, certain that World War I would result in the Biblically prophesied end-times, did not initially fuse their religion with patriotism. Yet their disappointment when prophesied events did not come to pass did not cause them to retreat, but rather to regroup.

After the war, conservatives faced off against liberal theologians in an ongoing battle against modernity. In reaction to the rise of communism and the moral crusades of the time, including Prohibition, these evangelicals began to wrap themselves in the flag and present themselves as the true arbiters of the American way. The term fundamentalism — which Sutton maintains was imprecisely coined after the Scopes trial by the acerbic journalist H.L. Mencken — “came to define the interdenominational network of radical evangelical apocalypticists who joined together to publicly and aggressively herald the imminent second coming while challenging trends in liberal theology and in the broader American culture.”

Here Sutton finds evidence that the culture wars have dogged us far longer than since the 1960s. Refuting well-worn arguments that evangelicals were supportive of abortion rights, or at least indifferent to that defining culture war issue until a marriage of convenience with anti-choice Catholics in the 1970s, Sutton documents a fundamentalist opposition to abortion in the 1920s. (Notably, too, he documents the more familiar anti-Catholicism running through much of the fundamentalist rhetoric of the time.) The evangelist Billy Sunday denounced “the murder of unborn babies,” saying abortion would be “the curse and damnation of America.” A letter from a supporter to the pastor and moralist John Roach Straton described abortion as “the shedding of innocent blood, the sin of blood-guiltiness, the unpardonable sin, the MURDER OF THE UNBORN,” showing that abortion was an issue for grassroots fundamentalists as well. Years later, the evangelist Dan Gilbert said World War II was God’s judgment on America for abortion, which was “more appalling” than “the violence practiced by the Japs and Nazis against helpless prisoners.” For every three American women who become mothers, Gilbert said, “one American woman became a murderess!”

Fundamentalists raged against homosexuality, sex education, contraception, interracial marriage, women’s suffrage, and even women’s hairstyles (especially the bob). These culture wars carried on into opposition to the New Deal, to unionization, and efforts to nationalize health care. World War II offered new opportunities for prophecy, each more absurd than the last. Some fundamentalists wondered whether Italian fascist Benito Mussolini was the Antichrist; another said the Book of Revelation “was the first religious magazine… to discuss Mein Kampf.”

As Sutton takes us to the present, he traverses more familiar territory, particularly the creation of the National Association of Evangelicals, Christian anti-communism demagoguery during the Cold War, the evangelist Billy Graham’s forays into national politics, fundamentalist opposition to integration and the civil rights movement, the publication of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, Ronald Reagan’s interest in the end-times, and the blockbuster Left Behind series. Even for those familiar with that more recent history, though, will find much to inform them here, particularly the ways in which Sutton meticulously details how apocalyptic ideas — far from being a fringe — have been entwined with our politics for over a century.

Non-evangelicals have long mocked the apocalyptic strain in American Christianity and often dismiss the possibility that rational adults can take it seriously. American Apocalypse is essential for understanding just how deeply this religious strain is entrenched in our history and politics.

Sarah Posner is a contributing writer to Religion Dispatches and has covered religion and politics for Al Jazeera America, The American Prospect, The Nation, Mother Jones, and many other publications. Her website is http://sarahposner.com.

In Tea Party Senate Candidate’s Dissertation, A Nostalgia For A Populist Christian Nation

In Tea Party Senate Candidate’s Dissertation, A Nostalgia For A Populist Christian Nation

The following is reprinted with permission from Religion Dispatches. Follow RD on Facebook or Twitter for daily updates.

Ben Sasse, winner of last week’s Republican Senate primary in Nebraska and likely the next senator from that state, is a Tea Party hero with an unusual credential: a PhD in history from Yale.

Sasse — a proud anti-choice activist, homeschooler, and opponent of Obamacare and its “entire failed worldview” — bills himself as an outsider to politics, with an expertise in “business turnaround projects” for such powerhouses as Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey and Company.

Even before winning the primary, Sasse had been the subject of favorable profiles in both the National Review (“Obamacare’s Cornhusker Nemesis”) and the Weekly Standard (“A Virtuoso Pol from Nebraska?”). In a reverential interview, Glenn Beck told the candidate, “I can hear the Constitution running through your veins.”

If the Constitution could actually flow through the human circulatory system, there’s one part I might imagine Sasse omitting: the Establishment Clause, or at least the Establishment Clause as interpreted by the Warren Court, whose church-state decisions of the early 1960s form the lynchpin of Sasse’s 2004 doctoral dissertation.

It’s that dissertation, not the right’s adulation of their Ivy-educated everyman, that offers the greatest insight into Sasse’s political orientation, one in which religion — and, more critically, “elite” dismissal of it — takes center stage in the story of America and the rise of the modern conservative movement.

In 2004’s “The Anti-Madalyn Majority: Secular Left, Religious Right, and the Rise of Reagan’s America,” Sasse argues that journalists and historians have misapprehended, and indeed misreported, the story of the rise of the modern religious right. His historical marker is not placed — as many histories of the movement have placed it — at the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, whose candidacy was supported by Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and the coalition of religious leaders Reagan notoriously embraced.

Rather, he argues, not unpersuasively, that the roots of the modern religious right lie in the 1962 and 1963 Supreme Court decisions striking down mandatory public school prayer and Bible reading. Those decisions, Sasse maintains, touched a nerve among what he calls the “masses,” by which he means Americans horrified by rapid cultural changes, a reaction that “elites” dismissed as the backwater views of an unrepresentative, anti-modernist minority.

By failing to recognize what Sasse characterizes as a spontaneous, grassroots reaction to “judicial tyranny” (yes, Sasse documents the use of that term in the Cold War era), intellectual and journalistic elites, along with the entire Democratic Party, failed to grasp the true motivation of religious conservatives, or the political turns they would force the country to take.

Madalyn Murray O’Hair is the odd ghost hovering over Sasse’s project. It’s almost as though the exhibitionist atheist is, for Sasse, a persistent bogeyman in American culture, despite O’Hair’s death a decade earlier and the rising prominence of dozens of more staid advocates of atheism and secularism. Indeed, Sasse admits, in spite of the title of his prize-winning thesis and the many pixels he devoted to O’Hair herself (whom Sasse repeatedly calls “Madalyn” much like conservatives refer to a Clinton as “Hillary”), that she was merely a “symbol” and “never really the substance of the threat.” Yet, he maintains, “she was an important catalyst in the formation of a particular incarnation of a worldview, with a long pedigree in American history, that godless elites were stealing the nation from godly masses.”

That worldview, as becomes evident, is one with which Sasse is deeply sympathetic. As a historical matter, Sasse is correct that much of the reaction to the Court’s Establishment Clause cases was rooted in Christian anti-communist movements (which I fully agree formed an underappreciated foundation for the modern religious right). But even though the historical record is rife with demagogues who stirred up anti-communist (and then, anti-secularist) passions, in his thesis Sasse claims instead that this grassroots reaction was sua sponte.

Only later in the dissertation — after documenting, in fascinating detail, congressional hearings on a proposed Constitutional amendment to permit school prayer — does Sasse concede that reporters “did uncover some other unseemly conservative allies, such as the John Birch Society, Billy Hargis, and Gerald L.K. Smith,” founder of the anti-Semitic Christian Nationalist Crusade.

But before that concession, Sasse spends considerable time with the records of the House Judiciary Committee, and the mail it received from what Sasse portrays as the country’s salt and light citizens opposing “activist judges” on the Supreme Court.

At the center of this episode was a Republican congressman from New York, Frank Becker, a Catholic, who first proposed the school prayer amendment in the wake of the 1962 Supreme Court decision in Engel v. Vitale. Throughout, Sasse portrays Becker as a true believer, not a calculating politician, whose tenacious focus derived less from a studied assessment of his audience than from his heartfelt conviction that the hope of America lay in its special relationship with the Almighty, and in the nation’s resolve to doggedly oppose the most formidable system of atheistic imperialism the world had ever known.

Becker, depicted here as a David to a Democratic Goliath, was stymied by the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Emanuel Celler (who Sasse repeatedly reminds us was Jewish), who refused to hold hearings on Becker’s proposal. But Becker was so committed to defending God and country, Sasse writes, that he then devoted his energies to educating the public about the mechanics of a discharge petition to force the chairman’s hand. “There was something almost Shakespearean,” Sasse notes, “about a man claiming to represent the great majority in defense of the great tradition now having to depend on an arcane legislative procedure.”

Sasse insists that the public outcry for a school prayer amendment was a “genuinely ‘bottom-up’ movement,” citing letters and other documents in the Judiciary Committee trove. A high-school student in Wyoming, for example, “implored all faithful countrymen ‘to remember that when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, his first move toward world conquest was the expulsion of religion from the schools.”

Becker’s machinations have been largely lost to history, since historians of the period, to Sasse’s dismay, have focused more on the Vietnam War and civil rights movement than on religion. But as Sasse’s narrative proceeds, it becomes clear that despite failing to amend the Constitution to permit mandatory school prayer (an effort Newt Gingrich half-heartedly resurrected in the 1990s), Becker emerges as the courageous, if unsophisticated, defender of Sasse’s pious, patriotic multitudes.

Becker repeatedly referred to his adversaries as a “fraternity of secularists” in the Democratic Party. But as Sasse documents in compelling detail, Becker was ultimately outsmarted and crushingly humiliated by Celler and his mainline Protestant allies, who dissected, undermined, and rebutted Becker’s arguments for the amendment. (The mainline Protestants, through the National Council of Churches, often attacked by the right as a communist tool, were united in opposition to the amendment. Evangelicals, in contrast, lacked a unified position.)

Despite Becker’s humiliation, he rises from the ashes as a roughed-up hero in Sasse’s telling. Sasse likens him to William Jennings Bryan, embarrassed by Clarence Darrow in the Scopes monkey trial. To Sasse, however, Becker should not be a source of shame for conservatives, but a source of pride, a true believer representing the authentic American masses. “His dreadful performance as lead witness,” Sasse writes, “ultimately resulted less from an arrogant commitment to grandstanding than from a genuine naiveté about this thicket.”

Despite Becker’s loss, Sasse argues that a conservative push for the entanglement of religion and politics prevailed. “Americans did not want a privatization of faith,” he maintains, adding,

Democrats faced a major obstacle in equaling the fervor of the Republicans in the prayer crusade because of the visibility of the alliance between the Democratic Party and the liberal Jewish groups so closely identified with the legal secularization movement.

For Sasse, the Nixon era was not defined by his notorious efforts to drum up fear of “acid, amnesty, and abortion,” but by his and Spiro Agnew’s savvy sympathies for the “bottom-up” masses’ existing religious fears. Nixon and his “silent majority,” Sasse writes, “spoke effectively to and for the small-town values still prized by most of the country.” Most historians’ telling of the conservative resurgence of the 1960s and 70s, he goes on, has neglected the central role of conservative reaction to secularization. “Indeed angst about secularization, more than any other complaint,” he writes, “provided a lens through which Americans could see all other social problems as sharing a common root, a liberal root.”

Other historians, notably Randall Balmer, have documented conservative backlash to school desegregation and the 1976 revocation of Bob Jones University’s tax-exempt status for its interracial dating ban as motivating forces for the religious right. Sasse conceded “nativist passions and racist status anxiety surely comprise part of the story, but not the whole of it.”

Instead, he argues, the religious right “is better understood first as a consequence of fears about top-down communism — and about the evaporation of a religious understanding of the nation — than as simply a product of resistance to the sexual revolution or desegregation.”

Sasse’s nostalgia for grassroots impulses lead him to pinpoint the religious right’s rise before Reagan. It was Nixon, not Reagan, Sasse argues, who brought political vitality to the religious right as a grassroots movement, emphasizing a “cleavage” between the religious and the irreligious, and leaning on the support of the evangelist Billy Graham to burnish his credentials. The GOP didn’t win over working-class white voters by opposing civil rights and abortion, according to Sasse, but by highlighting a clash between religion and secularism. It wasn’t Reagan who turned the tide of white evangelicals to the Republican Party, but Nixon. Evangelicals didn’t become more prominent in the public square because of Reagan’s presidency, and their storied role in his election, but in the rise of “entrepreneurial” evangelicalism and the explosion of para-church structures, which “remade the experience of lived religion for countless lay Protestants.”

Sasse’s reflections on the Moral Majority period are shot through with skepticism for evangelical political leadership, with its “willingness to run out in front of the masses claiming to be their leaders.” Throughout, his nostalgia for the supposedly grassroots promoters of a true American religious ethic seems to trump the role of any of the religious leaders organizing around Reagan’s candidacy.

Sasse’s dissertation was written during the presidency of George W. Bush (in whose administration Sasse later served). As a candidate 10 years later, Sasse has reprised themes about elites (the Obama administration) imposing something terrible (the contraception coverage benefit) on religious objectors. Ultimately that issue will be decided by a Court that has eroded the Warren Court’s Establishment Clause jurisprudence and embraced legislative prayer, at least, in a decision that has alarmed secularists. But should the Court’s “activist judges” rule in the Obama administration’s favor, you can count on conservative leaders stoking the fears of Ben Sasse’s religious “grassroots.”

Sarah Posner, author of God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters, covers politics and religion. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The American Prospect, The Nation, Salon, and other publications. Follow her on Twitter.