Part I: Going to Hell
Part II: The Late, Great Planet Earth
When I was ten, in 1976, we moved to the city of Orange and started going to North Orange Christian Church. The head minister there was the junior minister from our previous church (you know, the one whose son I conked with a play stop sign). The church building was about a hundred years old, with a real belfry, and windows made of small diamond windowpanes that had solarized to topaz yellow and amethyst purple.
It was the first time I remember actually
liking church, as opposed to taking it for granted. This was the church where I was baptized. Their music program was first rate -- once a week my parents were at choir practice and my brothers and I hung out at the church eating McDonald's and watching
The Six Million Dollar Man. My parents listened to the
Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack and we kids would boogie like mad. The minister was warm, young, funny, peppering his sermons with references to
Peanuts and
Star Trek.
He was pretty liberal, too.
I remember one sermon in particular, regarding the Crystal Cathedral -- a new church that was being built at great expense in Orange County to house one of those TV preacher shows (Hour of Power). The sermon consisted of the minister reading a list of things that could be done with the money being spent on that building: feeding whole regions in Africa for years to come, building schools and hospitals for the poor, etc. Each item sounded big, so the natural thing to picture was that any one of them could be done with the Crystal Cathedral price tag. The punch line was that you could do all of those things with the more than $20 million the building was going to cost.
(Side note: as a child I was indignantly appalled by the content of this sermon, and had a pretty low opinion of TV preachers anyway, but the phrase "Crystal Cathedral" caused me to picture something cool and Disneyland-like, you know, with real giant crystals. Kind of like the fortress of solitude in Superman. I felt even more appalled when, years later, I saw a picture of the building and it's just a typical modern glass and steel structure. It looks like an office building! Sheesh!)
The late seventies brought a surge of apocalypse mania. Not just religious apocalypse -- people speculated darkly about the fabled earthquake that would put California in the ocean, nuclear war, cities breaking down into war zones as civilization collapsed when we ran out of energy, etc. The Late, Great Planet Earth was a bestseller. The Omen movie was a hit. I was starting to see those "In case of Rapture this car will be driverless" bumper stickers. I remember discussing the subject of apocalypse with my parents, who were skeptical about the people who thought our demise was imminent and that specifics from the book (like the 666 "number of the beast") should be interpreted literally. But, they seemed to take it for granted that Revelation was a book of prophecy about the literal end of everything, which was still to come.
I decided to read Revelation for myself. I came to the conclusion that anybody who claimed they knew what it was all about was probably lying, or at least mistaken. I did enjoy it from a literary standpoint, and have re-read it a few times since then.
The most recent time I read Revelation was a few years ago, in honor of the impending millennial rollover. I was thinking, grumpily, "Why is it that people interpret stuff like the 'number of the beast is 666' literally, but the repeated statement that all these events are to happen 'soon' as figurative?"
Then I thought, "Wow, this all sort of makes sense if you look on it as political commentary about the corruptions of Rome during the early Christian era. It's even prophetic -- Rome did fall, and it was the end of an age, and ushered in a thousand years -- the Middle Ages -- during which Christianity came to dominate in the west."
Silly me. I did a little research and found out that this view of Revelation is, in fact, the official Catholic one. And the Lutheran one. And pretty much the mainstream view for most of the last two thousand years.
I thought back on the omen-crazed seventies, and realized that I could not recall hearing a single sermon or Sunday school lesson specifically on Revelation, or the end of the world, or any of that. And yet it seemed everyone knew about it, and was talking about it, and there was this shared but largely unexamined concept that as Christians we all believed in some form of end times doctrine, in spite of considerable disagreement on the particulars.
But where did that idea come from?
We were getting this notion from the same place that non-Christians were getting it -- by cultural osmosis, from books and magazines and movies, from fiction.
Not from the Bible. Not even from the pulpit. From pop culture.
And now, both Christians and non-Christians take it for granted that Christians believe in the End Times.
Next: I could really feel Satan working in my life