There have been lots of essays, here and elsewhere, about the increasing influence and power of far-right-wing Christianity in our lives, how it drives or is driven by racism, misogyny, the sheer desire for power, the belief in the supremacy not just of Christianity overall but of White Christian nationalism in particular. All of those are genuine and very serious factors. But there is another one which seems to be getting less attention yet is no less significant: the belief that the end of the world will come if Christians can just create the right conditions for it.
(By “end of the world” I mean the end of the world as it currently exists, with suffering and death. It doesn’t mean the physical world will cease to exist; rather, there will be heaven on earth — a return to the garden of Eden, as it were.)
If you are Catholic, or mainstream Protestant, certainly if you are not a Christian of any sort, this may seem like an off-the-wall notion. (I’m skipping the various Orthodox branches, who have little presence in the US.) It is, after all, something that most of these Christians have decided, over the course of time, will come in its own good time, and they are not going to obsess over it in the meantime. But many (not all) evangelical and essentially all fundamentalist Protestants do obsess over it and structure their lives and their actions around that obsession.
There is a concept called millennialism, derived largely from Revelation, which holds that God’s kingdom will be established on earth for a thousand years (a millennium), after which God will hold a final judgment for all eternity. Some early Protestants expanded this idea into what became two specific theologies: premillennialism and postmillennialism. To very briefly generalize, the first one says Jesus will come back before the millennium starts to clean up the mess on earth (sometimes described as a seven-year “tribulation”) and then rule on earth for a thousand years. The second argues that we must establish a Christian kingdom on earth for a thousand years first, after which Jesus will return to announce the end of the world and the final judgment. (Caution: this is a simple summary of a complex concept; among other things, people sometimes move back and forth between them.)
Both premillennialism and postmillennialism have had great influence on American thinking and action. Massachusetts Bay Colony began with a postmillennialist agenda: John Winthrop’s “city on a hill,” and Jonathan Edwards’s declaration “that the beginning of this great work of God [the millennium] must be near. And there are many things that make it probable that this work will begin in America.” (Other Puritans, such as Increase and Cotton Mather, fall more into the premillennialist camp, as do today’s Seventh-Day Adventists and “Christian Zionists,” for example.)
I don’t want to make this into a long history lecture, but I needed to establish this much foundation to make the following point: One of the factors behind the current movement by some Christians to take over the United States is the postmillennialist belief that, if they can create a Christian kingdom on earth where everyone obeys God’s law, then finally this will get Jesus to return and bring about the end of the world once and for all.
In her 2017 book, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, Frances Fitzgerald explains the thinking of R. J. Rushdoony, writing in the mid-20th century, giving his variant of postmillennialism:
As one protégé, David Chilton, put it, “The Christian goal for the world for the world is the universal development of Biblical theocratic republics, in which every are of life is redeemed and placed under the Lordship of Jesus Christ and the rule of God’s law.” The goal, once achieved, would, Rushdoony promised, lead directly to Christ’s return and His millennial reign on earth. . . .
With God on their side, Christians had no need for majoritarian politics, or for compromise and accommodation to reach their goal. Rushdoony was completely straightforward in rejecting democracy. (341-42)
(This form of postmillennialism calls for Jesus to return after the world has been made ready for him and then reign for a thousand years.)
Rushdoony’s work is touted today by some of the leading personalities and policy groups on the Christian right. Perhaps the most telling example comes from David Barton, whose efforts to reframe our constitutional republic as a Christian nationalist enterprise are at the center of so many of the movement’s cultural and legislative initiatives. A Founder of American Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart (Mar 6, 2020)
Abortion is against God’s law (even though the Bible never says so), so it has to go. Gays are violating God’s law, so they have to be punished, even eliminated, if there is to be a Christian kingdom. Women must be subservient to men. No non-Christians (or even the “wrong” kind of Christians — looking at you, Catholics and Episcopalians and Methodists, etc.) will be allowed to live (except maybe in a degraded state) in this Christian kingdom. And of course, they need guns — in the right hands — to enforce all this.
All in the name of Jesus, and in the fantasy that this time, if they just get everything just right, this time he really will come back.