One of the big scientific events in 1973 was Comet Kohoutek, which according to the world’s leading astronomers was to attain perihelion the day after Christmas that year. At first, this was exciting news, but as Christmas and Kohoutek drew closer, religious nut-jobs came wriggling out of the cracks like fat cockroaches. One such nut-job was a pastor named David Berg, who announced that Kohoutek had come to destroy the world on Christmas morning. Berg claimed that he had been visited by Jesus Himself, who promised to deliver Berg and his followers to heaven just before Kohoutek struck.
Mom assured me that it was all a big lie, that David Berg was something we called a “crackpot,” but I still I lay awake on Christmas Eve, not listening for the clip-clop of Santa’s reindeer but counting the minutes until God’s rogue comet destroyed everything I knew or loved. Of course the world and I survived, but that did not stop the fear. Kohoutek had opened up the floodgates. Gone were any thoughts I may have had of a comforting Jesus, to be replaced by the pissed-off über-warrior of a Jonathan Edwards sermon. David Berg and his successors had polluted my Messiah.
One Saturday night during my sixth grade year, I noticed Mom sitting down to watch an independent film shot in Des Moines, Iowa, which was being sponsored by one of the churches in the nearby city. Before the film began, the pastor of the church that presented the film appeared on the screen to give us a chilling introduction. I did not recall all of his words, but one concept hung in the air that night like cigarette smoke: Jesus was coming back very soon … and he would come as “a thief in the night.” The film we then saw bore that very title--A Thief In the Night. I was absolutely terrified.
Long before the immense popularity (and financial prosperity) of the Left Behind series, A Thief In the Night was the first “Christian-made” film to exploit the campfire horror stories of Revelations. The plot of the film is straightforward: Patty Myers (Patty Dunning), a free-spirited non-Christian, awakens one day to find that her very Christian husband has been whisked away by the Rapture (the moment in Christian eschatology when Christ comes to take up his followers into heaven). With all the real Christians gone from earth, The United Nations forms a global fascist organization called UNITE, forcing everyone to take “the mark of the beast” so that they can be identified. Those who refuse “the mark” are put to death, and pretty soon Patty finds herself on the run with a bunch of creepy men in UNITE pith helmets hot on her heels. At the end of the film, Patty is cornered on a bridge, and these crazy UNITE thugs throw her to her death. Suddenly, Patty awakens in her bed, relieved to discover that it was all a dream. She goes to the bathroom and discovers that her husband has indeed been raptured, just like in her dream, and she collapses in tears, shouting “No! No! No!” The final shot is of a ticking clock with the title reading THE END … IS NEAR!
A Thief In the Night was followed by three sequels that I have managed to avoid: A Distant Thunder, in which Patty and friends are arrested and given a choice to accept “the mark” or be put to the guillotine; Image of the Beast, in which Patty meets her demise (in a terrifying scene that some horror critics have compared to the films of Lucio Fulci); and The Prodigal Planet, which I know little about but I understand is the equivalent of beating a dead horse. The movies are low-budget in terms of acting and production values, but they still pack a punch for impressionable children. One of the reasons for this is that they remove the last safety valve viewers have when watching horror films--they suggest that they not be dismissed as “only a movie,” that they are, in fact, a depiction of what is in store for us in the very near future. As such, End-Times movies, for the Christian, are like the disturbing ending of The Town That Dreaded Sundown (in which a real-life serial killer who was never caught by authorities is seen sitting in a movie theater--perhaps yours!--watching the very movie that you just saw!).
It took me years to get past the nightmares brought on by A Thief In the Night. Popular Christian culture, lathered into frenzy by Watergate, the Cold War, and a Recession, did not help matters much. Suddenly, the End Times were everywhere. Hal Lindsay was among the first to run with the ball, as his The Late Great Planet Earth (which put current events in the context of Biblical prophecy) was a bestseller. Around the same time, my Baptist friends in school were pushing Jack Chick’s creepy comic book tracts like heroin, beautifully drawn little narratives about sinners suffering eternally in Hell and wishy-washy Christians enduring the post-Rapture Tribulation after being left behind. I specifically remember opening a Chick Tract once to an image of a Christian strapped to a table, being tortured with electric shock and ordered renounce his faith.
In the summer of 1979, I signed up for church camp, something I had been doing since the seventh grade. Church camp, if you’ve never been there, is a week-long wilderness retreat for teens where they can commune with kids their own age, learn a bit more abut God’s love, and have a little break from the parents. By the time I had finished my sophomore year, I had made a few friends at church camp and looked forward to seeing them every June. But the 1979 camp retreat was a little different. In normal summers, that number of teens in attendance usually rose to around 30 or 40; in 1979, our numbers were exactly nine--four boys and five girls. With such a small group, our so-called Christian counselors had to get creative with the lessons, and one afternoon, they came up with the most disturbing “educational” exercise I have ever experienced.
It started when one of the youth ministers--let us call him Steve--revealed himself to be an apocalyptic nut-job. He had read Revelations thoroughly and was well-versed in the popular opinion of how the End Times were going to be played out. One afternoon, when I was talking to him about high school and how tough it was to fit in, he stopped me in mid-sentence and ordered me to stop worrying about it. “There’s a good chance, Matt, that you won’t be graduating from high school anyway.”
I could not believe my ears, so I asked him why.
“You just finished your sophomore year,” Steve said. “That means you’re on pace to graduate in 1981. Jesus will come back before 1981. If you’re a Christian, you’ll be part of the Rapture, and if you’re not, then there probably won’t be much need for high schools down here anyway.”
I was terrified all over again. How could this be? Steve later explained how Jesus said that the generation that “witnessed the budding of the fig tree” would be the generation to see the Lord’s return. The budding of the fig tree was the birth of the nation Israel, which happened in 1948. According to the Bible, a generation of judgment is 40 years, but within that time, Jesus will come back and call up his church, leaving the rest of mankind in Tribulation for another seven years. So, 1948 plus 40 equals 1988. But subtract the seven-year Tribulation, and what do you have? 1981. I could already see new nightmares coming.
As if Steve’s prophecy wasn’t bad enough, he then had to initiate a lesson surrounding the End Times. One morning after breakfast, he called the nine of us teens into the lounge. “Each of you is going to be given an identify for role-playing purposes,” he said. “We are then going to place you alone in the storm shelter. While you are there, we ask you to imagine that the US and the Soviet Union have engaged in global nuclear war. You are in a fallout shelter. There are nine of you, but you only have enough supplies for six. That means that three of you will have to be cast out of the shelter, to be sent to your deaths by radiation sickness. Your assignment is to decide which three that will be.”
It was traumatizing enough to be a teenager, to maneuver the caste system of high school. Now Steve wanted us to up the ante, to place our pathetic high school politics in an end-of-the-world scenario and imagine how we would react. I was already sick with fear because of Steve’s mathematical Judgment Day equation. I was already falling into depression because the world would end before I got out of high school. Now Steve wanted us to experience the horror, to confront ourselves with the hard decisions we would have to make in the face of the coming holocaust. If church camp was about making a connection through God’s love, I never felt more distant from it than I did at that moment.
If I had to blame anyone for my fifteen-year departure from God and subsequent comfort taken in alcohol, I would blame the apocalyptic Christians. Despite what they may say, the bill of goods they are selling is a world without faith. As Chris Hedges points out in his book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, the Christian Right today preys on the weak through a theology of despair. They seem oblivious to Jesus’ most urgent command to Peter (deemed so important that the Lord repeated it three times) to “Feed my sheep!”
The Apocalyptic Christians do not believe the sheep are worth feeding or the world worth saving. They celebrate the calamities in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East, all the time pointing to chapter and verse that reinforces their belief in a day of reckoning. As Hedges states on alternet.org, “Believers … clinging to this magical belief, which is a bizarre form of spiritual Darwinism, will be raptured upwards while the rest of us will be tormented with horrors by a warrior Christ and finally extinguished. This obsession with apocalyptic violence is an obsession with revenge.”
For the longest time, I wanted nothing to do with God. The Apocalyptic Christians had scared me away from Him. And that was the worst thing of all. It doesn’t matter how much good they think they are doing; the fact is, any doctrine that compels a man to flee from God is not a healing doctrine at all. Rather it is an ideology of sickness, destruction, exclusivity, and judgment. And its bitter message of anger and hopelessness is worse than anything any non--believer has ever tried to tell me.
* * * *
On Friday, December 21, 2012, the world was supposed to end. For me, it did, for that was the day I attended the funeral of my father. When I got sober back in 1994, it was my father who took me into his home, my father who listened to my alcoholic blatherings without judgment, my father who stayed up late in the night, sitting in his easy chair and talking me through my fears. We had our issues, and we butted our heads, but it is through the grace of God, the miracle of the Twelve Steps, and the patience of this fine and amazing man that I was able to pull through the early days of withdrawal.
Everything written in this entry that appears above the asterisks was part of a blog I originally posted on Facebook back in the Spring of 2007. When my father read this blog, he wrote an eloquent letter to me lamenting the fact that I was raised with such fear. He assumed accountability for this fact and assured me that had he known what was going on at church camp, he would have addressed the issue at the next district meeting for the Church of Christ.
My father did not fear the End Times. He did not even worry about them, nor did he worry about heaven or hell. My father approached the Bible with the same analytical mind that he approached Math and Science, which as an educator were two of his passions. He taught a Sunday school class, and every Saturday night he prepared for his lesson by dissecting the Scriptures to determine the nature and intention of the prose before him. What he came up with after years and years of this painstaking process is that Jesus came as a demonstration of Love, offering us a blueprint for how to live, and Dad did his very best to follow that blueprint.
Dad did not read the Left Behind series, nor did he preach about the End Times. He did not ostracize those who may have believed differently, nor did he reject those others (atheists, homosexuals, etc.) who may have been abandoned by other so-called Christians. My father lived a life intent on honoring Christ, and nowhere in Christ’s teachings did it say anything about picketing funerals, blocking the doors of abortion clinics, or terrifying young minds with tales of a vengeful God who champed at the bit to issue a terminal beat-down on Judgment Day.
My father helped save me from alcoholism, but more than this, he saved me from fear. He was the kind of man who made you feel comfortable, who treated all others as if they were friends, who viewed life through a filter of quiet joy, and made even his enemies live in peace with him. I remember bringing some of my outspoken atheist friends home to meet my parents, but in my father’s presence they were humble and respectful, not out of fear but because he was so gentle and kind that he made you crave his acceptance. Never were they judged or called to the carpet for their beliefs or lack thereof. If these people were going to Hell, they would never hear it from my father.
The Mayan Apocalypse has come and gone, but for me it was perhaps the most dramatic paradigm shift of my life. Everything in the world now looks different, and I find that I cannot return to my previous state. Yes, the world did end for me on December 21. Nothing about my life can ever be the same. In a way, that’s a good thing. I now have an opportunity to honor my father in death in ways I did not honor him in life. I can now look at the example he offered with unbiased eyes, and maybe, just maybe, I can try to be a little bit more like him.
So even though my old world ended, it can be replaced with a better one. I think Dad would have liked to think of it that way. My only regret is that once this blog is posted, I cannot look forward to another heartfelt letter from him, talking me through my latest fears.
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