Through the Flaming Sword

I’ve written about this before. Christian apocalypticism poses its own unique threat to the earth, its peoples, and all our fellow creatures.

When you believe that God will destroy a corrupt world as part of his last saving act, as he did in the time of Noah and promises in the book of Revelation, then an earth in destruction can be a good thing, a sign of God’s immanent return in judgmental glory. Furthermore, humans who are destroying the earth can be seen as, in some way, participating in God’s final act of righteousness. And finally, trying to stop the earth’s destruction can be seen as acting against God’s will, and that is Satan’s work.

Religious apocalyptic ideology, especially that based on biblical apocalyptic, like the book of Revelation, is itself the ultimate conspiracy theory, one of the factors cited by Zaleha in his article as contributing to fundamentalist hostility to action on climate change. The ultimate apocalyptic conspirator is the divine who wrote Revelation, and the belief system is so fantastic that to believe in it warps cognitive thinking itself; it infects all the other things you believe or could believe, and it makes lots of room for more thinking along similar lines. It is so rife with vague and esoteric symbology that it invites an unlimited amount of further speculation. And it offers the ultimate incentive: it invites its believers to feel that they have a role to play in the ultimate drama—when the drama is truly cosmic, even the bit parts in the drama are important. And the final curtain call takes place before the audience of the angels and the throne of God himself (sic).

The Revelation script is now two thousand years old and the failure of its fulfillment to date would, you might think, weaken its hold on believers. But apparently not; it never fails to resurface periodically. And now, the apocalyptic threat is all too real. Now believers have real world events to hold onto, regardless of the disconnect between those events and the specific symbolic elements of the myth. First, those symbolic elements have always been subject to adaptive interpretation, as I’ve already noted. But more importantly, they were never the main thing, anyway—it’s the spirit of apocalypticism that really matters, the feeling that you are part of some ultimate inbreaking of God’s presence, and that it’s all about judgment: a planet will die, but you will live on in bliss in a heaven that transcends life on a planet. 

This is the ultimate face of what Zaleha calls “collective narcissism:” the ultimate story is all about us, God’s faithful, and, of course, them, those who face his judgment for their unbelief in the conspiracy theory.