Christian Fundamentalism and the Culture of Disenchantment

Paul Maltby

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780813933443
• eBook ISBN: 9780813933467
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Within the familiar clash of religious conservatism and secular liberalism Paul Maltby finds a deeper discord: an antipathy between Christian fundamentalism and the postmodern culture of disenchantment. Arguing that each camp represents the poles of America's virulent culture wars, he shows how the cultural identity, lifestyle, and political commitments of many Americans match either the fundamentalist profile of one who cleaves to metaphysical and authoritarian beliefs or the postmodern profile of one who is disposed to critical inquiry and radical-democratic values.

Maltby offers a critique that operates in both directions. His use of the resources of postmodern theory to contest fundamentalism's doctrinal claims, ultra-right politics, anti-environmentalism, and conservative aesthetics informs his engagement with contemporary fundamentalist painting, spiritual warfare fiction, dominionist attitudes to nature, and a profoundly undemocratic interpretation of Christianity. At the same time, Maltby identifies some of fundamentalism's legitimate spiritual concerns, assesses the cost of perpetual critique, and exposes the deficit of spiritual meaning that haunts the culture of disenchantment.

1 FUNDAMENTALIST HISTORY, POSTMODERN CONTINGENCY

In the twentieth century, dispensationalism became the dominant eschatology among fundamentalist Christians in America. According to Charles Caldwell Ryrie, the preeminent theologian at the Dallas Theological Seminary, “Dispensationalism reveals the outworking of God's plan in the historical process in a progressive revelation of His glory” (37). This fundamentalist doctrine projects a model of history which depends on an abstruse numerology derived from archangel Gabriel's prophecy in Daniel (9:24–27). In what, from the start, has been received as a highly contentious interpretation that builds on the significance of the number 7, “seventy weeks of years” was elaborated into a system of history, whose time-frame extends all the way forward to the Christian millennium (see Marsden, Fundamentalism 52–54). The doctrine divides history into seven divinely administered epochs or “dispensations.” We are currently living under the Sixth Dispensation, that of Grace, which followed that of the Mosaic Law. The seventh and final dispensation, that of the Millennium, will be preceded by a rigidly ordered sequence of End Times events. First the Rapture,¹ then, for those left behind, the horrendous afflictions of the seven-year Tribulation (Matt. 24:21), a time marked by the rule of the Antichrist and the Apostate Church. The Tribulation ends when Christ and his heavenly host return to earth to defeat the forces of the Antichrist at the Battle of Armageddon, on the Plain of Jezreel in modern-day Israel. Next comes Christ's thousand-year rule on earth, followed by one last abortive revolt by Satan, the resurrection of the dead, and, at the end of time, the Last Judgment.

This (premillennialist) conception of history is entirely based on faith in, and a literal reading of, biblical prophecy. For example, a passage from 1 Thessalonians is read quite literally as predicting the Rapture: “And the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air” (4:16–17).² “Bible prophecy is history written in advance,” says a pastor in Left Behind (LaHaye and Jenkins 214). Indeed, all the novels in LaHaye and Jenkins's cycle include lengthy quotations from, and commentaries on, prophecies recorded in selected biblical texts, notably Revelation, Daniel, and Ezekiel. (LaHaye, according to the covers of his books, is a “renowned prophecy scholar.”) In an interview on CBS's 60 Minutes in 2002, Ed McAteer, cofounder of the fundamentalist Moral Majority, said of the current conflicts in the Middle East: “I believe that we are seeing prophecy unfold so rapidly and dramatically and wonderfully and, without exaggerating, [it] makes me breathless” (qtd. in Simon). For Pastor John Hagee, megachurch leader and media mogul, the al-Qaida attack on the United States is a preliminary step toward the End Times: “We are seeing in my judgment the birth pangs that will be called in the future the beginning of the end. I believe in my mind the Third World War has already begun. I believe it began on 9/11” (qtd. in Rossing, Rapture 71). The invasion of Iraq is also welcomed as a step toward World War III (i.e., Armageddon), as more evidence that history is unfolding according to the dispensationalist schedule. Apparently, Revelation explicitly prophesied the invasion: “And I heard a voice…saying to the sixth angel…Loose the four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates. And the four angels were loosed, which were prepared…for to slay the third part of men” (9:13–15).

Fundamentalist scholars have long engaged in a good deal of arcane numerology in their efforts to demonstrate the truth of biblical End Times prophecy. Mark Hulsether recounts how one such scholar read the book of Daniel backward, counting every seventh letter, to disclose the phrase “Arafat shake hands.” The scholar interpreted these words as prophesying that the Israeli/Palestinian peace negotiations of the time would fail because the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was an ally of the doomed Antichrist and an enemy of Israel, which was foreordained to occupy Palestinian land (192). And Paul Boyer recounts how another dispensationalist prophecy scholar discovered that the numerical value of the Cyrillic letters in the name of ex-Soviet leader “Mikhail S. Gorbachev” adds up to 1,322, which equals 666 x 2. This finding confirmed the suspicion, widespread in some fundamentalist circles, that the peace-seeking Gorbachev was the Antichrist in disguise (When Time 178). By the standards of secular academic research, such investigative methods have no credibility, yet they are typical of much dispensationalist scholarship.

The postmodern perception of truth as relativized and delimited by geo-historical contingencies prompts inquiry into the time and place at which dispensationalism emerged as a discourse. If the doctrine could, as its adherents claim, be traced back to the apostles (see Van Deventer), it might seem inevitable and natural to Christianity, ratified by two millennia of continuity. However, dispensationalism is a relatively recent and localized phenomenon, which arrived and flourished under historically specific and fortuitous conditions. In fact, the doctrine is barely 180 years old, its origin pinpointed to the 1830s. It had no place in the creed before then. Its progenitor, John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), was an Irish-born lawyer living in England, who later became a leader of the Plymouth Brethren. Darby saw the established Church as corrupted by Erastianism and clericalism. He charged it with abandoning the teachings of the apostles in favor of “man-made doctrines.” He railed against the increasing latitude by which the Church allowed freer (i.e., nonliteral) interpretation of the Bible. (The Higher Criticism of the Tübingen School applied Hegelian historicism to the study of Christianity. In investigating the sources of biblical texts to determine dates, place of composition, and authorship, it undermined traditional claims to a unified scripture of divine revelation.) Hence, in an endeavor to reaffirm the authority of the Bible's account of Christian history and combat the secularizing effects of liberal thinking, Darby called for a return to a fundamentalist respect for biblical literalism. Dispensationalism was the theory he developed for the purpose of this counterattack.

Proceeding from a “literal” interpretation of scripture, Darby proposed that Jesus would return without warning to rapture the church of “true believers” before the seven-year Tribulation, and that he would return a second time, after the Tribulation, to defeat Satan's forces at Armageddon and, only then, establish his millennial kingdom. While not quite a wooden literalism altogether insensitive to figures of speech, Darbyite dispensationalism elides the generic distinctions between gospels, prophecy, epistles, and parables, thereby losing sight of the specific cultural and historical contexts in which they were formulated. For example, Barbara Rossing of the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, in a historicist vein, has shown how dispensationalist theology is derived from a misconstrual of “prophecy” in its biblical usage. “Prophecy” does not signify prediction but God's word of “timely warning” of the dire consequences of worldly power (Rapture 88). She explains that Revelation was written in the context of the rival forces of militaristic empire and “Lamb power”: “Revelation aims to convince us that Jesus’ model of Lamb power is a model of victory more powerful than Rome's model of nike as military conquering” (120). Rossing reminds us that the meaning of “apocalyptic” is “unveiling,” rather than a prophetic disclosure of God's plans for the future (81). The purpose of Revelation was to “unveil” the vision of an alternative, godly life for the churches oppressed by the Roman Empire: “Revelation's proclamation of an impending ‘end’ referred not to the end of the world but to the end of Roman rule” (87). Revelation sought to bring a message of hope to Christians in an age of imperial violence. Prophecy necessarily relates to the political times in which it was written.

Insofar as Darby's tours of North America coincided with the Civil War and its aftermath, his theology—with its focus on the cataclysmic events prophesied in Revelation and the imminent return of Christ—must have resonated with communities devastated by what was “widely interpreted as ‘a true Apocalyptic contest’” (Marsden, Fundamentalism 11). (The conflict claimed 650,000 lives in a population estimated, in 1870, at under 40 million.) Ernest Sandeen has argued that it was the “millenarianism” of the last half of the nineteenth century which “gave life and shape to the Fundamentalist movement” in the United States (xv), while “World War I greatly stimulated interest in the second advent of Christ and the interpretation of prophecy” (233).

Darby's American followers were also alarmed by the rapid advances of liberal theology in the United States from the 1870s onward. However, conservative Christians were no longer contending only with historicist and rationalist criticism; evolutionary naturalism and a growing interest in fossil records also posed a serious challenge to scriptural authority. Postbellum American Protestantism was polarized between conservatives striving to defend “the fundamentals” of the faith and modernizing liberals. Thus, dispensationalism was adopted as a militant reaction to the incursions of liberal theology and naturalism; it was the product of a historically conditioned struggle of ideas, rather than, as Darby claimed, “a rediscovered truth.”

The popularity of the Scofield Reference Bible, published in 1909, proved to be the critical factor in the spread of dispensationalism among American Protestants. This version of the King James Bible, with estimated sales of over 12 million copies (Boyer, When Time 98), printed commentary directly inspired by Darby's theology beneath the scriptural text. As Rossing has observed, these annotations acquired authority simply by virtue of appearing in a Bible when, in fact, it is just Cyrus Scofield speaking, not the Bible (“God so Loved”). And Boyer has noted that “readers often could not remember whether they had encountered a particular thought in [Scofield's] notes or in the [biblical] text” (98). One such note, characteristic of Scofield's fundamentalist conception of a precisely demarcated epochal history, reads, “The Dispensations are distinguished, exhibiting the majestic, progressive order of the divine dealings of God with humanity, ‘the increasing purpose’ which runs through and links together the ages, from the beginning of the life of man to the end in eternity” (iii).

Later in the century, dispensationalist doctrine would be promulgated not only by pastors preaching from the pulpit and by its vocal proponents at the Dallas Theological Seminary but also by radio programs (many sponsored by the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago); by Christian television such as the Trinity Broadcasting Network and the Christian Broadcasting Network; by the phenomenal output of the doomsday publishing industry, notably Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth, whose estimated sales of 28 million copies made it the best-selling nonfiction book of the seventies (Hulsether 190), and currently, the Left Behind books, with combined sales to date of over 65 million copies, described by Jack Van Deventer as “recycled Darbyism.” Todd Johnson, who directs the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, estimates that 40% of fundamentalists adhere to the doctrine of dispensational premillennialism. The Chronicle of Higher Education refers to polls, conducted in 2003, in which “upwards of 40 percent” of Americans “believe that Bible prophecies detail a specific sequence of End Times events” (Boyer, “John Darby” B10).

The attraction of premillennial dispensationalism in recent decades derives from the revulsion felt for what fundamentalists see as the profanations of postmodernism, especially its “debased” media culture of “Holly-weird” films and antimoral, antifamily TV. It also derives from the job insecurity and disruptive effects of an ever-modernizing capitalism, and from the continuing appeal to an apocalyptic/millenarian mind-set of Darby's core concept of the pre-Tribulation Rapture, which could occur at any moment given, as Darby argued, that Christ's return is imminent. Consider also that Darby's pre-Tribulationist version of the Rapture spares Christians from suffering the unspeakable horrors of the End Times; just before the onset of the Tribulation, they are whisked up to the safety of heaven, from where they can gloat over the torments endured, down on earth, by the unrighteous.³ Moreover, as Peter Yoonsuk Paik astutely observes, “For what is the Rapture but the ‘holiday from history’ elevated to a cosmic principle?…Indeed, the Rapture as a doctrine appears acutely symptomatic of a people for whom history is unreal and who have become convinced that disasters happen only to other people in foreign countries.”

We can see, then, how dispensationalism emerged and flourished in a web of historically and culturally specific contingencies: a punctual reaction to the first wave of nineteenth-century liberal theology; a misreading of “prophecy” in its scriptural context; dissemination thanks largely to a run of books with sales almost unrivaled in publishing history; the receptivity of a culture given to periodic bouts of millenarianism. In spite of its universalizing pretensions and claims of apostolic pedigree, dispensationalist doctrine has distinct local and historical limits.

In the view of Cyrus Scofield, Dwight Moody, and other fundamentalist thinkers, each dispensation ends in failure owing to the innate corruption of humankind. Human history is not a story of gradual progress but one of degeneracy and destruction. By extension, all human institutions are inherently defective, including the “visible church,” whose future, under the Antichrist, is apostasy. Dispensationalists regard humanitarian institutions that operate at the national or international level as the prospective domain of the Antichrist. Thus, Pat Robertson condemned George Bush Sr.'s collaboration with the United Nations as “Satanic,” part of an agenda to establish “an occult-inspired world-socialist dictatorship” (New World 92). And human efforts at social reform, in particular efforts by labor activists and welfare workers to ameliorate the conditions of the poor and weak under unfettered capitalism, are doomed insofar as they are merely man-made projects and have no place in the divinely ordained dispensationalist scheme. Utopias designed by humans are but false forms of redemption because they render Christ's intervention superfluous. Indeed, this is the fundamentalist objection to the Social Gospel as adhered to by liberal Protestants. The duty of true Christians is to evangelize: their mission is to save souls for Christ, not to reform the world.

Dispensationalist prophecy has favored fundamentalist support for the virulent anticommunism and chauvinistic militarism of the New Right. In particular, the anti-Soviet polemics of Pat Robertson, Hal Lindsey, and others partly derives from their dispensationalist reading of Ezekiel 38. They interpret the account of how Gog, the “chief prince” of a northern land, will invade Israel only to be destroyed by the power of God's wrath (38:2, 15–22) as prophesying Russia's invasion of Israel and Russia's subsequent destruction—both pivotal End Times events. Accordingly, in the context of cold war politics, Paul Boyer has observed, “National opinion surveys in the mid-1980s revealed that a quarter of Americans viewed the U.S.-Soviet conflict in theological terms” (When Time 175). And insofar as Russia plays a central role in God's plan for End Time wars, fundamentalists have denounced glasnost and campaigns for peace as satanic ruses.

Biblical prophecy implies belief in history as the outworking of God's plan, which here means events occurring in accordance with the timetable of the dispensations. In this divinely ordered world, there is no place for accident, for chance occurrences that may initiate chains of events with unpredictable consequences that diverge from God's purpose. (Human agency cannot forestall the apocalyptic sequence of events; it can only prepare humans for it.) As Bush remarked in a speech on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks: “We do not claim to know all the ways of Providence. Yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, all of history” (qtd. in Cornwell). In the words of the fundamentalist theologian Carl Henry, fundamentalist doctrine “insists that the future is not an open question, but that world events move toward an ultimate consummation in a future judgment of the race” (58). In short, the dispensationalist history, as derived from a literal reading of the prophecies recorded in (chiefly) Revelation, is a one-way, God-centered process in which all decisive events are governed and connected by a single, purposive telos.

Such a model of history could not be more dramatically at variance with the postmodern model of an open-ended process and incoherent multiplicity of random events. Richard Rorty conceptualizes the future as wholly indeterminate: “After Darwin, it became possible to believe that nature is not leading up to anything—that nature has nothing in mind” (Philosophy 266). For Foucault, “The forces operating in history are not controlled by destiny or regulative mechanisms, but respond to haphazard conflicts. They do not manifest the successive forms of a primordial intention and their attraction is not that of a conclusion, for they always appear through the singular randomness of events” (Language 154–55). For Joseph Heller's postmodern cynic, Bruce Gold, “History was a trash bag of random coincidences torn open in a wind” (78). And, for good measure, consider Philip Roth's nihilistic protagonist, Simon Axler, speaking in response to living in a disenchanted world: “Nothing has a good reason for happening…. You lose, you gain—it's all caprice. The omnipotence of caprice” (16–17). Finally, recall the familiar postmodern account of historiography as a process akin to literary construction, a matter of imposing a narrative shapeliness on a mélange of isolated and disparate events. Indeed, as dramatized in Don DeLillo's Libra, “the writing of any history brings a persuasion and form to events” (211). One of DeLillo's characters, Nicholas Branch, is a historian hired to write the history of President Kennedy's assassination. Branch finds himself overwhelmed by facts “because the data keeps coming” (301, 59, 378, 441). He realizes that he must work with the imagination of a novelist in order to structure the excess data into a pattern of meaning, to “turn these notes into coherent history” (301). He thinks of the Warren Report as “the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he'd moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred” (181). And by the novel's end, Branch concludes that, in spite of his oppressive sense of conspiratorial linkages, of a tightly designed plot to murder Kennedy, “the conspiracy against the President was a rambling affair that succeeded in the short term due mainly to chance” (441).

This postmodern focus on the process of writing history, of shaping events into a coherent narrative, can throw light on the “linkages” forged between the attack on the World Trade Center and the case for war with Iraq. Where a fundamentalist history is inclined to seek a necessary link between 9/11 and the war in Iraq—a view that conforms to the dispensationalist model of a uniform and predetermined chronology—a postmodern history, premised on the contingency of events and rejecting any singular plotline, desists from a search for links and, instead, thinks in terms of a coincidence of microhistories. For example, Bush told Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas that “God told me to strike al-Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did” (qtd. in Kaplan 9; emphasis added). I emphasize “then,” the use of which implies a divinely ordered sequence of events. (And, as we have seen, Ed McAteer and John Hagee, among other fundamentalist leaders, have endorsed this view of God working his purpose out in the Middle East.) Yet, as has been widely noted, “regime change” in Iraq had been planned long before 9/11. In the classified but leaked “Defense Planning Guidance” draft of 1992, Paul Wolfowitz, then undersecretary of defense for policy, outlined plans for US intervention in Iraq to ensure, among other things, “access to vital raw material, primarily Persian Gulf oil.” A Project for a New American Century document of September 2000 discussed a plan to take military control of the Gulf region as part of its “blueprint for maintaining global US pre-eminence” (Mackay). And although advised months earlier by the CIA that “there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein was connected to the September 11 attacks” (Weinberger), Bush announced the end of major combat in Iraq by saying, “The battle in Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September 11th, 2001” (qtd. in Milbank). In fact, the only link between the 9/11 attack and the invasion of Iraq was that the former was exploited by neoconservative hawks as a pretext for the latter (Kirk). Otherwise, the two events may be understood as a convergence of unrelated plots: one by Islamic fundamentalists seeking revenge on the United States for its support of the corrupt and repressive House of Saud, and one to remove a noncompliant dictator as part of a long-term strategy for regional dominance. Moreover, in conformity with the postmodern paradigm, the consequences of this conjuncture of events have proved truly haphazard: an exacerbation of jihadist activity as the illegitimate war mobilizes pan-Islamic radicals; the emergence of Iran as a regional hegemon facilitated by a United States recoiling from the strategic catastrophe of its occupation of Iraq; social breakdown in Iraq as the state fragments into zones controlled by warring sectarian, ethnic, tribal, and criminal groups. Here history looks far more like a chaotic entanglement of contingent forces with unpredictable outcomes than a dispensationalist plan unfolding in an inevitable line of development.

In The Illusions of Postmodernism, Terry Eagleton writes, “The brand of teleology postmodernists are most given to admonishing is something of a straw target. Hardly anybody believes that history is smoothly unfurling towards some predetermined goal” (104). Yet, statistical data show that tens of millions of Americans believe in precisely such a brand of teleology. As noted earlier, “upwards of 40%” of Americans believe that the Bible has prophesied a sequence of End T...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Note on the Text
• Introduction: Creed and Critique
• 1. Fundamentalist History, Postmodern Contingency
• 2. End Times Fiction and the Ironic Reader
• 3. Fundamentalist Exclusivism, Radical Democracy
• 4. Fundamentalist Dominion, Postmodern Ecology
• 5. Evangelical Painting and the Ironic Spectator
• Conclusion: Disenchanted Christianity
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index