Religion Dispatches
Even if we haven’t listened, every generation of evangelicals and fundamentalists says it: Their apocalyptic theology makes them more active not less.
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“Religious enthusiasm” or the American apocalyptic can be read as modes of the disaffection of the citizen in a time of political delegitimation. We often see this “religion” taking shape most clearly when we focus all the way down, to the odd hybrid of melancholy and triumphalism in these assertions about Damascus.
Read MoreValues Voters Summit forces moderate Republicans to face some crushing facts.
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When I conducted a focus group at this church, the end times seemed to be on everyone’s mind. When we talked about caring for the environment, “Craig” cautioned that it was important to draw the line between protecting the creation and worshipping it, while “Julie” agreed, adding that, “like with the polar bears and stuff, of course I don’t want them to die, but you also have to realize this is just a part of the world coming to an end like it’s supposed to. And there’s nothing really that they can do.”
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RD talks to Mark Van Stone, author of 2012: Science and Prophecy of the Ancient Maya, who claims that the real lesson of the Maya is that they showed us how to destroy a civilization by stupidly using up their environment and by not planning for a bad year.
Read MoreWhoever took this viral thinks that Romney’s religion will scare voters away.
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What ought we do about millennial thinking in our day? If the combined 1300 pages of these two books have taught me anything, it’s that we can’t make it just go away. There is something fascinating, and perverse, in the human psyche that seems to yearn for this world to be other than how it is, even if that means destroying it.
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Is the human drive for immortality, from the Alexander the Great to Frankenstein to the latest technology-driven movements, just an illusion?
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No giant earthquake rippled across the surface of the earth but I wanted to know what happens next. If you’re absolutely sure the world is going to end on a specific day, and it doesn’t, what do you do? How do you explain it to yourself? What happens to your faith in God?
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I think I can safely assume that for most Americans, Camping and his miscalculated (and then re-calculated) doomsday predictions are of more curiosity than true salvific concern. Camping has been buried by subsequent news cycles and is the latest member of a cadre of religious leaders whom the Apocalypse passed by. But while May’s Apocalypse seems to have skipped over most of the world, it did land squarely on a hilltop in north-western Vietnam. It would behoove us to take notice of the complex and unexpected ways in which this spring’s apocalypticism rippled across the world…
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