Staying Up All Night for the Great Pumpkin
Those outside Evangelicalism might be a little confused as to why certain Christians are really very excited about Trump moving the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. If you're a bit bewildered, let me try to untangle things a little bit for you.
It has to do with "Bible prophecy" -- by which certain Christians mean pulling a meaning out of the Bible that it never clearly expresses, and has to be twisted out of the text as one hops around from passage to passage with no clear purpose other than to make the "prophecy" seem topical and current; and it has to do with "support for Israel" -- by which certain Christians mean accelerating the "prophetic" timeline derived earlier, so that Israel will be destroyed all the sooner. (The sooner the better.)
The "prophetic" scheme these particular Christians subscribe to is known in theological circles as "premillennial dispensationalism" (or "dispensational premilliennialism"). Somehow, their teachers have convinced them that this scheme comes from a "literal" reading of the Bible(*), even though it's a new interpretation based on John Nelson Darby's work in the 19th century. The timeline this philosophy has constructed claims that human history will culminate in seven years of judgment known as the Great Tribulation.
Darby and his particular peculiar ideas would have probably faded into obscurity had it not been for Hal Lindsey and his book, The Late Great Planet Earth. That Christian bestseller resurrected Darby's notions and reinterpreted them within John Birch conspiracy theories, reassuring Christians who were otherwise vaguely lost as they waited for death ("We're saved and destined for Heaven... I guess we just wait until that happens, then") that their faith was really much more pertinent to the society and the times than anyone had ever guessed. For the Great Tribulation to get underway, according to Lindsey, three things had to happen. First, the Jews would retake Palestine; second, they would retake Jerusalem; and third, they would rebuild the Temple of King Solomon on its original site in that city, where the Dome of the Rock now sits (which, as it turns out, the Muslims are reluctant to move or tear down). Step One happened in 1948 when Israel was created by the UN (which is now the enemy... it's complicated, but when it comes to this "prophecy" scheme, God and Satan want the same thing). Step Two happened when Israel captured Jerusalem during the Six-Day War. Step Three hasn't happened yet, but surely will Any Second Now -- and when it does, things will really start to move.
They have to move quickly, too, since Step One happened in 1948, and part of the "prophetic" scheme includes the belief that "this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place" -- a quote from Jesus in the book of Matthew (24:34) which doesn't really seem to have anything to do with the founding of the state of Israel, but this is easy to gloss over in general because other attempts in the "prophetic" scheme to tie the words in Scripture to current events are even more strained. How long a "generation" is isn't really clear, but people who seemed to think it had to be right around forty years (with a list of Biblical-sounding reasons for claiming so) had me pretty convinced that it would be right around the time of the end of my high school and beginning of my college years. I was fairly certain that there was absolutely no way I'd see 1995, to say nothing of 2005 or 2015.
Anyway, the impact of these ideas is hard to overstate. Suddenly, signs that the culture wasn't listening to these Christians and obeying them without question -- allowing interracial marriage, barring teacher-led Protestant prayer in public schools, promoting feminism, making peace protests, listening to rock and roll, playing Dungeons and Dragons, watching Saturday morning cartoons -- were no longer causes to mope and despair, but reasons to rejoice. They were proof that the world was ending soon; slipping Christian influence was merely evidence that Satan was moving the game pieces around for his final showdown, and certainly not any kind of indication that their motives or actions should be examined or questioned. It fit their pessimistic view about a whirling gyre of destruction and humanity's accelerating decline towards it perfectly. Small wonder that women, brown people, and single mothers were not staying in their ordained places in society's structure! The Second Coming is nigh!
And so is the Third Coming, since premillennial dispensationalism has Jesus returning twice in rapid succession -- once to rapture the people of His Church, and once to wrap up the Great Tribulation with an ultimate display of power as He wipes the armies of Earth off the map. (If you really want to piss off a premillennial dispensationalist Christian, show him that you can count to three. I remember reading and using all sorts of elaborate rationalizations for why one of those last two didn't really count.)
Premillennial dispensationalism has been waning in zeal and influence in the twenty-first century. This is largely, it seems to me, because we had countless "Bible prophecy scholars" who picked dates and missed, and we even had a Big Round Number -- 2000 -- largely presided over by one of their own in the United States, and nothing rapture-y happened. This left large swaths of people within the movement to slide back into wondering why they're still here. Tim LaHaye, after all -- co-author of the Left Behind series, far and away the most popular mass media created around this "prophetic" scheme -- recently died of old age.
So when Trump moved the U.S. embassy, it sparked a sense of renewed hope among people who needed some reassurance that everything they had been taught and believed in was true. (And I do mean "needed". When waiting to die or be zapped somewhere else is what characterizes your life, and that hope starts to fade, you really don't want anyone pointing out that you've been spending your life and defining your faith by doing nothing.) Someone with a deep, vivid imagination, a penchant for finding obscure connections, and a scarcity of scruples could probably revitalize the movement and make heaps of money for himself by rejiggering the "prophetic" scheme so that Trump's action was enough yardage to get premillennial dispensationalism a first down -- to reset the "generation" clock and allow a new crop of "Bible prophecy scholars" to sell books, movies, "witnessing tools", and "study guides".
Obviously, I don't know the future. Maybe it will all turn out the way Darby's disciples have been saying, against all odds, even in spite of the way it's been used to get money and influence. All I mean to point out is that it's not that I don't know how to get rich quick. It's that it's probably better if I don't try my ideas.
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(*) They've also managed to convince them that the greatest controversy among Christians all over time and space when it comes to understanding Biblical prophecy has been whether Jesus will return for His own prior to, in the middle of, or at the end of the Great Tribulation. The reality is -- as you might expect from a religious movement spanning continents and millennia -- that this particular quarrel is utterly insignificant compared to the questions, puzzles, arguments, and disagreements Christians have had when it comes to scrying the future. (And it's only after Jewish apocalyptic literature had stopped being a literary genre for a while that any attempt to read Revelation with some kind of contemporary literalism didn't seem inherently ludicrous on its face. Even if you believe that the Bible is true, there's a problem with reading ancient Semitic apocalyptic literature literally from the get-go.)
It has to do with "Bible prophecy" -- by which certain Christians mean pulling a meaning out of the Bible that it never clearly expresses, and has to be twisted out of the text as one hops around from passage to passage with no clear purpose other than to make the "prophecy" seem topical and current; and it has to do with "support for Israel" -- by which certain Christians mean accelerating the "prophetic" timeline derived earlier, so that Israel will be destroyed all the sooner. (The sooner the better.)
The "prophetic" scheme these particular Christians subscribe to is known in theological circles as "premillennial dispensationalism" (or "dispensational premilliennialism"). Somehow, their teachers have convinced them that this scheme comes from a "literal" reading of the Bible(*), even though it's a new interpretation based on John Nelson Darby's work in the 19th century. The timeline this philosophy has constructed claims that human history will culminate in seven years of judgment known as the Great Tribulation.
Darby and his particular peculiar ideas would have probably faded into obscurity had it not been for Hal Lindsey and his book, The Late Great Planet Earth. That Christian bestseller resurrected Darby's notions and reinterpreted them within John Birch conspiracy theories, reassuring Christians who were otherwise vaguely lost as they waited for death ("We're saved and destined for Heaven... I guess we just wait until that happens, then") that their faith was really much more pertinent to the society and the times than anyone had ever guessed. For the Great Tribulation to get underway, according to Lindsey, three things had to happen. First, the Jews would retake Palestine; second, they would retake Jerusalem; and third, they would rebuild the Temple of King Solomon on its original site in that city, where the Dome of the Rock now sits (which, as it turns out, the Muslims are reluctant to move or tear down). Step One happened in 1948 when Israel was created by the UN (which is now the enemy... it's complicated, but when it comes to this "prophecy" scheme, God and Satan want the same thing). Step Two happened when Israel captured Jerusalem during the Six-Day War. Step Three hasn't happened yet, but surely will Any Second Now -- and when it does, things will really start to move.
They have to move quickly, too, since Step One happened in 1948, and part of the "prophetic" scheme includes the belief that "this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place" -- a quote from Jesus in the book of Matthew (24:34) which doesn't really seem to have anything to do with the founding of the state of Israel, but this is easy to gloss over in general because other attempts in the "prophetic" scheme to tie the words in Scripture to current events are even more strained. How long a "generation" is isn't really clear, but people who seemed to think it had to be right around forty years (with a list of Biblical-sounding reasons for claiming so) had me pretty convinced that it would be right around the time of the end of my high school and beginning of my college years. I was fairly certain that there was absolutely no way I'd see 1995, to say nothing of 2005 or 2015.
Anyway, the impact of these ideas is hard to overstate. Suddenly, signs that the culture wasn't listening to these Christians and obeying them without question -- allowing interracial marriage, barring teacher-led Protestant prayer in public schools, promoting feminism, making peace protests, listening to rock and roll, playing Dungeons and Dragons, watching Saturday morning cartoons -- were no longer causes to mope and despair, but reasons to rejoice. They were proof that the world was ending soon; slipping Christian influence was merely evidence that Satan was moving the game pieces around for his final showdown, and certainly not any kind of indication that their motives or actions should be examined or questioned. It fit their pessimistic view about a whirling gyre of destruction and humanity's accelerating decline towards it perfectly. Small wonder that women, brown people, and single mothers were not staying in their ordained places in society's structure! The Second Coming is nigh!
And so is the Third Coming, since premillennial dispensationalism has Jesus returning twice in rapid succession -- once to rapture the people of His Church, and once to wrap up the Great Tribulation with an ultimate display of power as He wipes the armies of Earth off the map. (If you really want to piss off a premillennial dispensationalist Christian, show him that you can count to three. I remember reading and using all sorts of elaborate rationalizations for why one of those last two didn't really count.)
Premillennial dispensationalism has been waning in zeal and influence in the twenty-first century. This is largely, it seems to me, because we had countless "Bible prophecy scholars" who picked dates and missed, and we even had a Big Round Number -- 2000 -- largely presided over by one of their own in the United States, and nothing rapture-y happened. This left large swaths of people within the movement to slide back into wondering why they're still here. Tim LaHaye, after all -- co-author of the Left Behind series, far and away the most popular mass media created around this "prophetic" scheme -- recently died of old age.
So when Trump moved the U.S. embassy, it sparked a sense of renewed hope among people who needed some reassurance that everything they had been taught and believed in was true. (And I do mean "needed". When waiting to die or be zapped somewhere else is what characterizes your life, and that hope starts to fade, you really don't want anyone pointing out that you've been spending your life and defining your faith by doing nothing.) Someone with a deep, vivid imagination, a penchant for finding obscure connections, and a scarcity of scruples could probably revitalize the movement and make heaps of money for himself by rejiggering the "prophetic" scheme so that Trump's action was enough yardage to get premillennial dispensationalism a first down -- to reset the "generation" clock and allow a new crop of "Bible prophecy scholars" to sell books, movies, "witnessing tools", and "study guides".
Obviously, I don't know the future. Maybe it will all turn out the way Darby's disciples have been saying, against all odds, even in spite of the way it's been used to get money and influence. All I mean to point out is that it's not that I don't know how to get rich quick. It's that it's probably better if I don't try my ideas.
---
(*) They've also managed to convince them that the greatest controversy among Christians all over time and space when it comes to understanding Biblical prophecy has been whether Jesus will return for His own prior to, in the middle of, or at the end of the Great Tribulation. The reality is -- as you might expect from a religious movement spanning continents and millennia -- that this particular quarrel is utterly insignificant compared to the questions, puzzles, arguments, and disagreements Christians have had when it comes to scrying the future. (And it's only after Jewish apocalyptic literature had stopped being a literary genre for a while that any attempt to read Revelation with some kind of contemporary literalism didn't seem inherently ludicrous on its face. Even if you believe that the Bible is true, there's a problem with reading ancient Semitic apocalyptic literature literally from the get-go.)
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