June 14, 2007
On Evil Empires II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:20 PM EST Alexander Burns related an interesting story yesterday. In 1982–fully a year before he famously termed the Soviet Union an “evil empire”–Ronald Reagan began honing this language when he asked, rhetorically, of the British Parliament, “Must civilization perish in a hail of fiery atoms? Must freedom wither in a quiet, deadening accommodation with totalitarian evil?” Had Reagan posed the same question during his “evil empire” speech before the National Association of Evangelicals, many in the audience might well have answered, “yes,” or “sort of.” Millions of conservative Christian fundamentalists in this period believed deeply in the doctrine of dispensational premillennialism. Based on prophetic writings in the Old and New Testaments, premillennialism holds that God deals with human beings in distinct epochs, or dispensations; that the current (sixth) dispensation–the church era, or the Gentile era–will come to a close upon the arrival of the Antichrist (known also as the Beast), who will visit terror upon unsaved human beings; that the Antichrist’s reign of seven years, called the Tribulations, will be directly preceded by the in-gathering of world Jewry back to Palestine and by a tremendous event called the Raptures, which will see saved souls (or saints)–both living and dead–lifted directly from Earth to heaven; that at the end of the Tribulations, Jesus Christ will lead an army of saints to do battle with the Beast; that Christ will defeat the Beast at the Battle of Armageddon and introduce a thousand-year reign of peace; and finally, that at the conclusion of that millennium, Christ and Satan will engage in a final battle, resulting in the Satan’s ultimate defeat. As early as the 1940s, increasing numbers of fundamentalists understood the Cold War as a clear indication that the Antichrist’s armies were fulfilling prophecy by, first, constructing a worldwide government and, second, using these global institutions to inaugurate a seven-year reign of terror. “There is no reason why Anti-Christ should not be both a principle of opposition to God and the incarnation of that in a single person,” argued Clarence Edward Macartney of the First Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Rather than look specifically for a single person who might be the Antichrist incarnate, Macartney argued that it was important to search out those deeds and events that bore the Antichrist’s imprimatur. This line of thinking led him straight to the Kremlin’s doorstep. “It is an interesting and significant fact,” he concluded, “that in that very country, Russia, where the scriptural portrayals of Anti-Christ have most impressed themselves upon the minds of Christian people in past generations—in that very country we have had one of the worst outbreaks of Anti-Christ in government.” Many believing Christians welcomed the terrible events of the Tribulation as they lifted the curtain on a new and magnificent age for Christ’s army of saints. Russia was widely regarded as a key player in this drama–as “Gog,” the ruthless, militaristic nation from the North that, according to popular prophecy, would invade the Holy Land some time in the middle of the Antichrist’s reign. Gog’s defeat was, in fact, a scriptural prerequisite of Christ’s imminent return. So to Reagan’s question–must the world end in nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union?–some of his evangelical supporters may have answered, yes.
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