Pillars Of Creation (Left Behind Is A Lie, Prequel.)

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.~Revelation 13:15-18

As I have said many times before, I spent part of the later 1990's as a member of the Christian End Times Prophecy movement. But I didn't start out that way. I was raised as, and began my political and religious life as an adult being, a politically-conservative mainstream Christian. I started out as a Baptist, but in turn had points in my education where I attended Lutheran and later Catholic schools. I had of course read Revelation, and in a vague sort of way I knew the basics of the popular "End Times Prophecy" narrative at least as it existed in the 1980's and early 1990's.

But like a lot of people with my particular background I was by turns both ignorant and skeptical of the finer points of what drove the pop-Christian Evangelicals and the people who watched the TV preachers, or the political cult that lay yet unformed but, like stars forming within a nebula, unmistakable all the same.

As a young person who had managed to hear both sides of the Catholic-Protestant argument, I had no use for Calvinism, nor its bastard children, the Prosperity Gospel and Reformed Theology. It seemed to me that these heretical belief systems basically existed to justify the greed of TV preachers like Bob Tilton, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, or the brooding evil of fringe cranks like Rousas John Rushdoony. To me, well into my 20's, hell, my 30's...the idea that a Christian or conservative person might say that somebody else's life was less important than their liberty would have been seen as completely ridiculous. I mean, let's get real here, it's kinda hard to enjoy having freedom when you're dead, and if you're a decent person on any level, people dying when such can be prevented was, in my experience at the time, something generally seen as a bad thing.

In fact, I'll be honest. I was 19 years old before I even knew what the hell the Rapture was, given that it's neither mentioned as such in the Bible nor described in any mainstream Christian doctrines. My first exposure to the concept was when I happened to be trying to watch TV in a barracks basement rec room and a couple of other Airmen sitting at one of the other tables were talking about it. Needless to say, I was annoyed and more interested in trying to watch NYPD Blue (then the hot new show) than in joining their conversation. In that time of still a solid couple of years before the Internet and AOL bothering me with junk-mail CD-ROM's, I couldn't just look it up right then.

I was, in point of fact, a complete stranger to the baroque world of Evangelical conspiracy theories that in some cases then and now operate from assumptions and theories that mainstream science-fiction has not yet to my knowledge made, but I digress.

In fact, I was taught that if you were a Christian, things like spirits and technology couldn't have a hold over you unless you allowed it. Nothing of the sort could be forced upon you. There was no airtight conspiracy theory narrative construction because, well, my people were't so fucking stupid or scientifically or theologically illiterate that they'd bought into stuff like that.

Oh, I'd seen a few chain letters and such about computer chips being implanted into people in places like Sweden, but then you'd look for any mention of it anywhere else and...nothing, ever.

Well, a few years, a car accident, and learning to live with being disabled later I was often  still dealing with medical stuff, which entailed lots of waiting, and this older couple, Lloyd and Mira, that I knew gave me a bag of books to read. The bag had in it both Atlas Shrugged and Left Behind, in addition to a lot of middling science fiction and some other Christian woo woo stuff, including some books on morality and politics that warned of exactly the kind of problems that conservatism has today...but they thought such would come from the liberal side of the spectrum. I read most of those books, found Atlas Shrugged to be so deadly boring that I couldn't finished reading it, and moved on. I read Left Behind which wasn't the least bit interesting, but I did remember that one incident, and something clicked. I was like "Oh, Okay, that's what that means." I thought the book sucked, though. I'm not going to lie.

The short version is, it's literally an entire book where almost nothing of consequence happens, except for the Rapture. You can read the synopsis at the start of the next book and not miss a thing.

The people who gave me this selection of crap were older, not-quite retired yet, part of the same loose circle of mostly older or retired local Republicans that I had drank and golfed and hunted and shot guns at the rifle range with some of them off and on for some years. They attended one of the (at the time) two local Baptist churches. Lloyd was a Vietnam-era Marine Corps veteran...he'd been an F-4 Phantom maintainer...and high school math teacher who I'd known, but never had a class with since I wasn't one of the smart kids that way. Mira...a Cuban from Florida who had fled Castro with her family as a kid...worked at the grocery store in town before she'd upgraded to working at Walmart in Cheboygan when that went in. Their son was my age...a devoutly religious kid with a hardcore interest in music who came out as gay a few years later. Anyway, we had occasion to discuss some of the books (...and the phrase "Where did you find this crap" was mentioned...) but anyway, it generated discussion. Also, any competent Evangelist will tell you...that's how they get you. She'd just read Tribulation Force, the next book in the Left Behind series, and offered it to me next. I found it somewhat of a better book, and as it turned out a couple other friends of mine had also started reading it. Anyway, since I wasn't particularly happy with the church I was attending occasionally at the time, I switched to the one they went to around this time as well.

The ship was cheered, 
The harbor cleared
Merrily did we drop 
Below the Kirk, below the hill
Below the lighthouse top.
~Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

I feel like it's important to note that the End Times eschatology and movement I was stepping into, at least where I was at, had not yet become insane. These people followed things like the budding of the European Union and the ongoing Middle East peace process intently, they were aware of and concerned about things like Climate Change (especially concern about Pacific Ocean warming called El Nino) before almost anybody else I knew was...if only because such things are described in Revelation...and they were aware, in a global sense, of how good they had it and sensitive to the fact that other Christians around the world were actually being persecuted.

All of those things were, and are, germane to the End Times as they are depicted in the Bible, there are a number of things that have to happen, according to what I was taught. As of this writing they have mostly not, yet.

Half the people I knew barely shopped at Walmart, let alone accused it of being part of the New World Order.

There was no freaking out about the fact that George H.W. Bush had once uttered the words "New World Order" nor belief that such things as the "Mark of the Beast" were about to be thrust upon us. In point of fact, one of the reasons these people did things like follow the Middle East peace process and what was going on in Indonesia or South Sudan was because it was well understood at the time that certain things had to take place, and that previous parts of the "narrative" i.e. a whole slew of stuff involving the Soviet Union had been undone by the ebb and flow of world events.

The constant goal-post moving that would characterize End Times people just a few years later as the turn of the century drew near...and especially after Y2K passed without incident...was off to a rocky start, just as often met with "Okay, show me in the Bible where it says that" as anything else.

Granted, a lot of us were starting to get online and work our way around the internet, but that phenomenon had yet to reshape how nuts put their stuff out there. There were some cranks and crazies, but at that time their stuff tended to still percolate more through certain churches, face to face meetings and occasionally gun shows...mostly places and things respectable people like we thought we were all tried to avoid...than websites and whatnot. This was when computers were still typically more expensive...several hundred to a couple thousand dollars...and Dial-up internet service was all that was available. The only place around that was 'networked' in anything close to the modern sense was the computer lab at the local community college.

Don't get me wrong, there were plenty of nuts out there. Just north of the area where I lived and worked and went to church was a hotbed of Michigan Militia activity, and there had even been articles about this in the Detroit Free Press. Then, as now, we knew there was a problem. The difference was that Republicans were just as afraid of the far-right and the militia nuts as Democrats were...the Oklahoma City bombing still at the time was the biggest terrorist attack the US had ever had...in fact, we were probably more worried because we were also concerned about government overreach in dealing with these threats and more than a few of us personally knew people who'd come after us first if Black Helicopter hysteria or the RaHoWa or whatever broke out.

When there are people in your family or social circle who don't "fit in" in some way despite the fact that they too may be conservative as all get-out you tend to be aware of such things, and possibly keep weapons relatively handy. In fact, then as now, lots of Those Fucking People considered plenty of conservatives suspect. Then, as now, it didn't matter how Evangelical or Republican you were.

But more of us were damned well aware of that fact. Nobody thought their privilege or their wealth would protect them if things went sideways.

In fact, if you'd walked into Victory Baptist and said "YOUR HEALTH IS NOT MORE IMPORTANT THAN MY LIBERTIES" it would have probably been about as well received as if you'd walked in and shouted "I like big butts and I can not lie!" In either case, I suspect you'd have been marched back out the door fairly quickly.

And perhaps the biggest difference between the later 1990's and now was that, though you could see some issues, the conservative movement itself was not obviously composed of morons. Newt Gingrich was yet to be exposed as an adulterous cheat, the fault lines now coming to a head, would only begin to show during the Clinton impeachment, itself a couple years away. Jesus Christ and Ronald Reagan had yet to be eclipsed by Ayn Rand and Paul Ryan and the idea that somebody like Donald Trump...then a Democrat and thought of as a disgraced loser, if at all...would ever be considered a conservative or a Republican was beyond the pale.

Sometimes, I really miss those days.

In these days where there's a constant barrage of "COVID-19 VACCINE AND 5G ARE THE MARK OF THE BEAST" I mean, fuck, if they think the plan has been that comprehensively thought out, what exactly do they propose to do about it?

I mean, if they really think some functionary in Brussels or wherever can just flip your life-switch, what's the point? All those guns sure aren't going to do you any good if that's the case.

I feel like it's necessary to take a look at just how we got here, so I'm going to try over the next week or two to do exactly that, to understand the problem, to get to the root of it, you have to start from the beginning. I intend to take a look at conservatism, social issues and the End Times Prophecy movement over the last 20 years to see if a forensic analysis will help determine just where things went wrong and if there's anything we can do about this bullshit.

Peace.