Trump's Supporters Think The World is Going to Hell

Literally, though.

We need to talk more about the end of the world.

This is less because it’s necessarily nigh (though a number of conservative Christians believe the rapture is supposed to happen this week), and more because so many people think it is.  And because, contrary to what you might think, it’s always been this way.

Today, over three-quarters of U.S. evangelicals — around 25% of the US population —say that they believe that we are living in the End Times, the tumultuous period before Christ returns to Earth to judge us all.  Amazingly, over half of Protestants overall believe this too.

Of course, that might be an over-estimate, since it’s based on what Evangelicals say they believe, not what they actually might believe in their heart of hearts.  Still, pretty remarkable numbers: three quarters of these people believe the end of the world is nigh.  Surely this matters for how this enormously influential segment of the US population acts, right?

But it’s not just on the religious right.  Increasing numbers of non-religious folks, especially those under 30, believe this too, in light of threats of climate change, runaway technology, pandemics, and increased nationalism.  Again, I’m not saying whether these beliefs are right or wrong – only that they are prevalent and influential.

What may be surprising is how this has long been the case, particularly on the right, which will be my subject here.

In the case of Christian fundamentalists, Matthew Avery Sutton’s 2017 book, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism, argues that this belief is not incidental to the evangelical movement, but central to it. Focusing on the birth of fundamentalism (roughly, the 1880s through 1940s), Sutton marshals quotation after quotation from the leaders of the movement.

For example: “We are on the brink of a world catastrophe and impending judgment,” said Billy Graham, who also asked, “Are the last days here?” way back in 1949.

Ronald Reagan said privately in 1971 that, “For the first time ever, everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the second coming of Christ.” One wonders if his subsequent battles with the “Evil Empire” were animated by this belief.

And the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s was Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth, which calculated the year of the apocalypse to be—wait for it—1988.

I admit, it’s hard not to read American Apocalypse without smirking at a century of such failed prophecies. Will we ever learn?

As a longtime student of messianism, millennialism, and other end-times beliefs—I wrote my doctoral dissertation on an 18th century false messiah —I can safely say that the answer is no. Probably for deep-seated psychological reasons, human beings have always believed that it’s five minutes to midnight. Maybe it’s our fear of death. Maybe we just can’t imagine the world going on without us.

As Sutton shows in his book, an important shift for American Christians took place gradually, from the end of the Civil War until World War II. In the 19^th century, the prevailing view among Protestants was that the Second Coming of Christ would take place after the world got better and better, paving the way for the messianic age.

But in the wake of the Civil War, urbanization, immigration, and the loss of white Protestant hegemony, there soon emerged a new movement of conservative evangelicals, who looked around and saw their world (and their white privilege, it appeared at the time) falling apart.  And around the turn of the 20th century, they began creating a religious counterculture that preached that the End Times were upon us.

Fundamentalism—which takes its name from Lyman Stewart’s 1910 anthology The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth—eventually became dominant in American Christianity, and with it, this pessimistic view that we are hurtling toward the end times, with everything getting worse and worse until finally, literally, all hell will break loose.

What, then, is a good Christian to do?  Sutton quotes preacher John Roach Stratton from back in 1918: “The supreme duty of the church today is not to patch up and paint a wrecked world but to get out the lifeboats and take as many souls as possible off the wreck.”

Jesus saves—not just from hell and damnation, but the impending apocalypse, which is about to engulf the world. That’s why you need to get born again. Because otherwise you will be left behind.

Today’s Evangelical apocalypticism is directly descended from these century-old views, and is responding to a similar world. The shifts in late 19^th century American Christianity came as a response to massive social changes: urbanization, industrialization, the Civil War, and the rise of American Catholicism. Today’s changes are different—a majority-nonwhite America, changes in sexual and gender mores, advances in technology, a perceived decline in the social order—but the fundamentalist reaction to it is similar.

But remember, for many Christian conservatives, the world is ending because of human actions — because of changes that many progressives see as positive. Think about it: three-quarters of white evangelicals believe that we progressives are bringing on the end of the world as we know it. And no, they don’t feel fine.

Donald Trump’s nihilism – his dark pronouncements about America in decline; his irrational, angry politics of resentment – all resonate with the profound despair underlying this worldview.  A large percentage of Americans really believe (or at least say they believe) that the world is literally going to hell.  They’re not interested in some policy position, and they’ve largely given up hope of changing the course of history.  They think we’re doomed, and they vote accordingly.