More Than a Staging Area

By DON ROLLINS

It was July 8, 1741, when the otherwise measured Rev. Jonathan Edwards preached a Puritan-style sermon so fiery it helped occasion an entire rethinking of Protestantism in the colonies. Delivered to a congregation in Enfield, Connecticut, his hearers were so haunted by the images invoked by “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” some were known to have spasms, even faint. Tradition has it, Edwards was so concerned at the extreme responses, he prematurely ended the sermon.

Once in print form, “Sinners” found a ready audience as the First Religious Awakening — a 1730-1770s evangelical, Calvinistic movement — was sweeping through all 13 colonies. So popular was Edwards’ violent, apocalyptic God, not even the more secular strains of colonial life were spared: While some believers were content to wait for Judgment Day, more fervent colonists took their doomsday theology with them into their businesses, schools and governments. Doomsday had now entered the colonial cum national lexicon.

According to a 2020 poll conducted by Pew Research Center, Edwards’ ugly eschatology has indeed survived, thrived and spread as hoped: Nearly four in 10 Americans believe the world will end in their lifetimes, and in keeping with the account given in the Book of Revelation from the Christian scriptures. (Noteworthy if not surprising, 45% of Republican and 63% of evangelical respondents expect an imminent end of days. They outpaced Democratic and non-evangelical participants by double digits.)

Such indicators were chilling enough pre-Oct. 7, 2023, the day Hamas-led fighters began their brutal, unprecedented assault on Israel proper. Drawing from prophecies contained mostly in Revelation, end-timers were already steadfast in their belief in an epic, ultimate battle between good and evil heralding Jesus’ return to Earth. All that was lacking was a precipitating and savage war, with Israel as its epicenter.

Chilling is not the word for what came next.

It follows that hard core end-timers are finding signs aplenty even as the horrors of war multiply; and the internet is cluttered with near joyous anticipation for the day Jonathon Edwards predicted all those years ago. Yes the death and suffering are unfortunate, but more importantly the scriptures are at last coming to pass. Or as the almost giddy senior pastor of an end-times church in California put it, “… fasten your seatbelt because you’re seeing Bible prophecy fulfilled in your lifetime!”

The list of mostly MAGA politicians sharing in the giddiness is long and growing - none more publicly and consistently than Florida’s Republican Senator Marc Rubio: “The day of the LORD is coming! Yes, it approaches, a day of darkness & gloom, a day of thick clouds! Like dawn spreading over the mountains, a vast & mighty army!”

Although believers in a literal Judgement Day have never been exclusively Christian, hard core Christian millenarianists here and abroad should be called to task for celebrating anything to do with the unspeakable death and suffering in Gaza and Israel. The broken, bleeding region cannot be reduced to a staging area for their unholy theology.

Don Rollins is a retired Unitarian Universalist minister in Jackson, Ohio. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2024

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