As death was raging across 14th-century Europe, the church gathered the people together. God is mad, they told the people. We must ask for forgiveness so he will stop trying to kill us. The flagellants went on the march, dressed in linen hoods, slapping themselves for God and begging for the absolution of people’s many sins. And, yes, further spreading the plague wherever they went.
The professors at the University of Paris’s school of medicine decreed the plague had been caused by “a disturbance in the skies [that] had caused the sun to overheat the oceans near India, and the waters had begun to give off noxious vapors”, in the words of Otto Friedrich in The End of the World. (As to what would cure it: broth and enemas.) So it’s not like the people at the time had a sophisticated scientific knowledge about disease and contagion. Which makes one wonder, watching all of the US Christians crowd together in their churches both mega and modest as the coronavirus spreads, what’s their excuse?
Preachers have been dying, outbreaks are traced back to church services, and still people gather for worship. There are secret churches with secret entrances, churches that are cramming thousands of unmasked people indoors in defiance of orders. When the state of Kansas issued a ban on any gathering with more than 10 people, it was two churches that filed suit to challenge the law on the grounds that it interfered with their right to assembly. From the outside, it looks like a suicide pact, as ministers downplay the seriousness of the disease just before dropping dead of the virus while taking a couple congregants with them.
It’s not hugely out of character. Christianity is at its roots an apocalyptic cult. Jesus was talking less about how to live in the world than how to prepare for the next, because, he kept insisting, the end was near. After Christ’s execution, the early church waited with anticipation. Judgment Day was going to come. Any minute now.
But, disappointingly, the world never quite comes to an end. There is always another day to get through. And in order to maintain legitimacy, the church had to de-emphasize all of the apocalypse stuff and settle in for the long haul. But every once in a while, this seed of destruction would burst through in renewed prophecy, in splinter sects, and figures like Harold Camping, who in 2011 proclaimed that the world was about to end, in Florida, on a Saturday.
Over the past couple of decades, the end of the world stuff has been ramping up in the evangelical community. The 1990s Left Behind series of books and films brought the Rapture back into the mainstream, and millions of people gorged themselves on the story of how the antichrist, inexplicably Romanian, would take over an organization much like the United Nations (or is that the World Health Organization?) and lead us all into the Tribulation and the Final Days and whatever else. Its success was significant not only because it was the first time anyone got excited by a project involving Kirk Cameron in a very long time, but also because it made the doomsday thinking of contemporary Christianity more visible and acceptable.
Despite a million inspirational quotes in yearbooks and on cubicle walls, living like there is no tomorrow is reckless and exhausting. No one is suggesting these churchgoers have a conscious death wish, but the evangelical population has positioned itself as outside of, and persecuted by, the larger secular culture and subject not to the rules of law but only to the rules of God. The overlap between evangelicals and doomsday preppers was enormous even before the government’s response to the pandemic trashed the economy. And maybe being told again and again since childhood that the world will end as a blessing from God isn’t a great way to learn how to respond sanely and safely to a pandemic.
The relationship between religious belief, doctrine, politics and behavior is a mysterious brew. I have Quiverfull members of my own family, who believe it is their divine duty to have many, many children so … that they can supply soldiers for God’s army? To populate the afterlife? Because of one specific little bit of the Bible? The reasons change, the babies keep coming.
If you look around, it’s easy to spot the bits that line up with the prophecy that says this is it, the world is about to go boom. War, disease, social strife. Just like it was easy 30 years ago with the Branch Davidians, or with the fiery visions of Anne Wentworth in 17th-century England, or the followers of Joachim of Fiore in medieval Italy. Or for Jesus Christ, the son of God. Then all you have to do is wait for the fire from heaven and all that.
It’s harder work to acknowledge that the world only burns if we let it. It is our duty to go into the apocalypse and take care of one another no matter how cataclysmic the conditions. It’s not only more sensible, it’s more godly.
Jessa Crispin is a Guardian US columnist
