Why the Christian Far-Right is ready to believe that Covid-19 is a sign of the apocalypse
Conservative Roman Catholic and Evangelical communities have been anticipating global catastrophe for years
There’s precedent. After all, God tried to unmake his creation after ‘realising that the evils of humanity only increased and all human wishes and desires of the heart bent to evil’. The dramatic event of how a flood wiped out all lives on earth (save those of Noah and his family as well as those of the animals on his ark) is recorded in Genesis. Ardent believers convinced that the end times are nigh may also cite the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, a city supposedly wiped out for sins of sexual immorality, as proof for their reasoning.
If you ever had a conversation with a right-wing Christian, you’ve probably heard some form of criticism aimed at the ‘ills’ of modern society championing everything ranging from abortion, IVF insemination and birth control to homosexuality, premarital sex and divorce.
Following that world view, divine intervention to right the current status quo and herald the Second Coming of Jesus is long overdue.
Yet apocalyptic speculation has been embedded in the social and religious framework of the Church practically from the get go, with the coming of Jesus in first century Palestine having been anticipated with mass political upheaval. Oppressed by the Romans, many people expected a Saviour who would upend the world order but also one who would toll in the era of the resurrection of the dead. Scripture paints Jesus as an itinerant preacher deeply aware of these preconceptions, for all that he subverted them.
‘What are the signs of the end times?’, he is asked by the disciples in Matthew 24, 7–13. Jesus replied:‘And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars […] and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places’. He stressed that his followers would experience all of these things in their own time.
This conviction carried over to the times of the Roman persecution, when the crumbling Empire made martyrs of Christians refusing to recant their faith in Jesus and make offerings to the Emperor. An era characterized by Germanic invasions, economic failures due to rising inflation and taxation as well as political instability, people then were only too willing to view these happenings in the light of an imminent Second Coming of Jesus.
In an article (‘The day of the Lord’) for Catholic weekly The Tablet, historian and writer Martyn Whittock gives a full account of apocalyptic speculation in the Church, touching upon Islamic armies being considered ‘apocalypse triggers’ during the crusades, with Protestant Christians convinced that the end times were nigh during the Reformation, an idea that Puritan settlers took with them to the New World. (A more recent event associated with the end of the world would be the Cuban Missile Crisis.) Current religious ideology follows the idea of ‘premillennialism’, that is, the belief that Christ will appear, judging souls both living and dead, thereby instigating the ‘millennium’ when all this is said to occur according to the Book of Revelation. (This is opposed to the idea of ‘postmillennialism’, which states that the apocalypse would literally occur only after a 1000 years.)
Parishioners expecting the signs and wonders (today, the pandemic or the Ukraine war) precluding the end-times are often sympathetic to the cause and ideology of Charismatic preachers.
The Charismatic movement, which began in the 1970’s and is interdenominational, has gained notoriety for centring itself around miracle healings and a belief in the supernatural imbuing daily life in the form of spiritual gifts such as prophecy,mind reading or divine visions. Sermons and talks at retreats often feature a more literal interpretation of the Word of God, with some priests having come under fire for centring their sermons around a fire and brimstone kind of theology.
Currently, some of these priests espouse that the ‘signs of the end times’, which they are careful to term ‘times of purification’ rather than the apocalypse itself, will include three days of total darkness where the sun will be extinguished and all forms of electric lights will cease to function. Believers are advised to stock up on candles, the only source of illumination that will work. During this time, people will supposedly be able to see all their sins-their specific nature as well as their impact on others, with everyone granted the grace to see whether their soul would go to heaven, purgatory or hell should they die in that selfsame moment.
Flyleaves and newsletters in churches but also online sites have mentioned the ‘Prophecy of Garabandal’- as these predictions are commonly known-for years, yet these visions have seemingly gained new momentum in the wake of the pandemic.
It prompts the question whether infectious disease makes one more susceptible to End-time thinking.
Historically, contagion has always been linked to religious speculation, even in the ancient world.
In the Middle Ages, the Black Death was considered a form of divine punishment, with even the 1918 Spanish Flu treated as a divine scourge for sin by some religious commentators. (AIDS and most recently, monkey pox, are examples of current crises that have been shoe-horned by Christian fundamentalists into the ‘God-willed punishment’ frame.)
Epidemics and pandemics trigger pseudo-religious conspiracy theories not because of their catastrophic outcome in the form of the pain and suffering that they occasion but because of the trauma they evoke. They disrupt social reality, reminding people of the ultimately tenuous fragility of the pillars modern society stands upon.
The term ‘new normal’, which was popularised by the media, gives insight to this, referring, amongst other things to the the closed shops, empty streets and stopped ships, airplanes and trains as well as the curfews, quarantines and face coverings we are all now intimately familiar with. Coupled with images of overflowing hospitals and dead bodies on streets, infectious diseases such as Covid-19 unearth a lot of the existential anxiety that we unconsciously submerge in our day-to-day lives.
There’s also the factor of self-isolation to consider. The practice provides one with time to reflect on the community and world one lives in. Without distractions, it makes social inequality particularly obvious, this being the reason wealth disparity, social protection, gender equality and racism are getting more of a spotlight these days. With cultural and community identity at stake and the unprecedented fear that a government can curb and restrict ones movements on a here therefore unanticipated scale, people are more susceptible to a religious framework that dangles explanations they can cling to in a time of paralysing anxiety and instability.
Christianity is in a unique position to capitalise on these phenomenons by providing believers with a narrative that allows them to thwart the ‘evils that beset them’. Persistence when faith seems to get one nowhere in a seemingly cruel, blind and unjust world is a core message to be found in the Bible. Watchfulness and particularly endurance are emphasized in the Pauline Epistles, with Christians being asked to shoulder suffering not as a meaningless event but as a means to grow closer to the God who suffered for us and become ‘strong in their weakness’. As such, believers are not just meant to acquire a form of purposeful resilience but transform themselves into a joy-filled redemptive force that use their personal sorrow and worldly setbacks to save the world.
In the 14th century, when the plague ran rampant across Western Europe, Christian churches understood this ‘mission for redemption’ as a call to hold communal fast and institute public prayer marathons,exemplified by the carrying of relics in procession, accompanied by flagellants. Even today, churches institute processions, carrying images or statues of the Virgin Mary through the streets, with people praying the rosary aloud as a means to bring everything from world peace to inveigling an end to the pandemic. There are dedicated prayers only for this purpose, popularised by online sermons and talks, with believers instructed to pray for divine intervention and the expiation of sins that supposedly brought us to this current crossroads.
‘Someone suggested to me that it has to do with a secret longing for heroism, which I found interesting. Perhaps we believe on some level that if the world were to end and be remade, if some unthinkable catastrophe were to occur, then we might be remade too, perhaps into better, more heroic, more honourable people’. This quote, taken from Emily St. John Mandel’s most recent bestseller, Sea of Tranquility, provides an insight into why people might be attracted to end-time rapture and ideas of spiritual warfare. It’s a chance to grow beyond oneself, do something ultimately good by denying the ‘pull of sin’ and in the form of prayer and spiritual watchfulness, fight for good by paving the way for Jesus ultimate, triumphant return.
There’s certainly an ingrained desire in humanity to attain moral heroism. One of the reasons why acclaimed zombie TV shows like The Walking Dead are so popular is because they play into this desire-within these post-apocalyptic landscapes where only survival matters, normally random decisions (from moving to a strategic location such as a prison or making a run for food supplies) take on outsize importance, with the people making them transformed into heroes, no matter how mundane their origins. It’s a virtual escape in a world stripped down to its essentials, where people can get to live their childhood fantasies of heroism, something only possible where the complexity of modern society doesn’t exist to interfere into decisions of life and death, to kill or to let go.
In the grips of apocalyptic hysteria and narcissism, it can be easy to succumb to a belief that a pandemic is not the outcome of a myriad factors ranging from a micro-organism jumping the species barrier to ineffective politics but simply an answer to committed moral evil-particularly because the latter option gives people a sense of purpose of the role they can play in God’s plan to bring about a supposed final judgment.
The temptation to shrug off extreme end-time ideology as a fringe phenomenon is high but recent political events belie this. The attack on the US capitol last January wasn’t just instigated by right-wing militia members in support of Trump but also by a number of people with fundamentalist religious leanings. The interplay of religious and secular apocalypticism is nothing new. Fears of nuclear war already galvanized a generation during the Cold War-coupled with climate anxiety, the prepper and survivalist culture has come to the forefront once again.
In his piece for The Tablet, Whittock mentions how the ‘need to correctly interpret apocalyptic signs’ has led to wide spread atrocities, ranging from those perpetrated by the 1980’s Ugandan terrorist militia The Lord’s Resistance Army to the more seemingly benign belief that the EU is the seat of the Antichrist.
In some ways, a dedication to a more wholesome life on a spiritual level may be beneficial in terms of social renewal yet the tendency to view global events exclusively through an apocalyptic lens can give rise to a dangerous all-or-nothing kind of thinking. To date, this has partly manifested in the rejection by some religious parties of even mundane ways (ex. face masks) to protect themselves from Covid-19 because of their belief that only faith in God can ultimately save one from the disease.
While this kind of thinking is certainly not prevalent, history teaches us that trivialisation of religious apocalypticism is certainly ill-advised.
