Religion

Scalping the Apocalypse Ticket

If the world was to end at the turn of the millennium, as some did believe, many took comfort that Australia was seen as the best place to be during the outworking of an apocalyptic scenario. One Australian doomsday enthusiast, a regular contributor to the Canadian-based bible prophecy discussion list created in 1996, extended a warm invitation in late 1999 to all Christians worldwide who at the time perceived something ominous on the Y2K horizon: ‘I’m not saying Australia will completely escape whatever disasters befall us on or after 1 January 2000, but you will all be somewhat safer here from Christian persecution — we have plenty of “bush” to hide in’.

However, while dialogues aiming to isolate Australia from the expected north western Armageddon flourished on the internet, there were those in Australia who would attempt to establish a siege mentality regarding the future and who would seek to profit from this and this is the subject of today’s blog.

Since the early 1990s, I have been fascinated with the use and abuses of the concept of the future, how the exchange of temporally loaded language through conversation and text affects the pace, moods and behaviour of individuals, communities, cultures and civilisations. I am equally fascinated with mainstream Christianity which as a narrative structure begins with creation but awaits a conclusion. Whether it is religions announcing ten-point plans to attain paradise quickly, or cults encouraging group passes to heaven through suicide, it is the end that counts. Whether it be ‘ego-theologists’ (the ‘I am / You are a god’ types) scalping spiritual quick-fixes at the local entertainment centre, with a McDonalds-like serving of ‘Would you like a blessing with that?’, or the visiting ‘soul-winner’ from New South Wales distributing ‘Mark of the Beast’ warning pamphlets, the conclusion of the Christian narrative plays the lead.

My aim, however, is not to vilify nor to vindicate Christian apocalyptic thinking in Australia. After many years of research, I continue to be personally ambivalent towards this cultural narrative and its material output. On the one hand, I feel a strong compulsion to defend the apocalyptic narrative of biblical prophecy against the many detractors who would dismiss it without troubling themselves to understand its complexities. On the other hand, I cannot disguise my discomfort with the rogue salvation franchises or merchants who market pre-fabricated responses to apocalyptic narrative, curiously shaped by contemporary circumstances, and who profit excessively from such business. My aim is not to prove whether the technology for an Australian ‘Mark of the Beast’ now exists nor is it to dismiss the Christian rhetoric over fears of an Orwellian ‘big brother’. Rather, I am concerned with what commercial purposes such information is put to.

For example, it is no accident that the narrower the definition of salvation, the more specialised the rituals for attaining it, the qualifications for distributing it and the exclusivity for keeping it. Such restrictions place the power of salvation into the hands of a small number of people who make available upon specialised or ritualised request the means to lease it. I use the word ‘lease’ because salvation is never fully settled. Instead, a symbolic contract is achieved between the franchise and the seeker in which salvation is conveyed to the seeker for a specified period but usually in exchange for membership and often mental and financial obligation. If the seeker breaks the contract, salvation is lost. Jehovah’s Witnesses call this act of severance ‘disfellowshipping’ and the seeker is designated by continuing followers of Watchtower as an ‘apostate’, as one against the almighty creator. Many ex-witnesses are emotionally scarred by this devastating, violent act of seemingly removing salvation.

In this sense, a small elite using exclusive language and narrow definitions and who therefore monopolise the forms and the senses of achieving salvation habitually frames salvation and the rituals of being saved from a monstrous future. Who benefits and who is disempowered by the agenda being set in this manner: why are only select individuals able to lease directions to the road of salvation with maps that periodically imply the master planner has changed compass, be it the secular salvation from ecological doom or theological salvation from the damnable mark of the beast?

Saving a person from the antichrist has today become a robust industry. Religious entrepreneurs distribute their scriptural shandies and spiritual quick-fixes to the middle-class disheartened with the expertise of experienced confidence tricksters and the finesse of door-to-door life-insurance salespeople. Subscribe to a local salvation franchise of the ‘gospel of wealth’ variety found marketing in the early morning hours of Australian televangelism and a continual stream of ministrations will arrive in the mail replete with US postage markings and external messages warning you and your postie, as I did in 1999: ‘This envelope contains important information the devil hopes you will never find out!’, ‘Eight things you need to know before the new millennium’, ‘Has Y2K plunged us into a countdown to chaos? Don’t panic — prepare and trust God!’ or ‘Unleash the power of your faith!’.

Content will vary across a range of marketable approaches. Two postings I received from the same franchise in the late 1990s respectively presented a 4-5 page personalised letter requesting I purchase ‘dynamic ministry materials’ like the Your Y2K New Millennium Survival Personal Library Kit for an appropriate ‘seed harvest’ of $165.99. This reflected fair market value, naturally, on ‘powerful’ items including The Antichrist: 666 video, a three audio tape set called End Time Signs and The Book of Revelation Comic Book. An explanation sheet was also included for explaining the rituals required to activate an enclosed ‘miracle touch’ 2-inch square cloth, apparently anointed — ‘touched’ in a supernatural way — by a special class of persons self-appointed as ‘prayer warriors’. Some packages have reflected telegram-style formatting to ‘emphasize the great URGENCY’ felt by a pastor ‘that many of you may be on the verge of falling apart or feeling absolutely overwhelmed by fear, anger, depression, rejection, worry’ and who desperately require a newly-released ‘powerful book of wisdom’ to overcome personal tribulation and to successfully ‘rebuke the devil’.

["The Book of Revelation", comic book, Denver, Colorado: Marilyn Hickey Ministries, 1993, pp. 24-25.]

Often, correspondence signed from the pastor displays these excesses of individual concern, claims of divine new revelation blended with unbiblical doses of numerological deduction, and a persistent problem with capitalisation. The accompanying letter to my Y2K Personal Request Sheet began:

“Dear Jason, you are now reading a letter that HAD TO BE sent to you. From the moment I felt prompted to begin, I knew in my heart, I HAD NO OTHER CHOICE … Yes, the Lord told me to prepare this … He gave me a vivid, supernatural glimpse of the miracle difference this one letter could make in your life … especially in this year of 1999 … You and I are now living in the year 1999. When you study Biblical numbers and their significance in end-time prophecy, patterns and plans … you quickly learn that the NUMBER “9″ is the number which signifies FRUITFULNESS! Jason, God wants you to see your year of ’99 … in a special way. ’99 … {NINE NINE} SEE it as your YEAR OF DOUBLE FRUITFULNESS …”

Yet the leaders of salvation franchises as I controversially prefer to call them continually reckon with the perversity of time. They stumble through the perils of technological extrapolation; they grasp at sometimes attractive yet elusive mirages of decorous utopias, eternally just beyond the reach of the ‘saved’ whose sense of salvation is never settled; and they tickle the conscience of those seeking to dismount from the social momentum of muddy pasts.

["The Book of Revelation", comic book, Denver, Colorado: Marilyn Hickey Ministries, 1993, pp. 28-29.]

What role did and does this type of ‘future-thinking’ continue to play in Australian hope and expectation? Can we establish a discourse of ethics regarding the use or abuse of future mythology? And how might we engage studies of the future in the historical and sociological disciplines which would see the future as itself a theory with very particular ideological and metaphysical investments, an address to the present, transforming it into the fulfilment of the future we aim to aspire to? Even perhaps as a tool or weapon of mass distraction which has been waved about for some form of gain?

To answer these questions requires us to place ourselves in a position to see something of the design and construction of recent contemporary futures that captivated the Australian national imagination. But how do we unravel once popular terms like ‘future’, ’2000′, ’2001′, and ‘millennium’ from their frames of contemporary expression without being participants within the cultural processes of future-thinking? On an ethical framework, how might we regain the power to ‘let the worries of the day be sufficient’?

The approach of the year 2000/2001AD in the 1990s seemed to evoke excess response from Christian groups throughout Australia. But can a culture of apocalypse or a cult of the future– that is, a philosophically sealed community deriving identity from its expectation of doom– be limited to popular, extra-societal ideas of cult? Can we in fact see evidence of apocalyptic thinking and attendant actions to ward off an anticipated ‘end of things’ outside religious frameworks?

A ‘cult of the future’ could be described as a community of people, which embraces a particular system of linear time reckoning as part of its cultural and/or social code, which encourages (either explicitly or implicitly) and which sustains specialised activity as supplication to some qualitative or quantitative ‘future’. A ‘cult of the future’, to draw from sociological literature, does not adhere to the possibility of unforeseen occurrence but rather devotes itself to a presumed unalterable and necessary future to which all current activity and thought seems conditional upon it. Its core is a fear of the future.

I wonder then, perhaps controversially, whether the term ‘cult of the future’ can be applied to a whole society and not just to the small evangelical cult based in the outer suburbs, which still studiously awaits the end of the world and constantly resets its countdown. Can a cult of the future, traditionally applied to an unconventional extra-societal gathering, include Australian society itself? How our societies conceive of the future may be different in content and style to evangelical and theological communities, but could the aim be similar? Whether it is a social reformer or a cult leader, is the process the same in the way future mythology is constructed? Could secular future-orientated systems conceivably sit alongside the systems of more controversial groups like Heaven’s Gate or Jehovah’s Witnesses as related efforts of installing pre-organised future-mythology into the mindset of a group of people?

As an Australian studies postgraduate, I remain curious at how the Judeo-Christian apocalypse also functions in various secular contexts and how the term ‘apocalyptic’ has accrued associative meanings outside the scriptural exegesis of The Book of Revelation, such that, in the broad senses of being predictive, climatic, disastrous or unrestrained, last century’s events of cyclone Tracy, the Port Arthur massacre and the Y2k millennium bug (not forgetting this century’s 9/11 and tsunami), can all be accurately described as apocalyptic.

I am concerned too at how the cult of personality around such influential figures like Benny Hinn, whose early morning televised performances of popular faith (which continue to be broadcast to this day in Australia), somewhat lacking the liturgical rubrics that bind mainstream religious groups, magnifies the sense of doomsday urgency to their own advantage and to their followers’ disadvantage. Attending a convention at the Boondall entertainment centre in Brisbane 1999 as one critic among 4,000 followers, when Benny Hinn asked ‘Are you ready Australia?’, I almost naively felt obliged to stand up and passionately reply, ‘no!’.

What contemporary apocalyptic thinking has to commend it lies not in the ego-theological rhetoric of self-professed, silk Italian-suited, ‘prophets of god’ or in those government leaders who use fear to court votes, but in its location of the self in a future narrative. Rather, it is this placement of our personal selves within the ultimate future narrative, that is, within our struggle to become aware of death, which demands a special hearing of renewal, faith rewarded and second chances (or Hugh Mackay’s ‘third chance’) as we move deeper into the new millennium. Apocalyptic thinking should encourage us to ponder what part of ourselves goes on to the future, not what books or tapes to purchase in order to survive the various doomsday scenarios marketed or what security protocols we must have in place for the unknown.

Yet, living in a period overcome with chronological inertia and personally being situated within a culture that commodifies or demonises the future at every opportunity, our social exchanges remain saturated with media-types and politicians tipping their conversational hats to the new millennium and the security of the future. Those who have secured comfort in the contemporary forms of future mythology will thus find the argument, which suggests the social future is a situated textuality, with implicit and explicit agendas set by a powerful and profitable elite, uncomfortable, contentious and confrontational.

But to interrogate the monopolisation of future mythology by the leading mythmakers and the salvation merchants, whose greatest tool is the rumour of what we fear and whose largest assets are the shackled hopes of seekers, is to reclaim responsibility about the future. It is to take back the ‘future’ those others would have obscured and denied for us. It is to give meaning to an individual present that would otherwise be lonely in the crowd of social futures. It is, I suggest, to court the individual, responsible creation of durable, flexible futures on a design-it-yourself basis.

To undertake this, we must each ask ourselves when confronted with future mythology not ‘will it be true?’ but ‘what is it meant to do?’. We must reclaim the question of ‘what if?’ and fight the futures that bind us in the present. We must break the hold of ‘thinkphobia’ — which protects secular and theological apocalyptism — and responsibly interrogate and decide for ourselves.

Today, more than ever before, we face a precarious social crossroads in which the anxious ills of society stem not only from frequent oppressive controls of information, knowledge and future mythology, but also from an oppressive lack of control, of tongues wild with ‘new revelation’. A balance must be struck. In negotiating with future mythology and in thinking about the future, we need neither blind resistance nor blind acceptance but we must form and debate the futures that will presumably be invented and inhabited by us.

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