Apocalypse, Now What? Evangelical Decline and the Turn to Conservative Conspiritualism

The Evangelical Apocalypticism that accompanied the demographic and political ascendancy of Evangelical culture in the final decades of the twentieth century was grounded in a kind of conspiratorial framework — a doctrine called premillennial dispensationalism — that was both Biblically anchored, in its own controversial way, and fundamentally optimistic, foretelling the immanent return of Christ and the redemption of the faithful.1 But since the early 2000s Evangelicals have been declining in demographic reach and cultural influence.2 That sense of decline has led to the widespread adoption of new, less optimistic, less "native," less Biblically grounded kinds of conspiratorialism that recruit aspects of Christian supernaturalism to serve their own "grimmer" mythologies, resulting in a militarized mentality that legitimates the most desperate forms of political — and extra-political — action.

American Evangelicalism arguably hit the high point of its political and cultural influence in the decade or so that spanned Y2K, and its dominant affective mode then was Apocalypse. Not Apocalypse in its popular sense of a catastrophic end of the world, exactly, though it included that, but the sense of Apocalypse as "revelation": a cumulative moment in which the true order of things shows forth and a Godly moral, social and political order is instituted on Earth. This kind of apocalypse is an end of something, true, but it is the end of something Evangelicals consider bad: "the world" that is fallen and fatally damaged by ambiguity, deception, corruption and sin. Apocalypse, for Evangelicals, is the occasion of redemption, when this world is replaced by something better in which the faithful are recognized and rewarded. In the late '90s and early '00s a Joshua Generation of homeschooled Evangelical children were being prepared for the final, blessed re-conquest of their nation. Evangelical women and girls were being encouraged to live in accordance with their true, pure, captivating femininity, Evangelical men were being encouraged to embrace their wild-at-heart masculinity,3 and Evangelicals young and old were devouring Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins's Left Behind novels (1995-2007) that depict the pre-apocalyptic End Times as a period of heroic struggle. Truth — the complementarian truth of gender, the moral truth of the church's ultimate Dominion, the eschatological truth of History — seemed in the process of showing forth in a slow-rolling apocalypse that would start with the kingdom being built in small-town America, and that would end — soon, if the signs were being read properly — in its institution throughout the cosmos.

This was apocalypse in a major key. It was an exciting but emotionally complex prospect for Evangelicals, the terror of possibility of being found wanting and left behind shot through with the euphoric hope of vindication and redemption.4 Its affect was grounded in the anxieties of persecution and the resentments borne of feeling looked-down-upon by a dominant culture that treated you as ignorant, square, and backwards, even while they reframed your righteousness in the context of their faux-morality and called it intolerance.5 These resentments were bound to the knowledge (or hope) that you were actually right all along, and that it was you, not they, who were on the right side of the moral universe, the nation's true values, and history itself. These feelings were not without the extra, slightly sadistic frisson that earned Left Behind the moniker "Rapture porn": the promise that from one's post-Rapture perch on high one could watch them — the liberals, the homosexuals, the feminists, the smug atheists, the country-club churchgoers, the race-shamers — being made to pay for their arrogant condescension and fake-virtuous "tolerance." 

But since then, as the second Bush 43 term saw Evangelical dreams of widespread revival sputter out and American wars bog down, and certainly since Barack Obama's 2008 election, "White Christian America" has been in decline, that decline perceived as an increase in persecution and the slipping away of the redemptive apocalypse that had seemed so immanent.6 The question is, what cultural mode accompanies the sense of decline that comes after the victorious apocalypticism that seemed, paradoxically, to capture both the ascendant culture's sense of persecution and its optimism? How does Evangelical culture cope with the whimper that follows the bang that never came, after the turn-of-the-millennium apocalypticism began to seem a kind of "cruel optimism" in which "something you desire is actually an obstacle to your own flourishing"?7 What emotions follow as purity culture collapses on its own contradictions,8 Evangelical warrior manhood is revealed as a questionably-scriptural fantasy impotent to hold back the erosion of support for traditional sexual institutions and gender roles,9 confident Dominionism morphs into defensive, paranoid Christian nationalism,10 and the Joshua generation not only fails to march down and purge the modern Canaan of its wickedness, but deserts from the army of the virtuous altogether and reveals itself, rather, to be part of the bleeding edge of decline?11 

More recent Evangelical culture has turned to explanatory narratives that invoke apocalypse in a minor key, because its animating narrative framework, its cultural "deep story,"12 has changed subtly, becoming less like Left Behind, and more like another story long beloved in Evangelical culture: Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.13 In this superseding deep story Christian hope and anticipation are mixed with, and arguably overdetermined by, something less Christian, something more akin to the pagan heroic code of Tolkien's beloved Beowulf. Though himself a devout Catholic, the world Tolkien chronicles in LOTR is not that of Christian creation (structured by redemptive history) but, is, rather, Middle Earth, a version of the Old Norse Midgard. Norse mythology does not run toward a redemptive Apocalypse, but toward a "Great Winter" and from there through an anti-Armageddon, the heroic but doomed battle of Ragnarok, to ultimate destruction and dissolution. The overarching historical narrative of Tolkien's Middle-Earth, to the extent that it is perceptible to its denizens seems to follow this trajectory, and is apprehended as long, slow decline: "The world is changed. [ . . . ] Much that once was is lost." Within this long historical arc there are specific moments and situations where evil arises and demands a desperate heroic response, but the defeat of evil does not permanently affect the trajectory. At the end of LOTR, there is a moment of eucatastrophe: Middle Earth is saved from the evil of Sauron and peaceful life resumes, but the Elves continue to leave Middle Earth, taking their magic and their possibility of transcendence and redemption with them.14 There is no final showing-forth of a true order, but, instead, a journey into mystery: to the Grey Havens, a version of a certain Norse prince's "undiscover'd country from whose bourn / No traveller returns." Though the heroism of Frodo and Sam is clearly in the Christian sacrificial mode, other members of the Fellowship of the Ring resonate more profoundly with the pagan heroic code that remains vestigially prominent in Beowulf. In this code, defense of one's clan is the warrior's duty and renown for valor and wealth gained in conquest is the measure of a life's accomplishment, but neither fundamentally alters the implacable march of fate, an inevitability to be accepted with dignity and resolve. "Grim" is a word that comes up frequently in Tolkien, most often as the descriptor of a fearsome foe, but also applied to protagonists who resolve to enter into brutal combat despite long odds, resolute in the knowledge that they go to meet their fate whatever it may be. When applied to such protagonists it is imbued with a determination to protect what is right, inflamed by indignation at the temerity of spiritually inferior enemies to attempt to overturn the proper order. 

In the recent "grim" Evangelical imagination the apocalyptic anxiety crystallized in the premillennial dispensationalist account of the end times is unbound from its Biblical script, attaching itself (along with notions such as "spiritual warfare" borrowed from popular Christian supernaturalism) to other, often conspiratorial, explanatory narratives that fit better with this newer structure of feeling. In this kind of "conspiritualism" the "spiritual hunger" that characterizes conspiratorialism is fed by the spiritual assurance and promise of access to arcane knowledge promised by doctrines such as premillennial dispensationalism, resulting in otherwise secular conspiracies being infused by Evangelicalism's characteristic strong supernaturalism and adapting, piecemeal, some of its world-historical interpretive frameworks.15 In Pizzagate, Q-Anon, the COVID anti-vaccine movement, the "Freedom Convoy" occupations and other conspiracy-driven events, conservative Evangelicals have been front and center, linking their characteristic strong supernaturalism to conspiratorial interpretations of world events.16 Christians, as former Southern Baptist Convention leader Russell Moore observes, have been "taking all the populist passions and adding a transcendent authority to [them]," allowing conspiracies without Biblical grounding to "draw legitimacy from a sense of divine justice."17 The January 6, 2021 assault on the US Capitol building, for example, was largely informed by the wide variety of conspiracy theories that emerged to support Donald Trump's evidence-free claim that the 2020 presidential election had been "stolen" from him. But though Trump's own justifications made no reference to the supernatural, many of the insurrection's participants used religious language to articulate the foundation of their belief in those conspiracies.18 For example, in response to her demands that he do more to overturn the election's results (telling him "there are no rules in war") Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows wrote to Ginny Thomas (wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas) that "this is a fight of good versus evil. Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing." Meadows and Thomas, in other words, understood this real-world event in terms of the "fearful angry imaginary world" structured by a grim version of the Evangelical imagination.19

The prominence of Evangelicals in these movements that seem to have little to do with Christianity is the result, primarily of two things: one longstanding and ideational, the other affective and specific to the recent period of decline.  The first is the high degree of overlap between tendencies in popular Evangelical thought and conspiratorial ideation.20 These include:

• Faith: That conspiratorial thought leans heavily on pseudo-scientificist discourses of "research" and "evidence" while organizing evidence on the basis of feelings, hunches and suspicions grounded in underlying narrative frameworks is well known.21 Evangelical thought, being explicitly "faith based" is less bound to scientificist legitimation, and "faith" can also legitimate distortions of inductive reasoning, for similar reasons. Faith is most commonly understood in Evangelical culture with reference to Hebrews 11:1, as "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Faith, in other words, suggests that in any given situation the evidence available may be incomplete, and that there may be invisible forces at work operating, ultimately, for what is hoped for. Despite widespread cultural admonitions against drawing conclusions about the operation of spiritual forces, the knowledge that these forces are operative, in combination with a strong sense of what is good or Godly (which often coincides with what one hopes for) can have the effect of organizing evidence in a way that overrules conclusions drawn from material evidence.22 The interpretive possibilities of "faith," as mobilized by lay Evangelicals in other words, can be extended almost indefinitely to validate their own sense of the good, the things they "hope for." One Evangelical, for example, perhaps echoing sentiments widely shared among the 74% of White Evangelical Republicans who in early 2021 doubted President Biden's victory,23 explained his opinion in a way that suggests a similar basis for it and his religious beliefs: he was "just as convinced that Trump won the 2020 election as he was that Jesus rose from the dead 2,000 years ago."24 A faith-based worldview need not override inductive reasoning in this way, but it can, as this man demonstrates, be used to validate any kind of lack of inductive rigor. 

• Purpose / Teleological historicity: Conspiratorialist ideation is often described with the phrase "everything is connected, nothing is as it seems and everything happens for a reason." But an analogous postulate informs the prayer practices of many Evangelicals, who are encouraged to believe that God is involved in and has an obscure purpose for everything that happens in their lives and the world around (Matthew 10:29). This axiom has a historicist correlative: the idea that history is controlled by powerful obscure forces, and that it is tending toward a certain end-point or objective. Knowledge of that telos shapes responses to contemporary historical events. Evangelical culture carries with it a native, highly flexible teleological historiographical framework (premillennial dispensationalism) that can be easily absorb or be piecemeal accommodated to exoteric conspiratorial teleologies.25

• Rejection: Both conspiratorialism and Evangelical ideation, in its more DIY forms, gravitate to the logic of "rejected knowledge": ideas rejected by mainstream sources are more credible than "official" knowledge because they have been rejected.26 Both assume that what "the world" knows is incomplete or misleading: it is delusion, deception or distraction. For Evangelicals, who tend to be grounded in a strong supernaturalism that is rejected by modern secular thought and often ridiculed by non-Evangelical society, it is not a big step to assume that "the world's" rejection of an idea or belief is an argument in favor of its plausibility.27 Additionally, the tendency of Evangelicals to privilege "common sense" over expert knowledge fits easily with conspiratorial rejection of official knowledge in favor of "inside" or self-developed knowledge gleaned from "doing the research."28 This habit of mind is often appealing to those with less formal education, who work primarily in an inside-knowledge "I know a guy" economy, and resent the authority assumed by "expert knowledge."29 Rejection by experts and non-initiates becomes a badge of honor in both conspiratorialism (grounded as it is in the romantic narrative model of the individual hero fighting a world trying to keep them down), and in Evangelicalism, which makes a central tenet Jesus's admonition that if you follow Him truly, "the world will hate you" (Matthew 10:22).

• Miracles: Both Evangelicals and conspiratorialists tend to imagine the present as being on the threshold of a change after which past rules may no longer apply. This means that even if expert knowledge is right as far as talking about the ordinary world as it is known to science and official history it may not be applicable, because the world is about to enter an extraordinary period. For the conspiracist this assumption is grounded in the sheer volume of indicators that they feel point to the immanence of threshold change, but for Evangelicals this is an article of faith: if one loves God and submits one's self to His purpose (Romans 8:28) miracles are always possible, because God can do more than one can ask or imagine (Ephesians 3:20). 

• Freedom: Like Evangelicalism conspiratorial thought tends to operate in a highly polarized moral universe in which evil is associated with exploitation and oppression, and good is associated with "freedom." American Evangelicals, following Jesus's observation that the truth is what "sets [you] free" (John 8:32), have appropriated "freedom" as central to their discourse, even while accommodating it to liberal and libertarian models theologically incompatible with the freedom Jesus invoked. 

This overlap between conspiratorialism and Evangelical thinking is not new, and the pervasiveness of conspiratorial ideation in Evangelical culture has ebbed and flowed over the past century and a half. What is new, however, leads us to the second, primarily affective, reason that Evangelicals have recently become increasingly attracted to certain kinds of conspiracy theories. While earlier kinds of conspiratorialism (such as premillennial dispensationalism) were usually "native" to Evangelical culture and articulated in doctrines and discourses that (however dubious theologically) emerged from and thrived within a primarily religious cultural ecosystem, the new models of conspiratorialism are not originally inspired by the attempt to apply Biblical text to world events. Instead, they simply absorb Evangelical supernaturalism into their own narrative deep structures, which may not be particularly aligned with a Christian metanarrative.

So though conspiratorialist tendencies are latent within Evangelical thought, the recent turn to "non-native" conspiratorialism and the "grim" apocalyptic vision is best understood in terms of the recent increase in White Evangelical anxiety around decline combined with an increase in the availability of conspiratorial narratives in the media Evangelicals use and consume. It can be understood in terms of Frederic Jameson's observation that "conspiracy is the poor man's cognitive mapping."30 "Poor," in Jameson's phrase, is best understood as a "structure of feeling": an emergent framework for organizing emotions that grows in the social classes most exposed to economic and social change, before those changes are fully understood or articulated.31 "Poor," in the Evangelical context, is connected to the feeling of being unjustly persecuted, referencing the indignation and resentment generated by a sense of unjust dispossession and the feeling of being superior while being seen as inferior. This sense certainly seems the emotional mode native to Fox news, which some Evangelical leaders argue is the real spiritual home of many conservative Christians.32 Fox "has two pronouns, you and they, and one tone: indignation. (You are under attack; they are the attackers.) Its grammar is grievance. Its effect is totalizing."33 This is the organizing emotional complex of conspiratorial narrative: a sense of injustice that intuits hostility and responds with resentment, anger and reciprocal hostility. Fox evangelicals, or those whose Evangelical identity is shaped more by social media than church, may not notice that they have swapped the Evangelical Christian vision for something akin but subtly different, something like Christian nationalism, perhaps.34

Unlike the anxious optimism of turn-of-the-millennium apocalypticism, the grimness of the recent conspiracies is grounded in fear: fear of being displaced from a position of centrality. And fear, as Marilynne Robinson points out, "is not a Christian habit of mind."35 For conservative Evangelicals the problem of adopting a non-Biblical conspiratorialist framework is that these conspiracies are grounded in visions of persecution without a Biblically grounded vision of resolution, or apocalypse. Instead, they offer only facile hallucinations of redemption that do not offset their grim fatalism, and fatalism is incompatible with the Christian hope that lies at the core of their faith. Apocalyptic visions without hope of redemption are secular visions of apocalypse — something to be feared and fought instead of welcomed — and their adoption by contemporary Evangelicals is indicative that their religious culture has become infected by a most un-Christian politics, the politics of cultural despair.36

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Ken Paradis is Associate Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University in Brantford, Ontario. He has published on Evangelical fiction and culture in The Journal of American Culture, Christianity and Literature, English Studies in Canada, The Oxford Handbook of Allegory and elsewhere.

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