Last month, I drove from Nashville, Tennessee to Starkville, Mississippi for a Sunday afternoon speaking engagement. As I drove across rural Alabama and Mississippi, through small towns, flooded fields, and by countless small farms, I got a glimpse into a religious phenomenon oddly familiar.
On this drive were hundreds of religious signs. Most mentioned the name of a church or the times of a service. But many focused on a central message: Impending Doom.
- Signs about the rapture.
- Signs about the evils of the world.
- Signs mixing politics and religion.
- Signs declaring the end is near.
- Signs reminding you that you must turn from evil to Jesus or risk the consequences of hell.
It wasn’t just the occasional sign near a weird fundamentalist church. And they weren’t coordinated, like from the same organization. For hours, as I drove, I saw these signs. Mostly negative. Mostly rooted in fear. Mostly warning about the evil of the day.
This was a not-so-subtle pulse for how “the church” was representing itself to the common passerby.
It was oddly familiar to me because it’d been nearly 10 years since I saw similar signs. In 2005, I spent almost 3 weeks working with churches in Northern Ireland. And there were similar signs in front of nearly every church everywhere we went. While the signs in rural Alabama and rural Northern Ireland weren’t exactly the same, the sentiment was: Turn to Jesus or bear the consequences of your sins.
Odd Juxtaposition
First, seeing the plethora of these signs reminded me of just how cultural religious expression is. Those signs wouldn’t last where I live. Someone would either take them down or deface them.
Second, it’s odd to me that signs declaring the end of the world and reminding you of your secure position in hell are acceptable in a culture defined by it’s nice-ness. “Nice to meet you, Mr. McLane. Would you like a glass of sweet tea? Now let’s talk about your eternal security.”
That’s an odd juxtaposition. Deeply cultural. Likewise, deeply theological.
Southern hospitality and far-right evangelical eschatology make for odd bedfellows to an outsider. “We’re really nice… and out of our niceness we need to remind you that you’re going to hell.”
Odd? Yes. But bedfellows? Absolutely.
Assumptions
I’m a middle of the road evangelical. I went to a Bible college that’s traditionally pretty middle of the road evangelical, even if the past ten or so years they’ve leaned much more conservatively for the sake of fundraising.
Part of being an evangelical is a longing for Jesus’ return. (This is a core distinctive of evangelicalism.) There’s an assumption that being an evangelical also means being on the premillenial spectrum.
For me, that’s always been something “out there” for theological reflection. Among the 10 or so distinctives of evangelicalism, it’s always been a distant 11th for me. But I’m also a “who cares” person when it comes to end times stuff. “If we don’t know when it’ll happen, let’s just go about our life & ministry as normal, let the end of the world take care of itself.”
But there’s a whole group of my fellow evangelicals who think about this all the time. It’s not just a distinctive of what it means to be evangelical, it’s pre-eminent in their faith:
- They are convinced that the day is near.
- They are convinced they are the last generation.
- This belief shapes their day-to-day life and ministry.
For them, to be a Christian means that they live on the edge of their seat, desperate to make final preparations for the end of the world.
I share that because this is core to this group’s worldview. To them, “turn or burn” is impending. It is imminent. And it’s a desire.
This is an assumption they carry around. It’s not just the 11th thing on their list of 10 things about their faith, it’s in the top 5.
See, to this group, part of their identity is that they want to be the last tribe of Christians. They want to see the end of the world in their lifetime. And that means that their assumption about the world around them is that it’s generally evil.
And amongst the wider evangelical group is a fragment who doesn’t just want to see the end of the world, they are convinced that they can manipulate world events in such a way as to usher in Jesus’ return. This impacts their politics, their need for gun ownership, their blanket support for Israel at all costs, and their interpretation of things that happen in the news. ]
See, you and I see signs for “Turn or Burn” and that elicits negativity– makes us shudder a little. But to a certain part of the evangelical tribe… “Turn or burn” is a positive, it means that the end is near. And they long for Jesus to come back to make things right according to their assumptions of what that means.
I’ll never forget sitting in a class Daniel & Revelation class at Moody during the 2000 election cycle. The professor, on a rabbit trail tangent, shared his persuasive view of why he thought it was “good” for Al Gore and Joe Lieberman to be elected. He ranted about their political positions and came to the conclusion that in order for Jesus to come back the vice president of the United States had to be of Jewish decent, so that he could somehow become the antichrist.
Class ended and students stared at one another. We were all shocked at what we’d heard, “What was that?” We shrugged it off. But it left a mark. It was one thing to be indoctrinated in Moody’s particular flavor of evangelicalism. But the baggage of this sociological assumption rose an alarm among my classmates not easily shaken.
My point is that there are some people among us for whom their assumption about everything happening in the world is negative, but– in their minds– it’s somehow positive because it is ushering in the end of the world.
This is nuanced, complicated, and impacts so much. Doing good is somehow bad, because Jesus would never come back to a world that’s getting better. Doing bad is bad because Jesus would never want his people to sin. But bad happening in the world? That’s good. We need more of it. Because somehow that’ll “force” Jesus to come back and make everything right.
Ugh
“So what?” “If we can’t know the day or time of Jesus’ return, so what?”
I’ve been asking that question forever. The reality is that I cannot and will not reshape my entire posture towards my life around eschatology.
At the end of the day, Jesus doesn’t call us to secretly hope for evil to somehow welcome back Jesus.
Good is good and bad is bad.
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