Awaiting

I was reading an article on Christian Nationalism, and this lead me to an interesting paper on The Rise of the New Apostolic Reformation and Its Implications for Adventist Eschatology. The paper is some thirty pages, so I didn't read it carefully all the way through, but it was interesting nevertheless. Reading it, I was reminded of an article that I'd read in Slate, back in the day, Full House at King of Kings Assembly. There was a quote in it, that reads as follows:

There's something in the bloodstream of American Christianity that looks for, and reacts to, signs of the apocalypse. To me, it's not a great thing to herald the end of the world while I'm living here. I have kids. I want to see them grow up.

While Full House at King of Kings Assembly was about Christian Zionism, that desire to see the end of the world (or at least the end of the present world) come as quickly as possible is still prevalent in Christian Nationalism, which also wants to bring about the return of the messiah. And this seems driven, at least in part, by a notable hostility to the world as it currently is. Which makes sense once you learn a little bit about their theology. This is, after all, a worldview that holds that "much of the world is under demon control, which includes many individuals, people groups, nations, territories, false religions and ideologies." I suspect that if I believed that literal demons were leading most of the world around me, I would be pretty hostile to it, too. Especially if I saw a number of post-Enlightenment changes, such as acceptance of homosexuality, religious pluralism, and separation of church and state, as being the result of supernatural "evil influences."

But the thought that I kept coming back to while reading the paper was: "Man. That has to suck." Because it simply can't be a pleasant experience to look at the world around oneself and understand that a good deal of what one sees as being the result of the enemies of what is just and right. The world can sometimes come across as a pretty miserable place even when one grants that everyone has good intentions and is doing their best. Seeing people as in thrall to literal forces of evil, of their own doing or not, has to make the world into a much darker and more hostile place that it would be otherwise.