The transparent malarkey of Q-Anon and the thinly veiled white supremacist hate of Kraken conspiracism are, indeed, the natural flowering of the bonkers ideologies embedded in [Hal] Lindsey’s and [Mike] Warnke’s fantasies, related expressions of what [James] McGrath rightly identifies as a toxic “spiritual pride.”
I think it’s also a predictable result of the nihilism force-fed to those young white Christians back in that youth group. And let’s be clear: that is what you are teaching when you tell a teenager, in 1985, to read a book called The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon and telling them they must believe every word of it. You’re teaching them that nothing means anything, that nothing matters, that nothing is true or good or beautiful or real.
That would have been the case even if any of Lindsey’s “prophecies” had been anything close to accurate and we had been able to fully believe the things that Lindsey and our teachers believed. We were being taught, and we were learning, that our lives, the lives of others, and the universe entire had no meaning except in its annihilation. We were being taught the futility of hope for anything other than that annihilation — that we should regard “Armageddon” as good news, as the best possible news. Attachment to this reality, we were told, was pointless, and thereby we were being groomed and trained to become detached from reality.
While some of our fellow Cold War kids went Goth, scarring their arms with ballpoint tats reading “No Future,” we were being taught an even weirder, darker ideology that saw “No Future” and everything they feared — nuclear Holocaust, environmental catastrophe, a deadly epidemic unacknowledged by our churches and leaders — as cause for cheer. Train your children to think of mass-death as good and thrilling and they’ll grow up to be the kind of people who simultaneously deny and celebrate a global pandemic.
But there was a second, subtler and more pernicious way that our Hal Lindsey syllabus was teaching us that truth was illusion and nothing means anything. Because at the same time we were being taught to believe in an imminent Rapture and a final cataclysmic Armageddon within the decade, we were also being told to study hard for that final exam because if we didn’t keep our grades up senior year, we wouldn’t be able to go to a good college, and if we didn’t go to a good college, we wouldn’t be able to get a good job, and if we didn’t get a good job we’d never be able to provide for our children or ensure our financial security in retirement.
None of this talk about the future — college, careers, children, grandchildren — was presented to us as contingent. It wasn’t a matter of “But just in case the Bible prophecy scholars are wrong and the Lord tarries, then you’ll need a Plan B.” It was, instead, a constant yet constantly unacknowledged contradiction. And what that contradiction taught us was that the things we believed or claimed to believe didn’t matter — that the substance of our “beliefs” did not need to correspond to reality or to affect the reality of our lives in any meaningful way.
