Every morning, the Rev. Micheal Mitchell prays that if today is the beginning of the end of the world as we know it, he will be ready.
“Ever since the terrorist attacks four years ago, I try to live every day as if it will be the last day,” said Mitchell, 46, senior pastor of New Life Tabernacle United Pentecostal Church in New York.
Mitchell’s belief that he is watching biblical prophecy unfold in the form of modern-day famines, floods and earthquakes has grown increasingly urgent. What with a cataclysmic earthquake swallowing whole villages in South Asia, coming on the heels of a killer tsunami and hurricanes that flooded the Gulf Coast and brought lethal mud slides to Guatemala, apocalyptic anxiety is running extraordinarily high – among believers and nonbelievers alike.
Set against a backdrop of terror threats and worries that avian flu may morph into a pandemic, it’s no wonder that talk of a biblical-scale reckoning is cropping up in all sorts of conversations.
“A lot of people are watching the Rapture Index very carefully right now,” said Stephen O’Leary, an expert on apocalypticism at the University of Southern California, referring to a Web site that purports to offer a statistical gauge of the approach of the moment that Christians believe Jesus will remove the faithful from Earth.
The Web site, www.raptureready.com/rap2.html, registers 159. Anything higher than 145 means “fasten your seat belts,” according to the legend.
Apocalyptic beliefs have long been an American staple. A June 2001 survey by the Barna Research Group, for instance, found that 40 percent of adults in the United States believe the physical world will end as a result of supernatural intervention. Fifty percent disagreed, and 10 percent didn’t know.
Mitchell, like many Pentecostals and charismatics, believes the seven years of calamities leading to Armageddon – the battle in which Jesus will defeat the Anti-Christ – may already have begun. Now, he said, he gets almost daily questions from congregants about how current events may reflect those prophecies.
Social scientists say that such preoccupations reflect an increasingly apocalyptic mood in America, expressed not just in Christian fundamentalism, but also in secular doom-and-gloom scenarios.
Nonbelievers tend to express their anxieties in terms of man-made ecological disasters or, more simply, an indifferent and hostile nature. If the recent storms and quakes portend anything, it’s climactic change, not biblical reckoning, said Oliver Haker, 28, a New York lawyer.
Others search for a deeper, redemptive meaning behind so much suffering and despair.
“When I heard about the quake in Pakistan, I thought, ‘Wow, this could be it – we could be entering the final seven years,’” said Irwin Baxter, founder of Endtime Ministries in Richmond, Ind., who does a radio show about biblical prophecy.
Naysayers note that such predictions are a constant in human history – and have always been proven wrong.
“We have an acute need to find an explanation for suffering, pain and death,” O’Leary said.
Certainly, it is a sign of the times that booksellers report an uptick in sales for books not just about biblical prophecy, but also that explain disasters in scientific terms.
Besides the steady popularity of apocalyptic titles, like the bestselling Left Behind series, “what we have seen recently is marked interest in books that help readers understand the issues of the day,” said Bill Tipper, bestsellers editor for Barnes&Noble.com.
Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of the Manhattan-based National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, said that for Jews, as well as Christians, millennial thinking offers purpose to life. But he warns that it can also be used to “escape from real-world ethical obligations.”
He stresses a Jewish teaching that if one is planting a tree, and hears the messiah is coming, one should continue planting. “It’s our life-affirming actions that produce the reality of a messianic future,” Kula said.
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