David Walsh, editor of History News Network, recently interviewed Matthew Avery Sutton, who teaches history at Washington State. Sutton wrote a 2009 book on the female evangelist and Los Angeles sensation, Aimee Semple McPherson in 2009. Walsh’s interview comes as Sutton is finishing a forthcoming monograph called American Evangelicals and the Politics of Apocalypse. This should be a fascinating read. Here’s a taste of this insightful interview that you can find here:
Walsh:
Let’s discuss the political implications. One of the direct consequences of millenialist theology was the rise of conservative fundamentalist Christianity in America. What can we expect today?
Sutton:
This is where I, as an historian, need to be a bit careful. In the Times, I wrote that throughout the twentieth century, when we have a so-called liberal president, there seems to be a rise in apocalyptic thinking among evangelicals on the heels of that. We had Roosevelt and a major rise in apocalyptic thinking. Then it sort of subsides until the 1960s, as things get crazy with the student movements, with Vietnam, we then see a rise again in apocalyptic thinking, especially in response to the Great Society. The symbol of that, for me, is the publication in 1970 of Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth, which was the best-selling nonfiction book of the decade. And then it subsides in the 1980s and 1990s, but then during the Clinton years Tim LaHaye publishes the novel Left Behind, which became another insane phenomenon. The whole series revolved around the scenario I outlined earlier: the Rapture, the Tribulation, the rise of the Antichrist, the Battle of Armageddon, the Second Coming. But it subsides a bit during the Bush administration ...
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