by Mindy Clegg
On June 21st, 2025, President Trump ordered a series of strikes on Iran aimed at ending their nuclear program. The Iranians had maintained their legal right to develop a peaceful, domestic nuclear program. After Trump pulled the US out of the JCPOA (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) negotiated during the Obama administration, he claimed he could cut a new deal with the Iranians quickly. After several false starts, he instead joined in on the violence started by the Israelis earlier in June in their obvious effort to distract from the ongoing acts of genocide in Gaza.
The group probably most excited by Trump’s actions are his far right white evangelical followers. They know that this very well could cause a chain reaction of violence across the region and possibly the world. They are hoping for and counting on it with glee in their hearts. They view it through a cult-like belief in the End Times. In their fevered imaginary, the End Times are a kind of ultimate victory that will prove their righteousness. They want nothing more than to watch their enemies burn from their clouds on high. But what if they are wrong about this being the start of the apocalypse? I argue, that, in fact we already live in a post-apocalyptic world and have done since 1945.
Definitions matter of course, but definitions can change with the historical context. We like to pretend words’ meanings are stable across human history and experience, but it’s just not so. Today, the term apocalypse has become a bit secularized and unmoored from its religious origins. The original meaning connected to the modern understanding of the term comes from Judaism. The term apocalypse was a genre of literature that followed from their Babylonian Exile of the 6th century BCE. The term means “revelation” in the Greek. It also denoted a change in circumstances and context, a historical break. The dreams or visions experienced by the early prophets of Judaism represented the meaning of the word during that era. The term that relates to God destroying the world, but saving his followers is more accurately apocalyptic eschatology. Revelation was not just about the world inevitably ending but it can refer to prophetic revelations about the “end of days.” That could denote an end or a new beginning.
Christianity and Islam incorporated these concepts into their own theological framework. As these faiths grew, secured power, and morphed, millenarian movements emerged at various points. These movements often took on End Times variants. In American history one example was the rise of the Millerite movement, founded during the Second Great Awakening era. Some religious groups during this era came to believe the tensions in the world (citing events such as the French Revolution) meant Jesus’ return was imminent and a change in circumstances was upon them. Eventually their predictions of the end of the world proved incorrect, and the original movement shattered into different Christian sects that are still around today waiting for the End Times, such as the Seventh Day Adventist church.
Thus began a tradition of American religious figures predicting the Ends Times, especially among Evangelical Christians. Most now eschew predicting specific dates in favor seeking evidence that its nearly time for Jesus to return and smite their enemies. In the 20th century, this evangelical wait for the End times entered the mass media era, beginning with figures such as Pentecostal preacher Sister Aimee Semple McPherson. As the Great Depression took hold and right wingers sought to exploit economic uncertainty to recruit followers to the fascist movements. Some religious figures participated in this, such as Father Charles Coughlin whose radio sermons on Catholicism later morphed into antisemitic drivel. In the postwar era, preachers continued to find space on the radio and later on TV, such as Billy Graham. Graham appealed to the broad middle of Protestant Christian America. A less mainstream wing of the evangelical movement emerged during this period. They began to see much of American culture, especially popular culture, as poisoned and even satanic in nature. One example was the backlash to a 1966 interview with John Lennon of the Beatles original published in a British newspaper later republished in American papers about the band being bigger than Jesus. A wave of radio stations in the south sponsored record burnings in response. However, the band attracted the ire of the KKK, who objected to their playing Black music and holding some anti-racist views, such as wanting to play integrated shows in the south. This was the most likely reason for the backlash to the band. Over the next several decades, a Christian media ecosystem began to emerge. Cable allowed for 24-7 Christian themed programs and publishers began to put out various forms of Christian popular literature. More recently, record labels and film studios have been established to cater to especially the Evangelical Christian demographic. One break-out series of books was the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye. A film series followed. This recontextualized and popularized end times eschatology for a new audience. People began to embrace the idea that Jesus’ return was imminent.
The End Times got new stans we might say. It’s a popular position among some white Evangelicals. For clarity’s sake, the modern Evangelical movement has a major split. The late Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter were Evagelicals and hold strongly progressive positions. But there is a wing of the Evangelical movement that has followed figures like the late James Dobson. Dobson and his followers embraced conservative politics and Christian Nationalism as central political positions. Some of them also believe in the End Times narrative. They are extremists in their views on the role of religion in society, on race, and on gender roles. They overwhelmingly support Donald Trump who had put many of the high profile figures in this movement into positions of power within his administration. If the Millerites were simply predicting and waiting for the outcome of that prediction, today’s crop of extremists believe that their hands rest on the levers of power. They believe they are in a position force their savior to return via a war of genocide against all of us who refuse to submit to their whims. Hence, their backing of authoritarian chaos populist Donald Trump. His actual vacuous belief systems and craving for power made him the perfect avatar for their ongoing power grab. With Trump in charge, they know that the US would embrace not only a more authoritarian position on social policies, but would have a foreign policy that aligns with the larger authoritarian projects abroad. Think of their appreciation of Orban, Netanyahu, Bolsanaro, and Putin, and to some degree even leaders like Xi and Kim. But this aligns with their views that global conflict is an inevitability and desirable. They do not understand history as something humans participate in, but rather as a march towards the End Times already ordained by God. And putting one of their own in power helps them get to that point. The contradiction is obvious (that it’s “God’s plan” but also, they are making it happen), but they have no problems with contradictions if it gets them to their goal (death to their perceived enemies).
What is worse is they know that humanity can bring about its own near or total destruction. They do not believe they’ll be the ones destroyed, but believe they’ll be the ones saved to live out a paradise on earth under a Jesus-led dictatorship. But they are wrong about the apocalypse, as it’s kind of already happened. In 1945, after one of the most consequential arms races in modern history (coming at the end of one of the most destructive wars in human history), the US won and pulled off the Trinity Test on July 16 of that year. Within less than a month, the US put their new weapon into action, dropping two atomic bombs on Japan. The argument was that the Japanese would never surrender otherwise. This has been debated by historians to some degree – with regards to the disagreements within the Japanese government about the Potsdam Declaration. Many argue the real reason was to allow Truman to send a message to Stalin: hands off east Asia and we have more than one nuke. Stalin got both messages. In the next few years, Stalin backed the communist take over of the Korean peninsula by Kim Il Sung. Then came the arms race. The Soviet and American governments built up their nuclear arsenal over the next couple of decades. From the mid-60s until the 80s, Detente ruled and disarmament treaties were agreed upon. Too late, though. In addition to the two major global powers, other countries embraced nuclear “deterrence” and built up their own nuclear programs. We lucked out as the whole world was not destroyed during the Cold War. The deterrence regimes worked, though that was not an inevitability. One reason was that the End Times was not a strong belief among many political leaders. Even if they were driven by a deep and abiding hatred of their enemies for whatever reason, they understood that destroying another country with nukes meant self-destruction. For the modern followers of this nuclear version of Christian Eschatology, the destruction of their enemies (which more often than not is an internal enemy) won’t mean their own destruction. They believe that their actions will be rewarded with a kind of bodily resurrection. Problem is with their framing is that we’ve already crossed the event horizon of the apocalypse. The bomb itself signaled a new world that is still emerging today. We’re not all dead and we do not live in a sort of Mad Max hellscape. We do live in a capitalist hyperrealism that has slowly spread since the end of the Second World War known as neoliberal postmodernism. Only the Cold War slowed the post-modern sense of impending doom that seep out into society after Trinity and then the wartime use of the atomic bomb. As sci-fi writer William Gibson once said, the future IS here, it’s just not evenly distributed.
Speculative fiction writers of the 20th century are a great place to look at this sudden, apocalyptic change in the world. Let’s take JG Ballard, whose work gave us the term “ballardian.” It refers to a particular kind of dystopian world that emerges out of neoliberal overconsumption. Some of Ballard’s earliest works played with the idea of a scientifically grounded, secular version of the end of days, a world under water, a world covered in crystals, and so on. Later works turned to examining forms of social and cultural breakdown, especially with regards to the idealize consumerist-centric middle class life in the postwar era. He explored these themes in works such as the 1975 novel High-Rise or 2003’s Millennium People. His books are often unaccountably weird. The origins of this seem to come from his time living in a Japanese-run detainment camp in China as a child, which he fictionalized in his book Empire of the Sun. In that book, the atomic explosions in Japan that the main character James can see, changes the landscape into something bizarre and hard to understand. It changed something fundamental for James and the world at large. Ballard is not the only one to explore the weirdness of the postwar, white middle class world. Film maker David Lynch framed his work in similar manner, as a critical examination of white, middle class Americana. His first breakthrough film was Blue Velvet in 1986. The film follows an all-American college student encountering the dark side of suburbia after he finds a severed ear in a vacant lot. The 1990s soap opera drama Twin Peaks, likely his most well-known work, trod similar ground. The third season, The Return aired in 2017. It explored origins of the evil visited upon the characters from the series in the form of Bob. In the episode “Gotta Light?” Bob escaped into the world during the Trinity test in 1945, signaling an important shift in the world that is largely hidden from view. Bob is a form of evil that hides within the minds of ordinary men, according to Lynch. But for both Ballard and Lynch, the atomic bomb represented a seismic shift in human history. We are still living with the consequences of the possibility of world destruction today.
If my theory bears out, then what we should learn from it is that we, humanity, have the choice to destroy ourselves or not. Despite what the violent End Times crowd would have us believe, we don’t have to go down the path of the worst possible outcome of our present day conflicts. It is not inevitable, and we don’t have to make it so. We can figure out a path forward that can lead us to a better outcome without another round of bloodletting like we saw in the Second World War. Unfortunately, some parts of the world have already gone down that path. The twin genocides of Gaza and Sudan are seen as the path we must all go down. The Russians are keen to expand their brutal war of conquest in Ukraine to other former Soviet territories in order to destroy NATO. But we can stop those conflicts and ensure that the rest of the world heads off similar kinds of destruction. We can find a way to build a better society, at home and between the nations of the world. We have a plethora of ideas on how to do that within various works of fiction and from history. We don’t have to be bound by what some have decided is an inevitable conclusion to human conflict. The old world ended in 1945. We can continue to forge a better one it its ashes, but only if we accept our own agency and do the work for ourselves and future humans.
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