BY LINCOLN E. STEED

"One nation, and only one, meets the specifications of this prophecy." -Ellen G. White

RIPPING THE SIDES OF THE LECTERN, THE EVENING'S guest of honor leaned forward as if to catapult himself toward the thousands of guests sitting at their tables in the darkness of the huge ballroom. "Are there any theologians out there?" he barked in guttural, heavily accented English. "Listen to me. I have the correct theology; I will teach you what is correct."

There was no answer from the hushed guests, so the octogenarian Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon launched into his keynote address for the twentieth-anniversary celebration of the founding of the Washington Times, one of the capital's two daily newspapers-owned, as few seem to remember, by the Unification Church.

One could scarcely imagine an event including more mainstream Washington power elite. There was a glittering array of community leaders on hand that evening of May 21, 2002, to applaud the coming of age of this well-accepted daily. We watched an effusive video message from former president George Bush; heard a personal message from a presidential aide, giving the current president's regrets that he had been called away suddenly; tried to laugh as Dr. Laura Schlesinger attempted to adapt conservative jargon to the event at hand; and bowed our heads as retired shadow member of Congress and pastor of the New Bethel Baptist church in Washington, D.C., Rev. Walter E. Fauntroy, blessed the event with benisons of inclusion and effusion. This was an "event." Hellfire missiles might still be descending in far-off Afghanistan, and al-Qaeda operatives might still be plotting in caves, but this moment was to be savored.

I looked at the printed text of that speech and smiled at its subtitle: "God's Warning to the Present Age, the Period of the Last Days." It was designed to resonate with the politics and patriotism of a nominally Christian audience.

Moving and gesturing like a prizefighter, the squat-figured Moon outlined the successful battle against godless Communism. That over, he declared that it is now America's role, as "the second Israel," to lead out in building "the kingdom of heaven on earth and in heaven." While that might sound like orthodox Christianity to some degree, the speaker went further and declared that "for the sake of America" the founders of "the four great [world] religions" have, "centering on Jesus," each "chosen 120 of their historically famous disciples." And he announced "their return to earth" to make it all happen. In case we missed what he meant by this, all attendees were given a bound transcript of what purported to be "the report on the seminar in the spirit world for 120 Communists," which supposedly took place that same month. It contained much that was curious, but nothing more so than the program participant list: the master of ceremonies was the prophet Muhammad, and the representative prayer was offered by Jesus!

Clearly, for all the talk of Christ and Christianity, for all the borrowed figures of speech attaching to national religious identity, this was indeed a communication from the spirit world-spiritism. I could not help but be reminded of words contained in "The Impending Conflict" chapter of The Great Controversy: "As spiritualism more closely imitates the nominal Christianity of the day, it has greater power to deceive and ensnare. Satan himself . . . will appear in the character of an angel of light. . . . And as the spirits will profess faith in the Bible, and manifest respect for the institutions of the church, their work will be accepted as a manifestation of divine power."¹

Twenty years ago there was much public amusement at the establishment of the very conservative Washington Times. I heard no one laughing last May. What has changed? I think it has something to do with how the message that night was linked to the longstanding but now resurgent sense of national apocalyptic.

America in Prophecy
In the lecture series "Prophecy and the Modern World" Arthur Williamson, professor of history at California State University, describes how "America became peculiarly the redeemer nation," as the "notion of election fused with apocalyptic expectations." His conclusion, in concert with many historians, is that "nowhere else in the world is the notion of the historical redemption of mankind more clearly, more closely, more emphatically, more irretrievably associated with the political community than in the United States."

And of course, Seventh-day Adventists share at least a core part of that conviction. We trace the finger of God's providence in protecting religious freedom throughout the Dark Ages and then establishing it here on a new shore. The lamblike beast of Revelation 13 fit the prophetic grid for Adventist Bible students 150 years ago, and it still does today. "One nation, and only one, meets the specifications of this prophecy; it points unmistakably to the United States of America," said Ellen G. White.²

But of course, the religious and cultural assumptions of election for the United States have always gone beyond our Adventist assumptions. And they clash at the point of the millennium.

Seventh-day Adventists understand prophecy to reveal a pivotal role for the United States in nurturing religious freedom until the very end-at which point it will actually lead out in restricting true worship. Then Christ returns to take the faithful of the ages to heaven for 1,000 years. Quite at odds with this view, the historic American apocalyptic has tended to gather toward a millennial fulfillment here as a prelude to the Second Coming-an age to usher it in.

In spite of the silence on the matter in history books this side of the Atlantic, the American sense of destiny-indeed, much of the engine that produced the new republic-derives directly from the English civil war of the mid-seventeenth century.

Triggered by the imposition of a new Book of Common Prayer, various independent religious factions rose up against a rigid state church and a weak king that they believed was sympathetic to Catholic interests. After several years of bitter political squabbles the various Puritan factions defeated and executed King Charles I and installed Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector. While there were many different political conflicts and aims, the rebellion was increasingly a religious and, indeed, apocalyptic movement. Two of the major religious factions besides Puritanism were the Levelers (dedicated to leveling society in anticipation of the imminent kingdom of God, in which all would stand as equals before the judgment seat) and the Fifth Monarchy men (named for their insistence that the fifth kingdom of the image of Daniel 2 was about to be established-Cromwell himself was closely associated with this group).

Cromwell's rule was rigorous, uncontested, yet short. In 1658, after ruling for nine years, he died without an obvious successor. Amazingly, the nation turned its back on the religious state model and invited the monarchy back into power. Many dissenters left England and came to the new world. They brought with them the continuation of the apocalyptic vision, tempered by a realization that political power or structure was not itself the way to realize national redemption. But they clung to the vision, articulated by John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay colony, that "We shall be as a city upon a hill. the eyes of all people are upon us." And in stating that vision, Winthrop and others consciously evoked an image of a second Jerusalem, a holy nation to lead the world to righteousness.

Redefining the Nation
The persistence of that vision shows up in the stirring 1860s "Battle Hymn of the Republic," which wonderfully conflates the political struggle to maintain the Union with the national destiny of establishing God's kingdom. It energized westward expansion under the apocalyptic rhetoric of "manifest destiny." It gave Ronald Reagan's condemnation of "the evil empire" a resonance it could have in no other country. It gives a heady religious edge to post September 11 "axis of evil" statements. And it is subtext to the rallying cry of Christian conservatives as they struggle to battle secular humanism and redefine the nation.

To be sure, the lure of dispensationalism has proved effective in the late twentieth century and is now dominant in the new millennium. John Darby's once-marginal view that the living faithful will be "raptured" away to be with the Lord before the tribulation-while the rest of humanity remains behind for a second-chance millennium before the literal return of Christ-has become mainstream to the American apocalyptic. Hal Lindsay's 1970s era The Late Great Planet Earth helped catapult the view to prominence. The Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, which has sold millions, confirms its following.

American dispensationalists identify with the nation of Israel. They see Old Testament prophecy literally fulfilled in that modern secular state. And while the sense of national election for America remains central, it actually gains momentum when the country is seen as the Christian nation designed to protect God's ancient people. In a curious way it satisfies a longstanding yearning by many Christians to legitimize themselves by becoming part of Israel's lineage. In England it emerged in the form of the British Israelites, who attempted to trace themselves to the lost tribes (William Blake's poem "Jerusalem" speaks to that assumption); in nineteenth-century America the Mormonism of Joseph Smith gained its sense of legitimacy by tracing Israel to the new world and establishing a spiritual continuum.

At last year's Christian Coalition Road to Victory conference, Israel was at the top of the agenda, with generous support for its political security. With the ongoing Palestinian intifada a bloody backdrop to the U.S.-declared war on terrorism, it becomes difficult to separate U.S. religious apocalyptic events from secular world events. Indeed, this religious fervor in large part explains the extended debate recently about what constitutes a "just war." In the past, U.S. national interest and a general assumption that an action had moral justification was enough. Now, to justify preemptive action, old religious formulas concerning just war have been broadly adopted. It is curious that they largely derive from Roman Catholic doctrine affirmed by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. We may be witnessing in this shift of national mood a change of the lamblike beast of Revelation toward its second, more domineering, phase.

Increasingly, at home what some may see as culture war is revealing itself as a struggle on all fronts for the national religious identity. Politically active Christian groups have gone beyond the shared Christian revulsion at declining morality. As Francis A. Schaeffer recommended in his seminal 1981 work, A Christian Manifesto, many have resorted to civil disobedience to reclaim America for Christianity. This involves not just the widely condemned abortion clinic bombings but also the continuing efforts to cross accepted constitutional lines and reimpose religion in the schools and in the judiciary.

The September/October 2002 issue of Liberty magazine reported indepth on efforts to post the Ten Commandments in public places. Adventists should understand up front that the generic version usually posted deletes all of the fourth commandment beyond the basic call to keep a Sabbath day. The move to impose the ten is persistent and dismissive of legal challenge. In a recent development state supreme court chief justice Roy Moore of Alabama secretly spirited a Ten Commandments monument into the courthouse after hours. Even after a November order by a U.S. district court that it be removed, the judge enjoyed "folk hero" support
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But no other recent issue has so aroused public religious outrage as a decision issued barely a week before July 4 last year. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California ruled that recitation of the words of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools constitutes an unacceptable state endorsement of religion. The sense of national election was cut to the quick, and the president, members of Congress, and Christian patriots howled objection. Most cared little that the words "under God" were a 1954 congressional addition urged by some religious leaders to contrast the United States with godless cold war Communism. And, more important, it revealed on the largest stage of public discussion that a somewhat self-serving revision of U.S. history has taken root and revitalized the national apocalyptic.

Outdated Separation?
"We do not believe in the separation of church and state," sneered the woman I met at a Senate CARE Act rally last year. She was one of hundreds representing various Christian social aid groups there to urge passage of this element of the president's faith-based initiative. And that, in a nutshell, is where Christian mainstream political thinking is right now.

It is a view that dismisses the intent of the First Amendment, what Thomas Jefferson called the "wall of separation between church and state." Like Chief Justice Rehnquist, they are quick to see it as "an outmoded metaphor." They have conjured up from history a nation established consciously and structurally to advance and protect the Christian faith. But it is a misleading history, made dangerous by its broad appeal (all too many Adventists have uncritically repeated the historical assertions of this view) and by the quick way that all who question it are accused of being un-Christian and, by extension, un-American.

The U.S. Treaty of Tripoli, signed in 1796, stated that "the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion." (See a discussion of the nature of the American republic in "This Happy State," Liberty, July/August 2002.) It is relatively easy to show the deist, Masonic, and Enlightenment intentions of the founders. What must be acknowledged, however, is their automatic assumption that this nation would be Christian to the core. How could they have thought otherwise? It would fly in the face of the obvious lessons they had learned from the English experiment with a purely religious government, as well as England's long history of state religion, to think they intended anything other than a structurally secular state giving constitutional guarantees for all faiths.

Seventh-day Adventists in North America may soon have to make a momentous mental adjustment. Like most of our fellow Christians, we have grown comfortable with the notion that this nation is not only a protector of religious freedom, but that it is by its very nature part of our Christian security. The American apocalyptic myth would tend to create, as a recent Harper's article put it, the "virtuous republic," which in its own self-view is always virtuous by definition. Legislators who hesitated to vote for the Patriot Act were accused of being un-American and of actually aiding the enemy. Christians who deplore the rush to tear down the First Amendment wall are already being marginalized as not quite Christian. And we are well on the way to legally defining this as a Christian state. The implications are sobering.

What happens when the aims of the American apocalyptic conflict with the Bible, even as they fulfill the Apocalypse itself?

It is worth noting the national situation that galvanized Adventists to reenter the religious liberty fray and begin publishing Liberty in 1906. The International Reform Bureau was calling for a constitutional amendment to declare the United States a "Christian nation," and there was open agitation for Sunday legislation. Adventists knew they had to act: to inform the misguided, to delay the coming storm and become more vigorous about evangelization, and to show that they themselves understood the times.

Today we witness calls for formal designation as a Christian nation, open intentions to move over the constitutional wall, real liberties and rights rapidly disappearing before an emergency that has a distinctly religious cast, suspicion of nonmainstream activist religion, and alarms and calamities threatening on every hand.

Adventists have long defined our special calling by invoking "present truth." Surely the process of the past few decades, so abruptly transformed by the events of September 11, puts us squarely into an apocalyptic fulfillment. Revelation 13 describes what we already see developing. How will we respond?

The "Elijah message" was once shorthand for our response to a world held captive to a wrong conception of truth. "Like a dark cloud, deception and blindness had overspread Israel," I read in Prophets and Kings of Elijah's confrontation with a resentful people (p. 147). Naturally, "the crafty priests are continually trying to devise some means by which they may kindle a fire upon the altar and lead the people to believe that the fire has come direct from Baal" (p. 149).

As with our world today, I think it self-evident that Israel, even in apostasy, was very religious. After all, there were several hundred priests there that day. And as in other times of spiritual confusion, the people had so blended true and false religion that they could not tell the difference. It is obvious from the record in 1 Kings 18 that they still regarded themselves as connected to God. But left to themselves, they could only have called down "strange fire" in the manner of Revelation 13. It remained for Elijah to clear their heads by a clarion call to choose between God and Baal ("How long will you go limping with two different opinions?").

A "Reverend" Moon might merely bemuse most of us by appropriating the terminology of American Christian apocalyptic. We might flatter ourselves that we are not vulnerable to the very lying spirits that Revelation predicts will aid in the final deception. But we will have to be very attentive to God's Word indeed to remain immune to the taunts of fellow Christians caught up in the passionate fires of national fulfillment.

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¹ Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 1911), p. 588.
² Ibid., p. 440.

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Lincoln E. Steed is the editor of Liberty magazine.