For millions of Americans the prophecies found in Revelation are not literary allegories but a blueprint of the events to come–if not in 2000, then soon enough. According to a new NEWSWEEK Poll, about 18 percent of Americans expect the endtimes to come within their lifetime. This translates to roughly 36 million people–not just fringe extremists but your office mate, mail carrier or soccer coach. Or your U.S. representative: House Majority Whip Tom DeLay has a wood carving in his office that reads this could be the day, a phrase widely used to refer to the Rapture.
The Rev. Jerry Falwell recently announced that the Antichrist was “probably” already among us. Speaking to NEWSWEEK last week, Falwell avoided setting a date for the big day–“That’s usually the tragedy of these surges of prophecy preaching”–but applauded what he sees as a grass-roots rise in endtimes sermons. “There are happenings today: the approach of one world government, the global-nation syndrome that is so prevalent today, the cashless society,” he said. “There are many who believe that we could be in the last century.” Tapping this spirit, a rash of best-selling novels and movies–including the stealth-hit film “The Omega Code,” which grossed $2.4 million in its opening weekend this month after being marketed strictly through Christian networks–has rechanneled the last days as popular entertainment. Monitoring all these rumblings, the FBI is warning local police departments to be on the lookout for increased militia activities as the new year approaches. As many as 239 Web sites, by one recent count, are multiplying millennial scenarios. “Doomsday sayers aren’t standing on street corners proclaiming the end of time,” says Ted Daniels, director of the one-man Millennium Watch Institute in Philadelphia. “Instead they’ve all gone on the Internet.”
In his small, nondenominational End Time Ministries in Elizabeth, N.J., the Rev. Al Horta is one of the keepers of the apocalyptic faith. The signs, he believes, are all around: wars, school shootings, AIDS, earthquakes, the Y2K bug. The founding of the state of Israel in 1948–an oft-cited precondition for Armageddon–means to Horta that we are “of the generation” and “in the season” that will see Christ’s return. Carmen Lanier, 39, a member of the New Hope Revival Church in Columbus, Ga., concurs. For her, these “last days” are a time to get right with God. As “things get darker on the earth and the perversion of man increases,” she says, she and other faithful will be “emboldened” to minister to lost souls. “I will have the power of Jesus Christ,” she says. “I will be able to heal the sick, to speak to the dead.” For those not saved in the Rapture, she envisions a world sunk in “complete madness, a period of darkness, a horrible time to be alive.”
Yet among Christian communities, the coming millennium has inspired a surprisingly low count of doomsday survivalist cults, says J. Gordon Melton, a researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara. After two decades of studying Christian schisms, splinter groups and rogue denominations, Melton finally concluded that the millennium is a bust, apocalypsewise. Except for the odd group hoarding water or fretting over the Y2K computer bug, the Armageddon wires have been surprisingly quiet. “I expected to have a field day with millennial groups,” he says. “And there was nothing.”
But for true believers, ground zero for apocalyptic zealotry remains the city of Jerusalem. There are already about 100 Christians living on the Mount of Olives, the spot where the Bible says Jesus will return to earth. On a recent Jerusalem evening, an American named Brother David led five congregants in an ecstatic prayer vigil, singing and speaking in tongues. David once had a ministry in Brooklyn, N.Y., but he sold everything 18 years ago to launch his House of Prayer group in Jerusalem, where he expects to be on hand for the day of days. “I feel the Lord’s returning,” he told NEWSWEEK, “and the millennium is to be the time of his coming.” He hastens to distance his sect from those who would commit violence. Such groups, he says, “are not Christians, they are cults. Nobody I know would do any violence. But with these cults, well, you never can tell.”
Even among such dedicated millennialists, the deadline of all deadlines remains fungible. History has not been kind to prophets who fixed a date for Christ’s return, only to see it pass. After one 19th-century believer sold his worldly possessions, his son sued him for squandering his inheritance. For modern would-be prophets, maybe it’s just too soon to know. Some doomsayers are already looking ahead to 2033, the second millennium of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. And why not? In this game, you only have to be right once.
title: “Millennium Madness” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-13” author: “Charity Ross”
These days Brother David can only pray for a miracle of his own. Israeli police arrested him and several American followers in late October and deported them last week in the name of public security. The approaching millennium is attracting doomsday fanatics as well as innocent Christians from all over the world. Some fringe groups are suspected of plotting acts of violence in hope of giving the apocalypse a kick-start. “They are not Christians, I’ll tell you that,” Brother David said before his arrest. “They are cults. Nobody I know would do any violence.” Still, the Israelis make no apology for his expulsion. According to Linda Menuchin, a police spokeswoman: “The most important thing from our point of view is that we prevented anything extraordinary from happening.”
The police can’t relax even now. Brother David and his followers were among roughly 100 foreigners living on the Mount of Olives, believing this to be the site of the Second Coming. What scares the Israelis most is how much trouble some zealots might cause while they await the big day. “We’re going to see this all over the place–people don’t have to go to Jerusalem to do something nutty,” says Hal Mansfield, who tracks cults at the Religious Movements Resource Center in Ft. Collins, Colorado. “But you’re going to see a heck of a lot of them in Jerusalem.” Brother David says he can hardly blame the Israelis for their millennial jitters. “With these cults,” he says, “well, you can never tell.”
The risk is rooted in a bizarre psychological affliction: “Jerusalem syndrome.” Every year a few tourists and pilgrims, emotionally overwhelmed by the holy city, become convinced they are the Son of God or one of his prophets. Perhaps the most notorious case was in 1969, when an Australian Christian, imagining he could hasten the Second Coming, provoked Muslim riots around the world when he tried to burn down Jerusalem’s main mosque. The city’s Kfar Shaul Psychiatric Hospital even has a special Jerusalem-syndrome ward. The problem is expected to soar in the coming year. Israel expects 3 million pilgrims in 2000–including Pope John Paul II himself. The Israeli Psychiatric Society estimates that 40,000 of those visitors may suffer at least mild bouts of Jerusalem syndrome. More than 800 will have to be hospitalized. And it would need only a single delusional traveler to repeat the attack on the Al Aqsa Mosque.
Still, overwrought tourists pose far less worry than end-of-the-world cultists. The FBI’s representative at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv is monitoring threats of millennialist violence and sharing intelligence with the Israelis. An October 1999 FBI report identifies Jerusalem’s Temple Mount as a special concern. Beneath the Dome of the Rock, one of Islam’s holiest shrines, lie the ruins of the city’s great Jewish temple, destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70. Before Jesus comes back, some Christian fundamentalists say, the temple must be rebuilt–impossible as long as the Dome of the Rock stands. The FBI’s report, obtained by NEWSWEEK, warns: “A simple act of desecration, or even a perceived desecration of any of the holy sites on the Temple Mount is likely to trigger a violent reaction.”
To counter such threats the Israelis have formed a special millennium task force, uniting police officers, agents of the domestic secret service known as Shin Bet and members of Mossad, the overseas intelligence service. So far the team’s most publicized case has been last January’s crackdown on a Denver-based endtimes sect calling itself Concerned Christians. The sect’s leader has predicted that he will die on the streets of Jerusalem next month–and that he will be resurrected. Early this year the task force raided two suburban Jerusalem homes where some members were living and arrested 14. Police say members of the group were preparing to blow up one of the city’s mosques, an action that would almost inevitably spark a devastating Mideast war. The Concerned Christians denied any violent intentions. They could have saved their breath. The Israelis threw them out of the country.
This fall the Israelis also quietly expelled an American street preacher known only as Elijah. Wearing a long, gray beard, he had been wandering Jerusalem’s Old City for more than a decade, insisting he was in fact the Biblical prophet–as well as one of the “two witnesses” mentioned in chapter 11 of the Book of Revelation. In recent months his apocalyptic preachings began to attract a group of disciples. Israeli police picked him up for questioning, gave him a psychological evaluation and quietly persuaded him to leave the country without official deportation proceedings.
Critics say Israel is over- reacting. Elijah never bothered anyone–and until the millennium bug bit, no one bothered him either. He’s no isolated instance. Last month a boatload of Irish pilgrims were arrested in Haifa and deported. Several of them, including disabled members of the group, claim Israeli police roughed them up. The Irish government lodged an official protest, saying the pilgrims were members of a charitable organization, not followers of the Concerned Christians, as Israeli newspapers initially reported. Israeli officials are still refusing to say they’re sorry. The end of the world may be at hand. But they’re not letting it happen on their watch.
