Whichever path becomes dominant, it seems unlikely that the domain of stigmatized-knowledge claims will disappear. Some will, no doubt, become the victims of their own success; that is, they will become so widely accepted that they will lose their stigma and become indistinguishable from the mainstream ideas they challenged. To a great extent, that has already happened to alternative medicine, now the beneficiary of government funding, with at least some access to conventional medical journals. Notwithstanding the increased permeability of boundaries, however, a domain of stigmatized knowledge seems likely to remain stigmatized, if only because it reflects the alienation and suspicions that some continue to direct toward government, science, higher education, and mainstream religion. As long as those suspicions remain, so too will the belief in a realm of hidden or forbidden knowledge. As ideas pass across the border that separates the world of the stigmatized from the world of the accepted, the world of the stigmatized must be reinforced with new additions. If the past is any guide, the cultic milieu provides a seemingly bottomless reservoir from which new knowledge claims can be drawn. Thus the attractions of the taboo and proscribed can always be met by visions of ever darker plots and ever more shocking revelations.
The existence of a self-perpetuating domain of stigmatized knowledge means that the raw material for improvisational millennialism will remain plentiful. We can see the flourishing undergrowth of improvisationalism in the development of increasingly complex beliefs about conspiracies. Although belief in malevolent plots has a long history in American culture, it is safe to say that no period has evinced so strong an appetite for conspiracism as the final two or three decades of the twentieth century. Conspiracism increasingly manifests itself in depictions of plots so vast that they can be undone only in an Armageddon-like conflict. Small wonder, then, that so much improvisational millennialism revolves around visions of conspiracy that purport to describe a coming diabolical New World Order—the focus of the next two chapters.
3
New World Order Conspiracies I
The New World Order and the Illuminati
Although styles of millenarian thought have become increasingly diverse, the result has not been the cacophony one might expect. Despite the unprecedented millenarian pluralism in contemporary America, the varieties described in the preceding chapter—religious, secular, and improvisational—have been integrated by the wide acceptance of a unifying conspiracy theory commonly denoted by the phrase New World Order. This theory may be found in religious, secular, and improvisational versions. In this chapter I examine its disparate origins, for it appears to have developed separately out of religious and secular ideas that subsequently converged.
New World Order theories claim that both past and present events must be understood as the outcome of efforts by an immensely powerful but secret group to seize control of the world. Most commonly, these theories now include some or all of the following elements: the systematic subversion of republican institutions by a federal government utilizing emergency powers; the gradual subordination of the United States to a world government operating through the United Nations; the creation of sinister new military and paramilitary forces, including governmental mobilization of urban youth gangs; the permanent stationing of foreign troops on U.S. soil; the widespread use of black helicopters to transport the tyranny’s operatives; the confiscation of privately owned guns; the incarceration of so-called patriots in concentration camps run by FEMA; the implantation of microchips and other advanced technology for surveillance and mind control; the replacement of Christianity with a New Age world religion; and, finally, the manipulation of the entire apparatus by a hidden hierarchy of conspirators operating through secret societies.
These concepts were, of course, far removed from what President George H. W. Bush had in mind when he popularized the phrase new world order at the time of the Gulf War of 1991. He drew on a quite different tradition, one which went back many decades and referred to a new and more stable international system associated with effective mechanisms for collective security. This distinction, however, is not one that New World Order writers have found persuasive. Indeed, considering Bush’s past associations with such organizations as Skull and Bones (a secret society at Yale University), the United Nations, and the CIA, it was easy for conspiracists to view his new-world-order references as messages to his fellow plotters. While Bush no doubt thought the phrase suggested a reassuring entry into a post–Cold War world, those who saw conspiracies everywhere saw his open use of the term as evidence of the cabal’s newfound brazenness.1
Thus, by the early 1990s, what most regarded as innocuous political rhetoric was seen by others as a sign of onrushing calamity. They did so not only because they distrusted Bush’s patrician origins but because, unbeknown to him, the New World Order was already a well-consolidated element in the thinking of both religious millenarians and those on the extreme political right. It is not clear how far back these sectarian usages go, but they certainly antedate Bush’s use by decades.
The idea of the New World Order as a sinister development draws on two distinct streams of ideas that evolved separately but eventually converged. One source is millenarian Christianity, embedded in fundamentalist Protestantism. Its speculations about the end-times, when history would reach its climax and termination, led to scenarios in which a diabolical figure—the Antichrist—would fasten his grip upon the world. The other, secular source, less easily categorized, consists of a body of historical and political pseudoscholarship that purported to explain major events in terms of the machinations of secret societies. They, rather than governments, were said to be the real holders of power. The eventual aim of these shadowy plotters was nothing less than world domination—the imposition of a New World Order.
THE REIGN OF THE ANTICHRIST
The term Antichrist itself appears only a few times in the New Testament, relegated to the First and Second Epistles of John. It is invoked almost in passing, but always with the sense that the person or persons referred to are “deceivers” and “false prophets” who will appear as adversaries in the last days. The sparse scriptural citations speak sometimes of a single Antichrist, and sometimes of many: “Little children, it is the last hour: and as ye heard that Antichrist cometh, even now have there arisen many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last hour” (1 John 2:18). Other than suggesting a capacity for deceiving the faithful, these passages say little about what such a person or persons will do. The vagueness of the concept, however, allowed it to be filled out with whatever content believers wished, particularly as time passed and it became evident that the Christ’s return was to be indefinitely delayed.2
Two strategies eventually developed for the elaboration of the concept. The most common was to seek the Antichrist’s identifying characteristics, the better to recognize him when the time came. Eventually, this quest produced a massive literature, especially among Anglo-American Protestants, aimed at determining who the Antichrist was, and always assuming that there was only one. The second strategy, which seems to have developed later, joined the figure of the Antichrist to an organization or institution through which he was to impose his will on the faithful.3
The Antichrist’s eschatological role was significantly increased by the rise of dispensational premillennialism in the late nineteenth century. The dispensational system, devised by British evangelical John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), quickly became the dominant form of millenarianism among Protestant fundamentalists, and remains so today. Premillennialists believe the millennium will not begin until after Christ’s return and the events associated with it. Postmillennialists, on the other hand, regard the Second Coming as an event that will not take place until the millennium itself has ended. As a result, premillennialists conceive the end-times in terms of high drama and the catastrophic demise of the present order, while postmillennialists are far more apt to view the millennium as a state to be achieved through the gradual perfection of the world. Darby produced an elaborated version of premillennialism, in which sacred history was divided into periods or “dispensations,” concluding with a complicated sequence immediately before the Second Coming. He argued that the end-times would commence with a seven-year period called the Tribulation. At the outset of the Tribulation,