Within this civil religious framework, especially as it was conceived in mid-twentieth century North America, the world was a battlefield for the war between the Children of God and the Children of Satan. And, during the years of the Cold War, if “we” were the Children of God, it was clear who the Children of Satan were. What I didn’t understand at the time was that the system of “Godless communism,” which our “Western Christian Civilization” was opposing, was as much an outgrowth of the apocalyptic as our own system.
If the dominant thread of apocalyptic thought in the US was post-millennial, the pre-millennial apocalyptic was dominant in the USSR. Frederick Engels saw the “chiliastic dream-visions of ancient Christianity” as “a very serviceable starting-point” for a movement that eventually “merged with the modern proletarian movement.”15 Karl Marx’s first published writings included such mystical texts as “On the Union of Christ with the Faithful” and the apocalyptic vision for the impending Revolution in which he and Engels shared a faith had roots in Judeo-Christian millenarianism. Modern utopianism and other currents of socialist, communist, and much other Left wing traditions were all, to varying degrees, modern products of Jewish and Christian apocalyptic thought, or showed at least some tinge of the apocalyptic worldview. The Revolution of Marxism and Leninism that would lead eventually to “communism” follows the same mythic structure of sudden and complete transformations into an idealized world that we find in the Apocalypse of John. Both Marxism-Leninism and apocalyptic Christians assume the struggle of a noble class of people (workers, believers, respectively) against diabolical evil (capitalism, or the “World, the flesh and the Devil” respectively), which the noble class wins. After the consummation and victory of the struggle both see an utterly transformed world, some version (a secular version in one) of a “heavenly city descending to earth,” the scene that ends the Book of Revelation.
And then there are all the other apocalyptic, utopian, and millenarian movements organized in the shadows of these two Goliath utopias of the twentieth century. Anarchism is a very diverse tradition that defies most categories, by definition. Still, the utopian and millenarian spirit clearly imbues much of this segment of the Left. Bakunin’s destructive impulses, for instance, had something deeply apocalyptic about them, and a millenarian spirit was also quite evident in the Spanish anarchists he influenced.16 In an account of one dramatic moment of the Spanish Civil War as the city of Málaga went down in flames, Gerald Brenan heard an anarchist echo the apocalyptic sayings of Jesus as he said, “And I tell you—not one stone will be left on another stone—no, not a plant nor even a cabbage will grow there, so that there may be no more wickedness in the world.”17
On the extreme margins of the US empire the apocalyptic idea plays a major role among the Christian Identity movement, Survivalists and many other far right organizations and movements. And of course there is ISIS in the Middle East,18 and the apocalypticism of Al Qaeda and other Islamic fringe groups, all of whom inherited their apocalyptic sensibilities from Christianity and presumably from the Prophet himself.19
Like everyone of my generation born mid-20th century, my worldview was formed between the millennialism of the American empire, and the apocalypticism of the Soviet. This dichotomous consciousness became the “motor force” of the 1960s and the shadowy reality that came to be known as the Cold War. Both sides of the binary were secular ideologies with deep roots in a Judeo-Christian apocalyptic ethos that would remain foundational, despite polite denials (in the “Western” countries) or even violent attempts to extirpate it (most notably in the Soviet Union). In the same way the Catholic Conquistadors built their churches on top of the indigenous temples, and often of the same stones, the modern world has been erected on the foundations of an apocalyptic faith, utterly transforming it in the process.
Chapter One: From Mid-Century to the Sixties
My father, William “Harmon” Ross, was a farm boy who grew up in Depression and Dust Bowl-era Oklahoma. As a desperate teenager he’d hitchhiked to California and gone to work in the Oakland shipyards at the beginning of the Second World War. He’d lied about his age to join the Navy during that war, and then reenlisted in the Air Force. When I knew him he was loud (due to having gone mostly deaf from working around jet engines) and he had an accent so thick he could have wiped it on his jeans. He had what one relative called “a meanness” to him, which I could have attested to even before I could speak. He terrified me until I got old enough to fight back, but even then he could make me shake in my boots.
While moonlighting as a bartender when he was stationed in Seattle, Washington Harmon met my mother, Mary Carol Crane, an ex-Marine who’d been raised in the Hoovervilles of Seattle. She could match wits with Harmon, which she often did, but he had the louder voice and that alone commanded submission from the whole family. She’d had a wild youth, but after the marriage she’d settled down, eventually converting to Billy Graham’s particular brand of millenarian dispensationalist Christianity.1
Besides poverty, the two sides of my family had something else in common: their diverse ancient lineages had only recently been homogenized into white Protestantism. My maternal grandmother had neglected to tell her anti-Semitic spouse that she was Jewish, and neither my mother nor the grandchildren (like me) knew that we weren’t really Protestants, nor therefore, in those days, qualified as “white.” On my father’s side a not-too distant ancestor also took advantage of a hole in the American apartheid wall that separated WASPs out from all others to leave the Cherokee tribe and join the dominant nest. Miscegenation had already lightened her complexion, making the defection from the tribe relatively easy, and leaving her people behind probably seemed a small price for my great-great grandmother to be able to manage her own life, far from the control of the Indian agent and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. And so it was that both branches of my family became white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant, and generations of ancestors with their non-white and non-Christian traditions were disappeared or shunted off into the underbrush around the family tree.
Other than these similarities, the two branches of my family bore little resemblance to each other. Despite my mother’s recent conversion to a rather conservative Evangelical Christianity, she was still a liberal compared to my father’s side of the family: they were Pentecostal Holiness of the Assembly of God variety, with a moderate sprinkling of, what by comparison were “moderate,” Southern Baptists. Most of my aunts and uncles on the Ross side, then, spoke two languages: An Oklahoma dialect of English and the “unknown tongue” of the Holy Spirit. I grew up with a personal understanding of the term “holy rollers” those summers I went to visit relatives in Oklahoma before we eventually moved there. I watched grown adults, who were the most unemotional, reserved, and opaque of people all week long, transformed on Sunday mornings. They would enter and take their seats at the pews and tap their feet to the music of the electric guitar, drums, and choir as it sang the old favorites like, “I’ll Fly Away,” and “I’ll see you in the Rapture.” The temperature would rise until the first few would be “touched by the Spirit” and soon begin dancing out from the pews to babble, shriek, moan, wail, groan, cry, and roll in the aisles of Tyler, Oklahoma Assembly of God Church, the old one-room school house built early the previous century by none other than my great grandfather.
My father never quite readjusted to that culture when he returned to Oklahoma in his mid-forties. The military and service overseas had changed him, so while his family “danced in the Spirit” and spoke in unknown tongues, he sat quietly with my mother in the pew, both of them with their heads bowed.
Because my father had made the US Air Force a career, my first memories of religious instruction took place in a more regimented and rationalized context than the rollicking holiness world he’d grown up in. My earliest memories of church took place in the US military chapel. Here God’s representative, dressed in an awe-inspiring officer’s uniform, led our Sunday school assembly in choruses of “Climb, climb up Sunshine