Apocalyptic Politics

My latest First Things column sparked some reflections on apocalyptic politics from the Economist’s Erasmus columnist. He moves my observations about apocalyptic philosophy to apocalyptic politics. It comes up in all sorts of places.

“Iran’s former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, seemed obsessed with eschatology to a degree that irritated the country’s clerical establishment; they complained that this was a distraction from practical, everyday concerns.” Erasmus quotes Michelle Bachmann’s observation that the Syrian crisis might indicate that “we are in God’s end time history…Rather than seeing this as a negative, we need to rejoice—Maranatha, come Lord Jesus, His day is at hand.”

Apocalyptic agitation is not a monopoly of the right: “Arguments about the apocalypse can pop up in other worldly debates—about the enviroment, for example. As many enviromentalists, including religious ones, have pointed out, talk of impending Armageddon can easily be harnessed by those who dismiss green concerns: what’s the point of recycling anything or limiting consumption if we, and all the toxins and plastic bags we are ever likely to produce, are all going to burn anyway? Meanwhile, eco-sceptics turn that point on its head: they dismiss warnings of the planet’s doom as a secular version of religious scaremongering.”