Tag: cult

Doomsday Prophecies: From Hal Lindsey to Trump’s NAR

FeaturedDoomsday Prophecies: From Hal Lindsey to Trump’s NAR

In the early 1970s the doomsday prophecies in Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, stoked my Toms River, New Jersey, Christian fundamentalist cult. Little did I know that the prophesies of the cult religion of my youth would come true through a new religious movement, the National Apostolic Reformation (NAR). Fifty years later.

Based on his interpretations of the Book of Revelations, Hal Lindsey connected end-of-the-world Biblical prophecies to current events. In his view, Satan’s plans to form a one-world government and religion were triggered by the establishment of the state of Israel and the World Council of Churches—both in 1948. 

Converts, like me, of the 1970s Jesus movement, still flash-backing to acid trips, saw signs of the end times around every corner. In our small church community, anti-globalism was our protest because Satan was using the banks to form a global economy. We boycotted the Bank of America. We refused to use credit cards. We wrote letters condemning the birth of the European Union. An increase in the divorce rate, recreational drugs, new technology, the gasoline shortage, religious ecumenism. All these signaled the diabolic end of the world, the coming of the Antichrist, or some kind of unearthly vision that terrified vulnerable young comfort-seekers.

I left the Christian cult after sobering up in Alcoholics Anonymous, divorcing an abusive husband, and moving 1,500 miles away from the scene. 

Starting in the 1980’s, unbeknownst to me, Christian fundamentalism slowly morphed into the New Apostolic Reformation. The prime NAR chronicler, Matthew D. Taylor, describes the NAR’s leadership as a “spiritual oligarchy” of apostles and prophets. Apparently God has told NAR adherents that Donald Trump is their spiritual leader. You’ll have to figure that one out for yourself, but the results are obvious. 

The NAR apostles and prophets tell Trump his job is to “advance God’s earthly kingdom so Christ can return.” Advancing the earthly kingdom is outlined in Project 2025. The elimination of abortion and women’s rights; same-sex marriage and gay rights; dismantling USAID as a stand against globalism—all the shockers in the first year of Trump 2.0 are advancing the earthly kingdom.

Venezuela is the biggest shocker so far, at least for me. Fifty years ago I learned that the Book of Revelations prophesied God would make the United States, Russia and China the world’s three spheres of influence. The United States would get the entire Western Hemisphere. Russia gets its region, and Europe. China gets all of Asia, India, Africa. This is the umbrella of national sovereignty, the opposite of international integration and the seeds of anti-globalization.

A radio broadcaster startled me on Saturday morning, January 3, with the news that the US invaded Venezuela. The long-forgotten voice of myself as a 25-year-old Jesus Freak bellowed, “Uh. Oh. Wake up. It’s happening.” 

Donald Trump, in a 2017 speech to the Joint Congress, announced he was not the President of the world. Instead, he stated, he was the President of America. These words sent a signal to anti-globalists and end-times prophets around the world.  It was a declaration that the US will once again dominate the Western Hemisphere. Vladimir Putin confidante Alexander Dugin, heard the call and issued a statement that traditionalism had won, globalism lost. 

Anthropologists say pandemic uncertainty, virtual reality, environmental issues, old-age anxiety, border disputes, memory disorder, and gender trouble put society in a self-protective liminal state, a state betwixt and between. Perhaps these unsettling markers ushered in Donald Trump as the leader of the new world order. Now that we’ve fallen over the threshold, what do we do?

I don’t know. 

But holy shit. 

Wake up. 

It’s happening.

The Ten Virgins

The Ten Virgins

As a veteran churchgoer, I’ve logged about 3,650 hours in the Sunday pew.  My childhood church clocked in at one hour a week for Catholic Mass. When I came to my senses at eighteen, I abandoned churchgoing. After a long period of barstool arguments on the God-is-dead theme, I started up churchgoing again at the Metaphysical Center, where I received a “reading” from a medium. The two-hour-long talk between the spiritualist and his dead interlocutor revealed that I had been Harriet Beecher Stowe in a former life.

I like that. Harriet Beecher Stowe, one of the world’s most famous abolitionists, wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin after receiving a vision during a church service. Church is indeed a good place for visions. Clare of Assisi, Joan of Arc, and Theresa of Avila are famous Christian visionaries. And, of course, there’s the fearless Miss Harriet Tubman herself, who led enslaved people through the Underground Railroad at night, led by her visions. 

After I learned as much as my addled brain could absorb in metaphysical spiritualism, I sobered up and joined a Christian fundamentalist cult. It was so extreme that the elders admonished me for making friends at Little League games with parents who were not our kind of Christian. To extricate myself from that legalistic life, I spent a year drinking jugs of vodka in my basement. Turning again to Alcoholics Anonymous, I sobered up through the holy love of AA veterans. 

Since 1979, I’ve been attending a Presbyterian church in downtown Chicago. Yet, I never call myself a Presbyterian. Why? I’m not too sure. Perhaps the residual PTSD from the Christian cult or, Catholicism or, spiritualism protects me from assigning myself religious labels. More likely, I’m not altogether sure I believe what they believe. 

Last Sunday, churchgoers throughout the land heard the parable of the ten virgins, or bridesmaids as they say in today’s lingo. The seven-day wedding feast in ancient times couldn’t begin until the bridegroom arrived. In the story, five wise bridesmaids had working oil lamps when the groom arrived late at night, and they all entered the gate to the feast. The other five foolish bridesmaids were out buying lamp oil and got locked out of the party. In previous preachings, I’d heard Jesus’ explanation of his parable is that we must always be ready, have our lamps lit, awaiting his coming (or was it his second coming?). No wonder I’ve been a nervous wreck my whole life, constantly failing to be ready for Jesus. I really hate parables. 

The church’s new pastor spun the story as a lesson in patience. Be patient because we never know when God will present a reason to throw a party. I had to listen again to him on YouTube because I swear I heard that ominous “Jesus is coming” sermon. This is one of the blessings and curses of old age. My brain holds years-old information, which is a blessing. But that information is a curse when it doesn’t make room for new ideas.

Like with those wily parables.

Me and Jeremiah

Me and Jeremiah

Anti-abortion evangelical Christians use the scriptural, “The Call of Jeremiah” to defend their idea of fetal viability at conception. It goes something like this:

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you…”

Frankly, those words take my breath away. I believe in a higher power most days and simple words like those give life to the marrow of my dry old bones. I can feel their power shimmy up and down my spine. My life has meaning if for just one moment of each day I know that spirit, that entity, whom I sometimes call God, has known my name since the beginning of time. 

Nothing in those words equates to the government denying women (and men) the right to choose when they wish to become parents. 

Christian mystic Richard Rohr teaches “The marvelous anthology of books and letters called the Bible is all for the sake of astonishment—not “proof” or certainty!” He says we don’t read for information but for transformation.

I’m not meant to get explanations from scriptures on how to support my point of view. I’m meant to be astonished. On more days than not, I accept the mystery and power of that astonishment without explanation, without questions, without answers. On some days, like when my body needs medical attention, I dig for certainty and absolutes, even demand them. I throw the spirit of mystery out the window and root around in the soil of black-and-white thinking.

Every week this summer I wake up feeling like Supreme Courts-federal and state—are bludgeoning me with a baseball bat. Their traditionalist interpretation of the Constitution coincides with literal  interpretations of the Bible. Prayer in the schools. Public funding of religious education. Dismantling the administrative state of consumer & climate change protections. The license to freely carry any weapons anywhere. Denying reproductive freedom. These and other contrivances are biblically-based ideas embraced by 41% of Americans who believe Jesus will descend on Earth in the flesh by 2050. Yeah. Really.

Christian zealots in every age have found signs that we are in the end-times as described in the Book of Revelation. In my twenties I belonged to a cult that looked for modern signs of the Apocalypse. We were convinced the arrival of branch banking and credit cards signaled the end was near. Globalism was then, as now, a sign. If we had today’s Supreme Court, they’d take up consideration of banning those. The World Council of Churches constituted a fulfillment of the end-times prophecy of a one-world religion. Ecumenism was shunned since it relegated Christianity an equal to other religions. I escaped that cult with a staggering amount of information that took years to dump. 

Now comes word  about how excited the 41% religious warriors are about the war in Ukraine—another fulfillment of the prophecy of the second coming of Christ. 

I know. I know. Who would believe such wacky stuff?

But is it such a leap from my belief that my existence was known eons before I was born? 

Are We Getting Dragged Into Their Holy War?

Hal Lindsey’s end-times prophecies in The Late, Great Planet Earth, permeated the born-again, religious cult I joined in the early 1970’s in Toms River, New Jersey. There were about fifty of us—disparate spiritual seekers who accepted Jesus Christ as our personal the_late_great_planet_earth_coversavior, a requirement for inclusion in the exclusive Fellowship. One of the elders had broken away from a local Plymouth Brethren Church and opened the basement of his family’s large, wooded, colonial home for Bible study and Sunday services for us blue-jeaned recovering addicts and alcoholics. As a newly sobered-up ex-hippie, full of self-loathing, all I wanted was to be accepted in that Fellowship.

Based on his interpretations of the Book of Revelations, Lindsey’s book sensationalized end-of-the-world Biblical prophecies connecting them to current events as proof of the coming Rapture where Christians would be taken up to heaven and avoid Armageddon. Satan’s plans to form a one-world government and religion, as prophesied, were triggered by the establishment of the state of Israel and the World Council of Churches—both in 1948. Everywhere I looked in those days I saw Lindsey’s signs of the end times: increase in the divorce rate, recreational drugs, new technology, the gasoline shortage, religious ecumenism, and the birth of the European Union.

Church elders directed every aspect of our lives. Men were the head of the household, women submitted to them and didn’t work. We lived in separate homes but were discouraged from socializing outside the Fellowship, lest we be influenced by secular humanist ideas, like having credit cards, one of Satan’s tools to create a global economy. We didn’t put our money in The Bank of America because the bank was seeking to legalize interstate branch banking, thereby centralizing all the country’s money into a single entity, another Satanic plan.

When my son joined Little League in the first grade, I sat away from the other parents in the bleachers fearing the wrath of God if I talked to anyone outside of the Fellowship. Church members scorned me for volunteering for Jimmy Carter for President in 1976, even though he was born-again.

After four years, I extricated myself from the Fellowship, left my abusive husband in New Jersey and drove my nine-year-old son 800 miles west to Chicago for a new life. A group of Christians at LaSalle Street Church who had experienced similar religious cults nursed me back to spiritual and emotional health. The ideas of Hal Lindsey dissipated into the ether of bad dreams and gradually I no longer looked for signs of the end times.

Until now.

President Trump in his first speech to the Joint Congress announced he was not the President of the world, rather the President of us Americans.

These words, and words of White House strategist Steve Bannon announcing a nationalistic government free from links to other countries remind me of Hal Lindsey’s warning to resist Satan’s plans for a global economy and one-world government.

Are they fighting a holy war?

signs28_title
http://1timothy4-13.com/files/prophecy/signs28.html

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