Author Archives: Amy Gijsbers van Wijk

The Fundamentalist Appearing

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In LaHaye and Jenkin’s Glorious Appearing, I found the fundamentalist mindset quite noticeable and disturbing – even before I read the Strozier, which I finished after reading GA.  As Colby mentioned, the ideas outlining fundamentalist mindsets – paranoia, dualistic thinking, and rage – are all very clear in Glorious Appearing.

What struck me most, in addition to the connection between Strozier’s essays and the book, was the way I found certain elements of apocalyptic gender roles manifest itself in  Glorious Appearing. Most of the men, despite several having lost wives or loved ones, were single-mindedly focused on Jesus and God in a way that on some levels struck me as homo-erotic. I couldn’t help but think of the thousands of virgin men that would enter New Jerusalem and reflect on the characters in Glorious Appearing, who are mainly male. The few women, and the couple of Naomi and Chang, remain almost wholly devoid of any hints of sexuality, though they do seem to fulfill stereotypical gender roles – Leah, the caring female nurse; Rayford, the rippling, gun-slinging action hero – that I also found in line with the gender roles propagated in The Book of Revelation.

“The Rapture”

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I had mixed feelings upon watching “The Rapture,” — before, I was immediately turned off by the name of the film and the short plot-teaser I read online.  Like Albert, I found myself noticing how the main character called out the Four Horsemen incorrectly and wondering about the intentions of these lines. Ultimately, I was unsure whether or not to interpret The Rapture as an anti-religious film, a religious one, a badly written film, or a film written by Hollywood without full regard to the way certain allusions were used, or a mix of all three.

However, upon rereading the Book of Revelation, it was interesting how I found myself flashing back to scenes in the film. After seeing an imagining of events, I felt as though I was less likely to disregard the imagery in the film — more open, perhaps, because I’d seen visual suggestions. This isn’t to say that I found myself at all more inclined to believe in the events. However, the ending did throw me for a loop – I was unsure as to what I felt about it. It seemed to disregard the idea of ending up in a Hellish damnation for Mimi’s character to end up in purgatory. To me, it seems as though if one doesn’t accept one’s God then one would be condemned, but Sharon ends up in this purgatorial place. I found that interpretation – “If you don’t accept God, but you are able to get raptured BUT you won’t accept or forgive God still…” confusing. Unwillingness to forgive God seems like a sin, or something worth damnation by Revelation’s standards, yet it wasn’t…unless the purgatorial landscape was like Hell…

Watchmen/Rosen & Sexuality

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As a former-comic-book fan (not of Western comics, however) I was interested to begin reading Watchmen as I was familiar with how famous it was, but not its content (other than the bloody smiley face). As I progressed through the graphic novel, what struck me most was how I found myself reacting to certain panels. As Rosen discusses, Rorschach’s opening, “The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood” (Moore 1) made me feel as though I was seeing something different than Rorschach was viewing. I was uncomfortable, I will admit, but the amount of blood in the comic (though I’m not particularly squeamish) but while I found myself unsure of Rorschach – with his hatred of sex, violence, and crime – and his perspective, I also found myself thinking, comforted, “This man knows what he’s after.”

I noticed that in the third panel on page, in the top right-hand corner, where Rorschach describes  the “filth of all their sex and murder [will] foam[ing] up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout…” (1) a similarity not just in the language in the Book of Revelation, but linked (to me) to the Whore of Babylon and her cup of fornication. It is interesting how even if one were to miss the direct similarity between Rorschach’s language and the Old Testament, his own personal story of a boy who grew up amidst dirt, scum, and prostitution – someone that many, I think, would assume would grow up to be the most amoral of all people – there are plenty of obvious ties in Rorschach’s life and development that don’t only remind me of the Bible, but of John, the author of the Book of Revelation. There is this anti-sex, anti-sexual quality to Rorschach, which is both almost childlike and disturbingly adult in its hard view of how things “should” be and how things “are.”

Despite Rorschach being only one of three people that Rosen calls Moore’s “deities,” I did notice that a sexually detached element is visible in all of them. While Doctor Manhattan does make love, and seems to experience romantic feelings (or at least did as a human), he is unable to connect fully with the women in his life, at least for a longer period. This seems to be due to the fact that he’s out of time, displaced, but also that he finds it difficult to stay the same, too, while people age. This is evidenced by his fight with Janey Slater, when she accuses him of liking Jupiter because she’s younger, and Dr. Manhattan’s voice-over says, “It’s true. She’s aging more noticeably every day….”

I also found that Ozymandias to be slightly asexual in a large part of his depiction. This contrasts starkly to a character like The Comedian, whom Rorschach identified as being closest to him, and his heavy, almost cruel sexual penchant. Though I do think The Comedian possessed a cold, hard view of the world similar to Rorschach’s, it is interesting that one seemed to exclude sexuality entirely and one used it in ways that led to destruction and dehumanization.

Sense of a (Sad) Ending

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While I found myself getting caught up in Frank Kermode’s “Sense of an Ending,” and honestly struggling to make sense of some of it, I strongly connected to Elizabeth Rosen’s “Introduction.”

What I connected to most heavily based on these articles was the idea of interpretation in art of the apocalypse – especially Rosen’s idea of the “neo-apocalyptic,” and how unlike the typical Apocalyptic belief, it is marked by a kind of stark ending, with no hope given. This idea, while heavily marked in the writing Rosen herself refers to, harks back to a book I am reading called Life As We Know It, a young-adult-based novel (first in a trilogy) that was written in the early 2000’s. It features an apocalyptic story when a scheduled meteor shower goes awry, knocking the moon closer into orbit with the Earth – what happens, catastrophically, is marked by science. The tides flood, and cities and countries are drowned under due to tides and gravitational pull. This novel, marked with a combination of the scientific non-moral neoapocalypse, considers the ideas of more religious based reasoning, and now I want to analyze the book more thoroughly for its relevance in this area.

What I am most curious of, based on the study (and other studies I have heard of), that while America is becoming less of an organized-religion fan, is anything but secular on the whole, and yet how the combination of more “sci-fi” apocalyptic ideas mix with the “older” more moralist ones.

Protecting The Children

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I was surprised, when watching the nine-minute “Duck and Cover” video, how strange it must have been to have been growing up as a child, or even to be living as an adult, when the very (seemingly) real threat of the world’s destruction hung in the air. In Charles Strozier’s piece, Fundamentalist Mindset, Strozier discusses how apocalyptic time is seen, to believers, as being within this kairotic, before-and-after way. However, though I couldn’t help thinking how believers may not have felt fear (or not as much fear) during the Cold War if they believed the end was The End. The “Duck and Cover” video remains fairly secular in the fact that there is no religious mentioning of being “saved,” but at the same time it deludes children with the idea that, if they properly follow instructions, they will transcend an otherwise disastrous fate – they will transcend a death that they might not even be aware of transcending (I dont’ know how many seven-year-olds are aware that the “Duck and Cover” methods were not actually preventing anything if a bomb was dropped near them).

Watching the “Duck and Cover” video also reminded me of my experience when 9/11 happened… though I was in Texas attending school about thirty minutes from Houston, kids were taken out of school for protection. My parents found the idea of taking children out of school because of 9/11 baffling when faced with the explanation of, “What if we are bombed?” Why my elementary school would be a target for bombing is an entirely other issue, but the idea that removing kids would have done anything in the face of real danger was a false attempt at controlling something completely bizarre – and in a way, unrelated to our small elementary school. The idea of transcending any danger is in itself an interesting topic, because it seems that for large portions of Christian Americans, this was a logical assumption and preparation against some kind of threat.

(2) Acknowledging the Apocalypse

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(Side note: the song “Losing My Religion,” came on while I was preparing this post.)

One line that caught my attention in Kirsch’s book as we read from the second half was this line: “Apocalyptic fancies, no matter how weird or woozy, were capable of taking on the quality of revealed truth. . . . The sure and urgent expectation of the end-times was, quite literally, a fact of life in the middle ages” (Kirsch 157).  The thing that is most hard for me to grasp is what it is like to live in a world not where we are aware that some people think this is a real way the history of our world is going, but a general political belief held by society.

I can’t help but think of this sort of “group think” and be reminded of things like the current political state of America because there is the phenomenon of having the population (mostly) split itself into two like-minded camps of thought where religion plays different, and yet specific roles. I was reading a quote from Sandra Fluke who spoke at the Democratic National Convention and she said “Over the last six months, I’ve seen what these two futures look like. And six months from now, we’ll all be living in one, or the other. But only one.”  Now, full disclosure, I think that political elections are extremely important and take it seriously, but reading that statement, I actually found myself a tad bit anxious like the “fate of the world,” rested in my hands. It is really interesting to look at how political speak uses the idea of a future history, and of a sort of apocalypse not only in its speeches against other campaigns, but in general. I would need to do more research, but I am super curious to see how this past election utilizes religious talk, and apocalyptic talk, as part of its “language arsenal.”

Violence & End of World

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After reading the selection of A History of the End of the World by Jonathan Kirsch (whose last name, ironically, reminds me of “kirche,” the German word for “church”) and Revelations (KJV), I found myself reflecting on the way “apocalypse” is represented and how it influences groups.

Growing up in Texas, I often found myself among people who are largely Christian, those who believe in most of the Bible and take a lot of its word as their Law. When Kirsch discusses the influence that “The Apocalypse” had on people – and how it often drives certain people, (such as David Koresh, or Al Quaeda), towards violence, I found myself coming to the conclusion that violence seems empowered by Revelation if one reads it from the “right” perspective.

To elaborate, those that take the word of “Revelation,” as truth or as a part of the Bible that they believe in are faced with a set of specific circumstances: 1) If the tribulation is already happening, then they must suffer; 2) if tribulation is happening, then Satan has or shall soon appear; 3) If 1, and 2, have occurred, then they are waiting for their king, Jesus. If they believe that the End Time is not near, then they must endure. Under normal circumstances, we have seen that small-scale versions of “end times,” such as tsunamis, hurricanes, and other natural disasters have driven people to all kinds of violence – when Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, people were robbing from one another, breaking into houses, and chaos ensued. I think that if one believes one is acting in accordance to their God, then violence could be seen as “defending” their earthly “kingdom,” or if one believes that Satan has come to power, that one might be faced with “defending” oneself from Satan — and those around one who might be influenced by Satan, or in accordance with him would probably also be something to “defend” oneself against.

I am not defending violence as a logical thing to be done, but I found that violence, from a modern perspective within the end times, was an interesting thing to analyze.