In A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization, Jonathan Kirsch outlines a long history of Christian apocalyptic dualism being used effectively to demonize the other, including Romans before Constantine, Jews in the third and fourth centuries, medieval women, Muslims and Jews during the Crusades, etc (Kirsch 108, 130, 164). Lee Quinby’s Millennial Seduction describes how binary classifications and accompanying value judgments have come from the Book of Revelation to dominate American perceptions of ostensibly secular matters, including race (white vs. minority), gender (male vs. female), sexuality (straight vs. gay), and religion (Christian vs. heretics) (8).
In America, where church and state are supposedly separate, and where allegedly “all men are created equal,” the dualism of Revelation has shaped and continues to shape the culture in decidedly undemocratic ways. The myth about the end of days contributed to the creation of “a regime of truth that operates within a field of power relations and describes a particular moral behavior” (Quniby, Anti-Apocalypse xv). At various times in American history, all of the following have been accused of being tools of the Antichrist:
bankers, biofeedback, credit cards, computers, the Council on Foreign Relations, feminism, Freudian psychology, the human-potential movement, Indian gurus, “international Jews,” lesbianism, the Masons, Montessori schools, secular humanism, the Trilateral Commission, Universal Product Codes, and the United Nations – and the list is certainly not comprehensive. (Kirsch 220)
In other words, anything that threatens the moral hierarchy established by the Book of Revelation, or undermines the idea that white Christian males are the elite, is considered evil.
By asserting that there is only one Truth, and only one legitimate moral hierarchy, the Book of Revelation established “the paradigm of so much aesthetic theory that privileges monological originality over dialogical richness” (Quinby, Millennial Seduction 26). As Quinby and Kirsch have demonstrated, belief in the apocalyptic regime of truth is pervasive throughout American society. Even moderate, secular, non-fundamentalist Americans “hold to notions of divine origin and metaphysical evil,” which are the foundations of the dualistic morality of the Biblical apocalypse (Quinby, Anti-Apocalypse xii).
