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How does apocalyptic rhetoric and belief come together with revolutionary
ideology? What's new about that?
The Great Awakening provided a sense of expectation among many millennial
scholars and among ordinary people, that this kingdom, divine kingdom, was
expanding. The American Revolution changed, in a sense, the direction of how
that kingdom was perceived.
... In the Great Awakening, you're dealing primarily with a question of
spiritual conversion. There's a sense that if enough people experience the new
birth, we're going to have a kingdom coming on, spreading gradually through
what has amounted to a worldwide revival. The American Revolution changes the
sense of what it means to bring this kingdom about, or what this kingdom
entails, what's at the center of it. It's not simply a matter of personal
conversion now. There is a sense of political as well as spiritual liberty;
that you must have the freedom to govern yourselves in a political, in a civil
sense, as well as in a religious sense, to have the religious freedom that is
your due. ... And therefore now there is both a civil and political side to
this religious vision.
I think at the time of the American Revolution, there was an interesting
process of a coming together of apocalyptic understandings of what the meaning
of the American experience was, with some very genuine political grievances
against British government of the late 18th century. So sort of
underlying the political debates of the Revolutionary era was another discourse
of prophetic meaning, that this struggle with England was not simply a
political struggle about whether they have the right to impose certain taxes on
the colonists, but it quite literally was a struggle to determine what the
future of America would be. Would America fulfill that vision that the Puritan
founders had created of the city on a hill, the New Zion? And it was really
quite literally, at that level, a struggle about the future, and the
apocalyptic future of the nation.
The Stamp Act was really important from that point of view, because here was a
specific piece of legislation that required the colonists to have on all their
legal documents, to have on all their newspapers, a stamp for which they would
pay. And given a culture in which the idea of the mark of the Beast was very
much a part of their thinking, the Stamp Act became a kind of particularly
outrageous and literal example of this sort of demonic power that is
threatening virtuous, righteous America.
There are fascinating continuities here when you stop and think about it,
because in the 1760s, the colonists saw the Stamp Act, the requirement of the
stamp on legal documents, as possibly the mark of the Beast. In the 1930s, in
the Depression era, some writers said it's the union label that's beginning to
be put on products. It's the NRA blue eagle. In the contemporary context,
it's the consumer product code. So there's a real continuity here of efforts
to find a kind of literal representation of this account in the Book of
Revelation of the mark of the Beast, the mark of the Evil One.
Apocalyptic rhetoric could be used in any number of ways to bolster this sense
that this was not just a simple political dispute; this was the history of
redemption in the balance. That King George was not just some sort of well
intentioned but obtuse king--King George could be seen as the Antichrist. The
Stamp Act was not just some piece of bureaucratic legislation. This was the
mark of the beast being put upon all those who followed it and accepted it.
... All of this creates the
sense of polarization, the sense that things are coming to a height. It's not
just a matter of reasoned political discourse, but much larger issues in the
balance.
On the positive side ... it's not simply that antichrist is Britain, but it is
that this is something worth fighting for in a positive sense; that this is a
kingdom that is evolving and spreading. And it almost comes to Americans with
sort of a breathtaking surprise. All of a sudden we are not English citizens
any more. We are Americans. And there may be a sense in which this is God's
plan. That there is a grand empire, and it need not be a British one. It may
be an American one, and we are pioneering new ground here. ...
The American Revolution provides a new timbre to apocalyptic thinking, because
it combines what is the traditional religious sense of conversion, spiritual
conversion and new birth with a political sense of a civil liberty. The Stamp
Act, the Intolerable Acts, all these controversies that the colonies have with
Great Britain are now melded into this vision which says: This is not simply a
divine empire of religious belief, but also a political sense of liberty that
goes on; that we are seeing something here we have not seen in the world
before, and that this new young nation in North America is going to show the
world the way to the New Jerusalem. ...
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revere's engraving of an apocalyptic beast with the magna carta
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Because millennial rhetoric is woven into the warp and woof of colonial
culture, even people like Paul Revere, whom we know as a patriot and a talented
silversmith--not what you would call a card carrying millennialist-- [drew on
apocalyptic imagery]. And when the Stamp Act came and mobilized the colonies,
Revere did a wonderful engraving, trying to convince people not to use stamped
paper. And there he used for his imagery a beast-like dragon, very much like
the beast in Revelation, with wings of a dragon, a fierce tail, talons
clutching the Magna Carta and ripping it to shreds, and the colonists being
ground underfoot. All imagery that just naturally came to Revere as something
you could use for the ordinary person, perhaps the people who didn't read, as a
way to say, "Don't use stamped paper. This is the mark of the
beast." ...
For preachers, the Revolution was something they firmly grounded in the
prophecies, scripture. But there was a message for many Americans that went
beyond that strict biblical, church-oriented millennialism ... without talking
chapter and verse about the prophecies, there is this sense that America is
exceptional; that it's born out of this religious conviction; that there is, in
a broad sense, an American tradition of liberty yoked with religion and a
divine plan that gives the United States and its citizens the confidence to
spread out into the world and bring this message of democracy and freedom all
across the globe. ...
Colonials come out of the America Revolution with a new sense of possibility.
One might almost say, a millennial sense of what is possible. So much so that
they are comfortable in the 19th century of speaking of a manifest
destiny, that this tremendous republic, which has won a revolution against all
odds, has now the opportunity to become a republic that will spread all the way
across the North American continent, and by its example, bring wisdom,
religious belief, and a sense of millennial possibility to the rest of the
world.
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