Dr. Thomas L. Long

Few students of American religious culture were surprised when Pat Robertson in the summer of 1998 issued a apocalyptic warning to the officials and citizens of Orlando, Florida, reminding them of their vulnerability to hurricanes and even suggesting that they could become ground-zero for an asteroid. What occasioned this prophetic utterance was evidence in Orlando for the tolerance of homosexuality. Disney World had become since earlier in the 1990s the unofficial gathering place for Queer Middle America for one day each June; the Disney corporation had no official sponsorship of this event, but they had infuriated Southern Baptists by including health benefits for same-sex domestic partners in their employment policies. And the city of Orlando had permitted queer-national rainbow flags to festoon downtown streetlights for the annual Gay Pride Parade. Robertson warned against waving those flags in God's face. Floridians, and by extension all Americans, had a choice: repudiate sodomy or endure apocalypse.

The linkage of sexual relations between men (loosely and problematically called "sodomy") with catastrophic destruction is not new to the twentieth century. Mark D. Jordan's The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology points out that in coining the term sodomia the eleventh-century theologian Peter Damian linguistically linked sexual behavior to blasphemia, religious behavior; thus, "Sodomia does not make its appearance as a neutral description of acts. It is a brand that burns condemnation into certain acts. It burns into them as well the presumption of a stable essence, a sameness found wherever the acts are performed. The sameness links those who perform them back to the criminals who suffered the most severe divine punishment" (43). Jordan characterizes the theologian's reformism as distinctly paranoid and apocalyptic:

Likewise, Jordan analyzes the Catholic penitential books published after the Fourth Lateran Councial of 1215, which mandated annual confession. In a discussion of the Summa of Penance by Paul of Hungary, Jordan notes that:

Elizabeth B. Keiser makes a similar point in her discussion of the fourteenth-century English alliterative poem, Cleanness. Finding remarkable the anonymous poet's elision of the Great Flood with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Keiser suggests that:

It was Peter the Cantor who had conflated sodomy with murder as two crimes crying out to heaven for justice, a trope that would be resurrected in the last decades of this century. Indeed, Reformation Protestant polemicists would adopt medieval Catholic apocalyptic configurations about sodomy and would translate them to North America.

What I will show here are some of the ways in which this apocalyptic discourse has been recycled since the 1960s and employed not simply as admonitions to believers within certain ecclesial communities but has become a component of more public and political discourses, particularly with the emergence of the AIDS epidemic in which gay men were configured initially as the sole agents of infection. This discourse produces an eschaton that is always imminent while it is always deferred, in other words, apocalyptus interruptus. Or, to use Judith Butler's take on gender, I read apocalypticism as an imitation without an original--or an end--which is known only through its ceaseless rehearsal.

In the second half of the 1970's religious conservatives in the United States began to consolidate their cultural and political power around the diffuse social anxieties of "middle Americans" who had been characterized earlier in the decade as a "silent majority." Among the "hot button" issues were gender and sexuality, particularly in the forms of North American feminism and gay rights activism. White males increasingly perceived themselves as competing for dwindling economic power with women as well as with people of other races and ethnicities. A more visible and vocal gay and lesbian activism, supported by some progressive politicians and religious leaders, began to make inroads into local politics. Christian fundamentalists, already politically conservative and more and more allied with monied interests, began to oppose this particular strain of progressivism-- activism for gay and lesbian equal rights.

Nowhere was this reaction more evident than in Anita Bryant’s nationally publicized 1977 campaign to repeal the Dade County, Florida gay equal rights ordinance. In her own account of the "Save Our Children" campaign--initially unsuccessful, but eventually repealing the ordinance in a public referendum--Bryant recalled a conversation with her pastor, William Chapman, after the ordinance was first passed by the Metro Dade Commission:

"Brother Bill"’s reading of the "signs of the times" is characteristic in two respects: homosexuality is read as a harbinger of catastrophe and the present moment is figured as a crucial binary opposition: revival or ruin. Bryant had apparently perceived the latter (the campaign after all was to "Save Our Children") and began to elaborate on the former. In her remarks on The PTL Club, televangelist Jim Bakker’s daily program, Bryant offered this historical exegesis:

Later that month she would appear with a similar message on Pat Robertson’s television program, The 700 Club.

While Bryant may have been one of the most visible proponents of the view that homosexuality is a precursor of a society’s decline or even of the ultimate apocalypse, she was by no means the sole advocate of that historiological and eschatological schema. Israel’s successful capture of the city of Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Days War prompted renewed Christian fundamentalist apocalyptic speculations, in response to which well over a thousand international delegates, among them Anita Bryant and C. Everett Koop, the future Reagan-appointed Surgeon General when AIDS was first identified, met in the Holy City for a 1971 prophecy conference. One of the speakers at the conference, Harold John Ockenga, compared his time in history with that of the biblical Noah, but contended that the modern world was even more ripe for apocalyptic destruction:

Ockenga cited the years 1965 to 1970 as having been a particular turning point in the West’s decline. Another conference speaker, Wilbur Smith, related changing sexual attitudes to Jesus’ prophecy about the end times:

Within only two years of the Greenwich Village Stonewall riots, homosexual visibility had become a sufficiently serious concern for Christian fundamentalists to configure it in these demonic terms.

During the 1970s, probably the best known Pentecostal Christian was the former gang member, David Wilkerson, author the immensely popular book, The Cross and the Switchblade. According to David Edwin Harrell, "no man’s voice carried more authority in the charismatic revival" than Wilkerson (186-87). In a 1974 book, Wilkerson narrated a detailed vision of five calamities that he claimed to have received from God. Wilkerson prophesied using the same gospel citation as Wilbur Smith:

Wilkerson engages a conspiratorial paranoia that alleges the certainty of these events, even though they may occur "in secret places" and "may not be publicized as such." Moreover, this free associated "vision" remarkably elides sodomy with murder, specifically sensationalist mass murder and political terrorist attacks, a linkage Wilkerson made even more explicitly in another section of this book entitled, "A Homosexual Epidemic":

Wilkerson’s rhetorical demonizing alloys sensationalist references to news events with parental anxieties about their children’s safety and the white middle class’s apprehensions about rioting mobs; the admixture is potently effective in creating a sense of urgency and terror. Moreover, he trades on Jesus' apocalyptic language about Lot and Sodom as a prediction of "mass rapes."

Wilkerson was not the first religious writer to equate homosexuality with epidemic disease, nor was he the last. One widely published and popular evangelical fundamentalist, Tim LaHaye, wrote in 1978 that "America is experiencing a homosexual epidemic" (8) and interpreted Israelite history in such a way as to contend that the Babylonian captivity was in part the result of homosexuality. He claimed that "many Bible scholars think one of the major sins that brought on the Flood was homosexuality" (204). LaHaye is explicit in his apocalyptic reading of homosexuality: "Most Bible prophecy scholars teach that we are either in ‘the last days,’ predicted in the Scriptures, or we are very close to them. Interestingly enough, homosexuality is to be a part of the buildup of the ‘perilously evil times’ that are prophesied for the last days" (203). Similarly, David Chilton quotes Rousas John Rushdoony’s 1973 The Institutes of Biblical Law: "Homosexuality is thus the culminating sexual practice of a culminating apostasy and hostility towards God. The homosexual is at war with God, and, in his every practice, is denying God's natural order and law. The theological aspect of homosexuality is thus emphasized in Scripture. In history, homosexuality becomes prominent in every age of apostasy and time of decline. It is an end of an age phenomenon" (qtd. 39). Another early evangelical fundamentalist tract on homosexuality, David A. Noebel’s The Homosexual Revolution: A Look at the Preachers and Politicians Behind It, asserts both biblical and historiographic authority:

Here again, the historical moment is presented as a crisis in the terms of two irreconcilable opposites.

California Congressman William Dannemeyer, writing later in the 1980s, would repeat the historiographic claim that,

He also offered as exempla of homosexually-induced decline Rome, the Mayan civilization, Venice, and Weimar Germany (223).

After the scandal-driven collapse of Bryant’s Protect America’s Children and Anita Bryant Ministries, her executive director wrote in 1984:

Here America is typologically configured as both Sodom and ancient Greece, and homosexuality or even only tolerance of homosexuality leads it along the "road to ruin" (24, 36), thus simultaneously constructing a crisis and demonizing homosexuals. Rowe reads homosexual behavior--even the social tolerance of homosexual behavior--as not simply a harbinger of the end times but even as the cause of such an apocalyptic rupture in American history. Beyond this historical exegesis, what makes Rowe’s account even more interesting than Bryant’s, is its further demonization of homosexuals as "anti-God, anti-Christ, anti-Bible, anti-moral, anti-life, anti-constitutional and anti-American" (25).

Works Cited