Who knew the end times would be so boring?

In my Catholic school days, I had a teacher, whom I respected greatly (he was an important intellectual influence), and who was a member of the Militia Immaculatae. These guys basically think of themselves as a modern knighthood devoted to Mary. There was a sort of unofficial chapter (I think--so far as I know they do not have official chapters) in my hometown, headed by a priest at St. Boniface parish. My teacher and a few classmates were members and carried the Miraculous Medal, a sign of membership. You are supposed to buy them in bulk and pass them out; the goal of the MI is to evangelize everyone into their weird Marian cult. I knew some people who would leave them in odd places, like on the floors of friends' cars, to create the illusion of their miraculous appearance.

But my own introduction to the world of the MI was through a book written by one of its members. Not a theological tract, Pierced by a Sword is a novel about the apocalypse. It is designed to scare you into believing in the saving grace of Mary, so that you will be prepared for the impending end of the world. It was given to me, either by my teacher or by a classmate (I forget which), but it can also be had for free just by writing to the publisher. (If you want more than one copy, there is a suggested donation.)

(By the way, if you look at this document written by the founder of MI, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, you will notice that those who join the order receive indulgences by virtue of their membership and confession. I thought that practice ended long ago. I guess I was wrong.)

I think of Pierced by a Sword as a kind of precursor to the best-selling Left Behind series of novels, of which you will have heard. The difference is that the intention behind the former is evangelical, while the intention behind the latter is capitalistic. I have, in the last couple of years, seen a few alarmist articles about the surge in apocalypticism that the sales of Left Behind are supposed to represent. The story goes: Christians in America are forgetting that their faith is supposed to be about love and forgiveness, instead hoping for or working to bring about the end of the world, in which they will be taken to heaven in the Rapture and the rest of us left behind to suffer through the apocalypse itself. (The support of the Christrian Right for Zionism and American friendliness towards Israel supposedly stems from the belief that the existence of the nation of Israel is a prerequisite for the apocalypse.) The alarmist part comes when we are reminded that these people are not a fringe element of our society--they have grown large enough to constitute a powerful political force.

It was in this spirit that I recently watched a re-run of an episode of NBC's new mini-series, Revelations. I wanted to be shocked and dismayed; I wanted to see it as the latest step in the evangelical efforts of fringe groups like the MI, the final push into prime time of the apocalyptic cults that are or soon will be running our country. What I saw, though, was a formulaic, utterly conventional, atrociously written, pandering piece of shit drama with religious overtones.

The most interesting part was the attempt to tie the show in with the Schiavo case by including a child in a coma (after being struck by lightning while foolishly running across a golf course in a thunderstorm) through whom the Holy Spirit was speaking the Word of God, while the atheistic doctors wanted to pull the plug. In miniature, you have the whole show right there. The producers took familiar narratives that they thought would appeal to American Christians and strung them together, without any sort of interesting exploration of ideas or even minimal artistic competence, into a six-hour miniseries.

And it is this, I think, that gives the lie to the apocalyptic tales of our own secular journalists. The Christians are taking over everything! Just look at how many copies Left Behind has sold! They've gone from being a legitimate faith to being crazy apocalyptic cultists, but they're more numerous and powerful than ever! We're doomed!

But what we are seeing, if anything, is just the co-opting, repackaging, and reselling by the corporate media of a narrative that has always been popular enough to be around in one form or another. Go to any bookstore. Look in the sci-fi/fantasy section. Earlier this century, George Lucas, Gene Roddenberry, and J. R. R. Tolkien crafted their own narratives that won the hearts of sizable minorities who, when they had consumed everything these original authors had to offer, wanted still more. In the spirit of capitalism, they were granted their wish, for the reasonable price of $4.95 for a 300-page trade paperback (I suspect they cost more by now). Now there is an entire industry devoted to retelling ad infinitum these narratives, with slight variations. I myself went in for the Tolkien form of this for some years in my youth. I read literally hundreds of fantasy novels that did nothing but rehash familiar characters, plots, themes, and conflicts, all rooted in Tolkien's original and genuinely creative work. None of it was terribly satisfying, but when an idea really catches one's imagination, one seeks to revisit it again and again. Some genius publisher realized this at some point, and so now there are hundreds of crappy Star Wars novels alone. Why not make money selling the same story again and again to the suckers who want to re-read it? This is the advanced form of the phenomenon of which Left Behind and Revelations are the vanguard in the apocalyptic case.

(I never really went in for the Star Wars novels myself, but I did read one such trilogy. If you want proof that it really is just the same story repackaged, read the Jedi Academy Trilogy by super-hack Kevin J. Anderson. The characters include Luke Skywalker and co., and the plot is roughly: the Death Star has been destroyed (twice!), but now the bad guys have a new super weapon--a ship that can destroy whole solar systems, not just planets! Even many familiar lines from the films show up in these novels unaltered, often in the mouths of the same characters who originally spoke them.)

The apocalypse has never gone out of vogue as a genre. And, of course, the most familiar such story in our part of the world is the one found at the end of the Bible. Somebody figured out that it's a popular and sensational story, the end of the world, and so they wrote it down at much greater length than in the Bible (and in less coded language) and sold it to the people who already knew and loved the story. They made a million bucks. So some NBC executive or pitch-man had an idea: he had been hearing about the money to be made in Christian book sales, and thought, "I want a piece of that." And that's all Revelations represents: TV's grabbing its slice of the apocalyptic pie. But the number of people who support the Star Wars industry is actually not so large (relatively speaking), and most of those people are pretty regular people (there are a few crazies who we see on the news camping outside for months for tickets to the new films, but they are the exception). I imagine it's the same with the apocalypse. It is a pretty thrilling idea, and people will be thrilled by it. All the alarmists are seeing is that corporations are realizing there is money to be made from this, and they are going out and getting it. That is the development, and it can be explained without appeal to any sea change in American Christianity, or to an increase in the size or power of nutty religious sects.