Episode 003 – It’s the End of the World as We Know It

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Listen here

 

T: All right, so welcome to I was a Teenage Fundamentalist. I’m T.

B: And I’m B.

T: Just before we get started I wanted to note that we are now available on a number of podcast platforms, so you can download us from there if you want, and also we set up a Facebook group, so if you do a search for I was a Teenage Fundamentalist, you can interact with each other or you can interact with us, which no one has done either of yet.

B: It’s early days, it’s fine, but we do encourage you to share with your fr4iends when you do hear this – anyone who might identify or be interested, flick it on to them, you never know.

T: Today we thought we’d talk about End Times, last days, end of the world. I thought a good title for this would be The End of the World as we Know it.

B: We do love a bit of REM, both of us.

T: Losing my religion – although it’s not about religion, apparently – is one of my favourite tracks.

B: It is great.

T: All right, let’s talk about prophecy then. I thought we’d start with you B, why don’t you talk about where you were at before you came  into church in terms of end times and prophecy.

B: For me, prophecy was something I really connected with. I had a book called Unexplained Mysteries and it had things like the Yeti, Loch Ness Monster, Bermuda Triangle, all those sort of things, but also featured prophecies. Obviously Nostradamus was the biggest one and probably the one that people would identify with. For me Nostradamus was frightening but exciting, because all these things that were happening in my life – not just my life, but everybody’s life in the 80s – were seen through the lens of what Nostradamus had predicted. A big thing was nuclear war and the end of the world, and it was exhilarating but frightening, like a train wreck I couldn’t look away from. I think the way it was written and interpreted was something I connected with, because it did speak quite directly to me and the fear I was feeling at the time. We had all the cold war stuff happening, we had the threat of nuclear war, I remember being obsessed for a while with building a bunker in the backyard. Not that I wanted to, but hearing stories of people that were doing that all round the world. So for me it was real and it was a fear, but it was something that really took my interest.

T: It’s funny isn’t it, the way it was presented to us on the one hand created fear because it was saying this was what was going to happen, but on the other hand it made you think ok but there’s a bigger plan, there’s something bigger than what we’re experiencing – dare I say God, but something beyond than us that’s in control and able to tell us what’s happening.

B: Yeah absolutely. I think it played into that teenage angst as well. Early to mid 80s was the time I was trying to work out my identity, trying to find my place in the world, and this sort of stuff comes along.

T: Society at large was very much caught up in the end times, or at least nuclear war. There were shows like the Americans had a show called The Day After, the British made one called Threads which was all about nuclear war and what it’s going to be like when it happens. It’s interesting because that sort of pushed a lot of society to going oh we don’t really want to do this, and moved back away from it even. People started pressuring the government, but the whole nuclear threat was huge. I talked in one of our earlier sessions about how I was involved in this group called The Revival Centres, which was a cult. I’m not going to harp on them for too long, but I will say this was a big piece of their messaging – nuclear war. They’d quote the verses from Joel, that there’d be blood, fire and pillars of smoke. They would put that up, and say look this is painting a picture of nuclear devastation. They’d even go back to the Hebrew and say look the Hebrew word there is palm tree of smoke. I remember talking to a friend of mine who said every bomb has a palm tree of smoke, it doesn’t say it’s a giant palm tree of smoke. It was interesting my friend said that to me, but nevertheless I bought right into it. There was another one the Revival Centres were big on, that the bible foretells mass transit in the end times, and I thought oh it does, then one day I actually looked it up and it says something about men will run to and fro about the earth. And I was like hold on, it doesn’t say planes trains and automobiles. It says men will run to and fro basically says they’ll be a bit frenetic even.

B: I reckon the world has always been like that.

T: Exactly right, people get anxious. So you go back and look at some of these verses, they’re not really that clear are they.

B: No. I think it resonates with the whole university psychology classes where we’d speak about the Barnham effect, there’s a sucker born every minute. It’s very much about that generalised message people can hook onto and apply quite easily.

T: Like star signs.

B: Like star signs, and look if you believe that and it does it for you that’s fine, but for me it’s so general that anybody could make it a truth and make something from it. So it’s that sort of thing I think they get people in with.

T: Yeah. It’s funny you talk about one born every minute, I saw an atheist website, its tagline was there’s one born again every minute.

B: (laughs) That’s great.

T: So coming back to the Revival Centres, the end times was a big part of their messaging. I can remember sitting with the same guy that told me how I needed to speak in tongues and be born again and everything, he actually started showing me the same day when I was on this camp about how the bible was predicting the end of the world. Like you, I had looked at Nostradamus and these other kind of more generic, less Christian kind of prophecies – if that’s even a term, generic prophecy. But looking at those I was already quite keen on them, so coming back to hearing this I think it tapped into the same thing – not only was it going to happen which is quite scary, but God’s in control and it’s all going to be ok in the end. Or at least, we’ll be ok, poor suckers who don’t get born again.

B: It’s funny what you say about the less Christian prophets. The big thing at the moment is futurists. They’ve always been around, but I’ve gone and heard a few futurists speak and if you look at what they’re saying, it’s a little like prophecy. It’s a little bit speculative about what’s going to happen, but they talk about what we’re moving into in the future. So I don’t think prophecy is necessarily a religious thing, there is definitely a big secular element to it.

T: Yes, it’s funny too though, I was reading something just recently about how the Christian church turned what they called the Hebrew Prophets into foretellers of Jesus and Jesus’ return, but their message was much broader than that, their message was more a critique, it was about a lack of social justice in the Israelite society. It’s interesting that when the Jews look at this stuff, even modern Jews, they don’t look at it as end times, they look at it as a reflection on Israel then.

B: Interesting isn’t it, those different viewpoints. Outside of the Revival Centre, was there other end times things that influenced you?

T: Yeah well, I think it’s fair to say, and this is why I want to bring the Revival Centres in, because when I get into the Assemblies of God which are now called the Australian Christian Churches and became Hillsong as well – I don’t know how much the end times stuff is all part of Hillsong, but I was primed and conditioned. I want to make that point, because when you tell your story, having not gone through a cult before joining this group, you may have a different perspective. But definitely I was primed, I was told we were living in the end times, we were in them then, and that Jesus’ return was imminent, and you’d best be good because if you’re not good and he comes back in the twinkling of an eye, in the flash of a lightning bolt or whatever, you could miss out on heaven.

B: Yeah,  absolutely. It was a real fear, but even though you were primed through a religious or cultish experience, I was primed through the Nostradamus stuff because I connected with it. It was something that piqued my interest – I was exposed to the whole end times and the fear driven by that, and that I’d better get on board because these people knew how to navigate the fact that we were in the end times, and they had a bit of a road map in the book of Revelation. It was a point of contention even at that time that there was a lot of interpretations of Revelation, what it meant, definitely in fundamentalism it was taken very literally so people were expecting Jesus to come down in a cloud, horses being ridden, all that sort of literal interpretation. I didn’t know what to do with that, people extrapolated what they wanted from Nostradamus, and I think people were doing the same in the Christian space. I definitely didn’t get into it as much as I did around Nostradamus because I didn’t like the fear that it drove, but it was definitely a part of it and it caused me to get on board a bit more because I had to hedge my bets.

T: Yeah sure, and you talked before we started recording about how there were people to whom this was everything. This was the defining thing of their Christianity, it had pushed them to convert, and now they were in, this was the message even more than maybe the death and resurrection of Jesus and the forgiveness of sins, their message was turn or burn, the end is night.

B: Yeah 100%. I remember probably in the first one or two years of my Christian journey, there was a bunch of people that were going out, they were so convinced they were going to the local train station and what they called witnessing to people. It was a sense of urgency, telling them about Jesus, making sure people jumped on board. Their message was very much we are in the end times, this thing that’s around us right now could end at any minute, and if you don’t have security then you’re going to hell. So there was a lot of fear, I went to it once and freaked out.

T: So they were like a group.

B: Yeah they were a group, there was probably about a dozen of them.

T: Were they going to other churches or were they in their own church?

B: They were in their own church, they were in the church I was involved in at the time. It was a very small group, I guess they were supported by the church at large, but not supported to the point where everybody was going out. It was very much seen that these people were at the front line, they were in the trenches making sure people were saved. As I think I said in my conversion story, I was never really comfortable talking to people about my Christianity, my journey, so for me it was a whole new level of confrontation and that was not something I was comfortable with at all, but I also saw a very ungraceful message that didn’t sit with me at all.

T: Were there any names that you associate with end times, famous preachers?

B: Probably the one that stands out was a guy called Barry Smith.

T: He was a kiwi wasn’t he.

B: I think he was. He was always touring and speaking, he’d be a guest speaker at churches. He probably didn’t come to the fore for me until three or four years in. A lot of people were talking about him going this guy’s on the money, come and listen to him so I did, I went with a couple of people to hear him and I didn’t make it halfway through.

T: You were such a rebel.

B: I was offended by the way he spoke, and some of it was just dumb. I remember him playing a minor chord on a keyboard he had on the stage and said for you musicians out there, never play a minor chord like this because it will invoke the devil. And I just went are you fucking serious, and I couldn’t stay. The people I was with couldn’t believe I didn’t want to listen any further, but for me that was a tipping point.

T: I think that testifies to the fact that you had a lot more critical reasoning engaged than I did, because I would go along to these things and I would swallow it pretty much holus bolus. I would take the whole thing as it was. I remember one day though, and it wasn’t Barry Smith, it was one of his apprentices who was involved in the AOG in Australia. I can’t remember his name but he claimed to be the former drummer for Rose Tattoo – you know how it was, people would tell those stories. But he got up one day and shared some fact about evolution, and the person I was sitting next to said isn’t it interesting we’ll listen to him when he says a fact that we want to know, but when he talks about evolution which is his speciality, we don’t want to know. Talk about pick and choose the facts, right?

B: Absolutely. Did you ever come across Barry Smith yourself?

T: I read his books, watched his videos. Can’t say I’ve seen Barry live, it’s on my bucket list.

B: Touched his robe.

T: He’s gone now, but you know was interesting about him is all his books were titled like Final Notice, but then the next one would be like “PS”. I’m making this up right, I can’t tell you the names of the books but it was very much like that. Like, Final Notice, Here it comes, One more thing, PS, he was constantly saying the imminence, the imminence, the imminence, it’s about to happen, then two or three years later he’s publishing another book and having to adjust the story as well. Coming back to the Revival Centres things, when I was in the Revival Centres it was still the Cold War so Russia was a big part of this, the fight between Communism, Capitalism and Democracy, all that kind of stuff was a huge part of this. But later on with the fall of the Eastern Bloc and Communism, it became less about that. This is before the whole Muslim thing broke out – I’m sure we can come back to that in a minute and discuss how it must all be about Muslims now, but it was very much an economic thing when I was in the AOG. It was about getting the Mark of the Beast, Cashless Societies, One World Order, the New World Order.

B: It’s interesting isn’t it. The Mark of the Beast was one thing – I remember bar codes. Everyone was going look, everything’s got a barcode on it now, you’re next.

T: I knew a guy who had a barcode tattoo on his head. He wasn’t a fundamentalist Christian or anything but I remember thinking ok.

B: He’s ahead of the game.

T: That’s exactly what I thought – it’s not the Mark of the Beast, but that’s what it’ll be like, I guess. But true story, he was a skin head and he had a barcode on his head.

B: Brilliant. But that was a real thing, it’s probably the main thing, the Mark of the Beast, the Cashless Society…

T: We all had ATM cards and we were told this is the first step, we’ll all get ATM cards and we’ll stop using cash and then it moved onto marks on the hand, so it was going to be a barcode or tattoo – this was all based on Revelation where it talks about people getting the Mark of the Beast. But then in my time of being a fundamentalist, it sort of morphed into being computer chips under the skin, in the hand or the forehead.

B: Yeah, the technology was there, microchipping your pets – I’m sure people were thinking our pets were possibly the first recruits for the end times.

T: But you’d hear stories such as in Sweden right now they’re running trials with this chip under the hand – you know.

B: I think Sweden I heard recently has become the first pretty much completely cashless society.

T: There it is, sorry.

B: So well done Sweden!

T: High five! I remember talking to a girlfriend of mine in the church, because her dad was a pastor and he would preach on the end times, and she said oh my dad actually said there will be the Mark of the Beast but there’s going to be other marks as well. I don’t know where he got this from but that was just confusing, because she said oh you can get those marks, you just can’t get the Mark of the Beast. They probably just didn’t want to lose their ability to spend, so they were making loopholes for themselves.

B: Yeah, and if you were really literal you couldn’t name your child Mark, just in case.

T: Indeed. So it’s interesting though, that the stories were revised all the time. Like I was saying before, first it was a tattoo of a barcode, then it was a chip, and now where we are – you and I aren’t in this anymore, but I mentioned there was the whole Muslim thing. Maybe you’re more in touch, but Armageddon must now involve Muslims, right?

B: Oh you’d imagine – I haven’t heard anything directly for quite a long time, but certainly I have heard people talking about the reality of the uprising of the Muslims, it’ll be a Muslims vs Christians war that will be the end of the world.

T: What were you saying you heard something about the COVID injection putting chips into us or something? Macro, micro, nano?

B: Yeah, little nano bots. It’s a huge thing. I’m still in touch with quite a few people from the evangelical scene, and I’ve seen a lot of concerning posts from them on social media around their concern about the COVID vaccine being linked to Bill Gates’ ability to nanochip us all and be controlled by 5G reception. It’s that level of paranoia that’s driven there, and they’re looking to anchor their truth in something. A lot of Christians, evangelicals – they need an enemy.

T: That’s not just Christians, that’s the world. That’s what George Orwell said in 1984, that we needed to have the other countries or other blocs that we fight against.

B: That’s a good point, I think for evangelicals it’s definitely the Muslim world. I’ve seen some taunting from people in the scene from back then who are still hard core Evangelicals putting things on social media about how disgraceful it is wearing hijab and how under a shroud of darkness these people are – I know some beautiful Muslim people that find the hijab freeing and I get offended at that lack of grace, lack of love, everything is seen as us vs them rather than extending grace. If people are living by that grace, they’re certainly not showing it, that’s for sure.

T: Well they become the other, and they need “the other”. They’ve got that dualistic interpretation of the bible, a dualistic understanding of their own religion, it’s us and them. Like you said, they need an enemy. Any form of social control needs an enemy, we need something to be protected from.

B: That’s a good point.

T: I think it’s interesting that they do shift this. The thing I find fascinating that the COVID shot is going to be putting nano technology in, is my kids – and I’ve got teenage kids now – they get shots all the time from the government. If the government wanted to give them nano particles through a vaccine, they could have done it seven or eight times already. Why do we need this whole COVID thing? It seems like an overreaction to try and get nano particles into us, they could feed us things, there’s so many different ways, it just makes no logical sense.

B: No! You could put something in water supplies – it’s pretty simple, but the reality is it’s a whole new level of paranoia. The whole COVID situation has been twisted around by Evangelical groups –  by many groups, but Evangelicals have certainly latched onto the whole COVID thing being a conspiracy, that it’s about government controlling us, it’s about bringing in a One World Order.

T: You say it’s about a whole new level of paranoia, I don’t think it is. I think it’s the same, it’s just that we’re sitting on the other side going this is fucked.

B: Yeah.

T: And what I mean by that is that I remember just after I came into the AOG and I started going along to the Keswick Scripture Union bookshop, and there were books there about the vitamin conspiracy – so someone was publishing a book saying there was some sort of conspiracy about vitamins, and there was another conspiracy about cable TV, because the fibre could be used as a camera. You and I had missed that train because we came in later, but the remnant of it was still in the bookshops, and I remember thinking to myself no one’s telling me about this, but that was part of the whole end times thing as well, the control by the government.

B: Actually a little flashback I just had was a guy called Tony Venn Brown, I remember going to hear him speak, and he had a whole series on Star Wars and the New Age. I remember it being a tape set and I bought it because I loved and still love Star Wars, and for me I was oh my god this could be a game changer, if this thing is influencing me unconsciously I’ve got to know about it. It was an interesting thing – Tony has now left.

T: He’s now an advocate for sexual identity and gay inclusivity. I think he still works around the Christian scene trying to get people to be more inclusive and accepting. Funny enough a gay friend said to me that’s like a Black guy trying to recruit for White Power. Which is quite funny.

I think it’s more of the same. They’re doing the same thing, it’s just that the characters are different.

B: Yeah, it’s true actually. If you look back through history we’ve been talking about end times for nearly 2000 years so this isn’t anything new, I think they’re just using the technology platforms for a bit of justification and reasoning around what’s happening. It’s an interesting time for sure, but I think you’re right, we can see it very differently from this side.

T: Without opening this too much because we’re nearly out of time, the idea of the end times being imminent is actually in the New Testament, Jesus said some standing here will not taste death until they see the Kingdom come, and he says it twice. So there’s a lot of scholars that say Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who said that the end times were in his lifetime. You can read some of the stuff that Paul wrote, and some of the other writers, and it’s pretty clear they believed that the end times were imminent. So what happens for us is that we read this stuff as modern people, because we’re taught to read the bible as it’s speaking to you now, rather than it’s actually a product of its context and we go oh, it says it’s coming soon. But this was actually part of my deconversion from all of this. I can remember I was working as a youth pastor and I was working in a service station as well, I was cleaning up one night and I remember thinking to myself one night, and I think I might have even prayed – there was just me and myself in the servo at the time – and I said you say you’re coming soon, but you said that 2000 years ago. I’ve had arguments with Christians about this since, because for me this was the straw that broke the camel’s back, it was the nail in the coffin. When I realised actually, he’s a no show. 2000 years ago he said he was coming soon, and his disciples started saying he was coming soon, so every Christian group throughout history has believed they’re in the end times, because the seeds were sown then at the very beginning.

B: And everyone will find signs when they look around them. There’s a sucker born every minute.

T: There’s a sucker born again every minute.

B: That’s right.

T: Anyway, that’s good. I’ve appreciated the opportunity to chat with you about this.

B: It’s been good. I’m sure that these things will come up in future podcasts, like I had that little flashback about Tony Venn Brown, things will come up that you forget about. Not that you’ve suppressed it, but because I’m getting old.

T: All right. See you next week.