Jared Yates Sexton - The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis

American Rule

The Man They Wanted Me to Be

The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore

My earliest memories are of the apocalypse. As a child I would sit on my grandmothers knee as she read scripture from the Holy Bible and bellowed end-times prophecy. While my friends were told fairy tales and legends of heroes and faraway magical places, my stories revolved around fire, ash, blood, and tribulation, great clashes of angels and beasts and the armies of man, all of it culminating in the final battle between God and the Devil for the fate of the world.

This war dominated every aspect of life.

Our preachers spent more time on the Book of Revelation than on any other part of the gospel, pounding the pulpit as they prepared us for the blast of trumpets announcing Armageddon. Satans minions, they warned, stalked the Earth, some as murderous demons waiting to pounce on susceptible Christians straying from the flock. Others donned disguises. They were our friends at school. They infiltrated our families, our communities, our culture, even our government, their lies punctuating our days and poisoning the airwaves. To let our guard down would be tantamount to spiritual suicide.

Grandma took the preachers at their word. On Sunday mornings in the 1980s she grabbed the remote control and expertly switched between the many apocalyptic televangelists she loved and the news, where scenes from what she believed was prophecy unfolding played out in striking detail. The center of evil in the world, she had been assured by those same preachers and a bevy of politicians, rested in Moscow; it wasnt even debatable whether the Kremlin was in league with Satan. The Soviet Union was the kingdom of the Antichrist, she believed. A place of abomination and heresy and terrors.

Like many others, Grandma had faith the United States was Gods champion in that war. She had played her part in the 1940s by rolling up her sleeves and working in the factories while men like my grandfather fought fascism thousands of miles away. Good had prevailed and would prevail again, thanks to the hard work and sacrifice of people like our family, who sweated on the factory floor, labored in limestone quarries, poisoned their lungs in the depths of the mine shaft, and generally gifted their bodies and fates to the fight. In their own small way, they were martyrs in a religious crusade.

Back then, the world was still strange and baffling to me. All I knew was that it seemed like there were many different lives to live, and some, like my loved ones, seemed destined to toil and suffer. In some of her brief sojourns away from Revelation, Grandma talked about how someday the meek would inherit the Earth, occasionally stopping to reflect on our lots in life and granting the suffering an air of righteous responsibility, reasoning, with a distinct note of pride, The world needs ditch diggers.

In school it was more of the same. American history was laundered, our books full of smiling cartoonish Native Americans happily handing over the continent and tales extolling the unique virtues of our nation. Sometimes, during emergency drills, as we ducked and covered and lined up in the halls on our knees and buried our heads against the concrete, teachers would talk about disasters sent by God and the Devil, tornados and falling bombs, all while reminding us how lucky we were to be born Christians in the Lords chosen nation.

Growing up in the eighties, I was pumped full of endless propaganda exalting American strength and the splendors of capitalism. My town and my family, with all of their struggles and blemishes, served as proof positive that God was working through the United States. And then, as the new decade arrived, and as the Evil Empire fell, something changed. Our people were laid off. Our factories closed, their windows boarded up; the buildings that had given us a livelihood were left to rust and rot. Stores dotting our modest Main Street shuttered. It was as if God had suddenly cast his judgment and found us lacking.

Grandma kept stacks of tablets scribbled over with her notes in light, looping cursive, one hand furiously flipping the thin pages of her King James Bible in search of answers while the other guided a pencil. As things changed, she turned more and more to stories of demonic possession and the secret world of magic and miracles. She was frantic to find something in the printed word that gave her direction and knowledge, and as conditions declined, new books appeared detailing the New World Order that explained how Gods chosen nation had been betrayed by its own in service of Satans evil plans. Grandma devoured these books in a manic flourish before foisting them upon everyone around her.

In her search for clues, Grandma cross-referenced the New World Order idea with the Book of Revelation and believed she had found her answers. We were living in the end-times, that much was certain, and surely the evil spirits in the Devils employ had managed to find some wayward sinners in the United States to do his bidding. The plan was to destroy the Kingdom of God from the inside out, leaving it vulnerable to attacks and domination, all of it culminating in a one-world government lorded over by the Antichrist himself. A literal hell on Earth.

Grandma continued buying these books, many hawked by the same televangelists on the TV who were now preaching about the insidious plot between calls for donations. Her bookshelves were swollen with them, the table next to her favorite chair piled high with tabloids from the grocery store checkout detailing an invisible world where monsters walked among us and a secret machinery whirred just under the surface of the material realm.