Conclusion

Abstract

“Perilous times are coming,” William Blackstone warned readers of Jesus Is Coming, “this wicked world, which is so radically opposed to God, and under the present control of His arch enemy, is not growing better. On the contrary, judgment, fire and perdition are before it.” This sentiment, omnipresent but subdued in early American Christianity, gained ascendance and increasingly defined its expression in the years immediately surrounding the Civil War, achieving dominance by the early twentieth century. Apocalypticism comforts its believers that there is nobility in the suffering of injustice at the hands of an evil oppressor, and that endurance will bring vindication. The righteous shall triumph over the wicked and unholy in a war to end all wars, and the meek shall inherit a sweeping creation of a perfected new world that will be the recreation of that lost paradise.