Angela M. Lahr opens both the introduction and the first chapter of Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares with sermons from the evangelical megastar Billy Graham. In each case, Graham offers sober reminders of the looming threat of nuclear war, bellowing in 1961 in a sermon reproduced by Lahr that “man is about to blow himself to bits” (25). In the face of such potential calamity, Graham urged his listeners to turn their lives over to Jesus Christ and await the second coming. By placing Graham — with his unparalleled cultural presence — front and center in her history, Lahr conveys the importance and sweeping influence of apocalypticism in America after World War II. Lahr argues, however, that Graham and most evangelical Americans shared not only in a “larger American apocalyptic tradition,” but one that was “profoundly influenced by a pre-millennial subtext” (22). For Lahr, this widespread and largely pre-millennial eschatology explains the rise and acceptance of the New Christian Right within American political culture.
This is a bold argument. Scholars have previously noted — most prominently Paul Boyer's When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (1994) — that the culture of the Cold War stimulated American interest in apocalyptic traditions that had long existed in America. Yet Lahr's isolation of pre-millennial dispensationalism as a crucial factor, perhaps the crucial factor, in political evangelicalism's ascendancy during the Cold War promises a fresh understanding of the origins of the New Christian Right, a movement primarily characterized heretofore as a product of the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s.
Lahr's promising argument, however, meets some evidentiary and conceptual problems that make its execution difficult. When Graham began his evangelical career, for example, he was a pre-millennialist but by the mid-1950s he had abandoned pre-millennialism for a less exacting vision of Christ's return. Thus, while Graham preached with end time's themes in the Cold War era he, along with many Americans, had a more general apocalyptic vision of history. Lahr, to her credit, is aware of the variety and degree of millennial view points, including the fact that evangelicals — then and now — often combine both pre- and post-millennial theologies. Yet, this nuanced understanding of the eschatological mixed bag of most evangelical Americans in this era surfaces infrequently and inconsistently in the text. Instead, Lahr regularly conflates, as she does in her discussions of Graham, the general apocalyptic tendencies alive in the culture with specifically pre-millennial apocalypticism.
Apart from the case of Graham, this confusion about the extent of pre-millennial influence in America is most evident in Chapters two and four of Millennial Dreams. In Chapter two, Lahr claims that prayer fostered “patriotic evangelicalism” (54), but she has difficulty connecting the prayers of evangelicals to her theme of apocalypticism, pre-millennial or not. Nationalistic prayer, in other words, is quite different from apocalyptic prayer. Chapter four chronicles evangelical responses to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. This event, Lahr writes, “Had a real impact on the relationship between evangelical and secular identity by augmenting universally adopted premillennnial understandings of the world” (113). Not only is this “universally adopted” pre-millennialism unsupported by clear evidence — the Liberal Protestant Christian Century hardly qualifies as an instrument of pre-millennial theology (117) — Lahr undermines her claim just pages later. She writes, “Surprisingly considering the pervasiveness of premillenialism during the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis did not appear to boost exponentially talk of prophecy fulfillment…most evangelicals appeared more concerned with the moment. Immediate anxiety brought on by the Cuban Missile Crisis mostly overshadowed thoughts of rapture, the tribulation, and the Antichrist” (118).
The clarity of the argument in these passages is further challenged by Lahr's use of the term “secular.” The Cuban Missile Crisis, she observes, affected the “relationship between evangelical and secular identity”(113). It is unclear what Lahr means by “secular” in this instance as well as in other places in the book where she speaks of the “secular mainstream,” “secular national culture,” and “secular identity formation” (22, 131, 204). These undefined constructions are problematic in themselves and compounded by the fact that the “mainstream” in America was not so much secular as it was defined by mainline Protestantism — church membership reached as high as sixty-percent in 1959 — and by a Christianized civil polity. This was the era, after all, in which “In God We Trust” replaced “E Pluribus Unum” as the national motto and “One Nation Under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance. In other words, few Americans after World War II participated in a “secular mainstream” or engaged in “secular identity formation.” If Lahr means to suggest, as I think she does, that apocalypticism moved the evangelical subculture from the margins to the center of American political life because of a national preoccupation with the threat of nuclear holocaust and that this repositioning of evangelicals allowed them to make peace with a technically secular American state, then I am with her. But so too is Mark Silk, author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II (New York, 1988), a study similarly concerned with the fusion of Christianity and American nationalism but one that goes unmentioned in Lahr's book.
Still, there is much in Millennial Dreams worthy of attention. Lahr's discussion of the state of Israel, for instance, provides her most convincing discussion of pre-millenialism as a shaper of American political life. Her clearest contribution to our understanding of evangelical political identity, however, is her illumination of the diversity of both evangelical apocalypticism and evangelical political opinion especially in relation to the Cuban Missile Crisis — other confusions notwithstanding — the Civil Rights Movement, and Vietnam. Yet these strengths actually weaken her specifically pre-millennial argument since the diversity of opinion that she documents conflicts with that very specificity.
