The End of History; or My Summer with Apocalyptic Christians

May/June 2008 Historically Speaking 27 The End of History; or My Summer with Apocalyptic Christians Nicholas Guyatt There are real advantages to writing about dead people. They don't have blogs, so there's no danger that they'll see your work and grumble about what you've written. They can't send you personal messages correcting your mistakes or arguing with your tone. And you don't have that scratching sense when you write your book that the subjects may quietly read it and just feel bad about what you've said. As someone who has spent most of his short career writing about people who've been dead for a hundred years or more, I found out all of this when I decided to write a book about contemporary America. Before too long, I felt quite nostalgic for archives and crumbling books and evidentiary dead ends. When you can find your subjects instantly via email , no matter where you are in the world, you don't have the excuses upon which you normally depend. In 2004 I had just finished my History Ph.D. at Princeton, and got my first job at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. My dissertation was on religious nationalism in early American history, and especially on the cluster of ideas about providence and national purpose that suggested a divine mission for the United States. I'd placed my manuscript with Cambridge, and I was sure that I was writing a monograph rather than a trade book, but I had become fascinated by the disconnect between my work on American religious history and the currents of contemporary evangelicalism. To be sure, there was still plenty of missionary rhetoric in American public life. George W. Bush used that language, and Bush's speechwriter Michael Gerson had insisted on the role of providence in shaping America's momentous course through history. But this familiar language was at odds with a new conviction that was sweeping dirough evangelical churches and bookstores . Tim LaHaye, co-author of the bestselling Left Behind books, was telling anyone who would listen that God hadn't sent America to save the world, because the world wasn't going to be saved. It would be consumed by the Antichrist, and the end was approaching fast. Would a historian have anything to say about the contemporary End Times movement? I was certainly curious about believers in biblical prophecy, and I felt an intellectual obligation to study them since they hadn't been big players in my providence manuscript. But I didn't want to muscle into the territory occupied by sociologists Pastor John Hagee addresses a crowd of followers during a rally in downtown Jerusalem on April 7, 2008. Several hundred evangelicals from the Christians United for Israel movement marched in Jerusalem in solidarity with the Jewish state. GALI TIBBON/AFP/Getty Images. or religion scholars, who had already produced interesting monographs on Left Behind and on the upsurge of apocalyptic enthusiasm in America. My aims were a bit different. Could I take a few months off from my regular research, and hit the road in search of the preachers and authors who were promoting the End Times message? Could I write a book that had some historical perspective, but which threw light on the contemporary significance of apocalyptic Christians? More to the point: Would anyone be willing to publish it? I found myself an agent in London, and he came up with simple suggestions about how to proceed. Write a proposal. Play up your historical knowledge, but don't become a prisoner to it. Look for a big thesis, and hammer it home when you map out your chapters. Boast that you're going to interview the colossi of the Religious Right, even if you have no idea how to contact them. I followed all diese steps, and let die agent do the rest. He quickly sold the book to Random House in the UK, and Harper Collins in the U.S. Then, to my enormous surprise, he was fired from the agency. One of the things I've found out during my brief exposure to commercial publishing is that every author has...