Have a Nice Doomsday: Why Millions of Americans Are Looking Forward to the End of the World

by Nicholas Guyatt

Book Overview

In Have a Nice Doomsday, Nicholas Guyatt searches for the truth behind a startling statistic: 50 million Americans have come to believe that the apocalypse will take place in their lifetime. They're convinced that, any day now, Jesus will snatch up his followers and spirit them to heaven. The rest of us will be left behind to endure massive earthquakes, devastating wars, and the terrifying rise of the Antichrist. But true believers aren't sitting...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061152242
• ISBN13: 9780061152245
• Release Date: October 2007
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

The phrophetic world is a murky world

I have mixed emotions about the book I just finished; on one hand Guyatt writes very well and very clearly but on the other hand I found the subject matter difficult to fully understand. Personally I am hugely anti-religion so the entire premise of this book is concerning: "...why millions of Americans are looking forward to the end of the world". I wish it were of no consequence sitting as I am on the other side of the world from these events and personalities but these ridiclous prophecy ideas are having a monstrous impact on America's relations with the world that wants nothing to do with John Hagee, Tim LaHaye, David Chagall and unfortunately, many others. I say that Guyatt's book should only be of passing interet to someone so far removed from this religious caldron but because America sits astride the largest piece of temperate land on the planet, the remainder of the world must at least pay lip service to this religious cesspool. Reading Guyatt's book leaves the reader knowing that he treaded extremely carefully through the minefield of so many strange ideas and so many strange people. These prophecy hobbiests never said anything, or at least it was never reported by Guyatt, about the possibility that 9/11 was not a terrorist attack from outside the US but a government sanctioned terrorist attack within the US. That fact would certainly be confronting to these prophecy fanatics because, although the End Times would certainly still be upon the world, the engine driving these times would be more confronting to these Christian fundamentalists. Guyatt writes in one of his final chapters, "Armageddon Comes Later" that Tim Lahaye believes (good conservative that he is) that "... he has found a way to pull back from the brink" or how to have your cake and eat it too. By believing (this thought train seems to be extremely common among Prophecy hobbiests) that tweaking the social fabric by punishing Gays, outlawing same-sex marrige, and outlawing abortions (the contemporary incindiary fuses) then the Final Days can be posponed until these social bette noirs of religious conservatives can be elliminated from the Final Days altogether (even though everybody except the Raptured will die, you can make these End Days a little cleaner). Good religious fundamentalists do not want these last days muddied by these social imperfections. This discussion probably hits upon my withdrawal from giving this extremely good book my full backing; I was hoping that Guyatt would venture further into the realm of the impact of this weidness on American and therefore world politics. That Guyatt completed such an excellent text probably indicates that this reader was looking for something that was not possible within the context of a single text. "Have A Nice Doomsday" is an excellent read and I reccomemd it too any person with interest in the current political undercurrents in the US.

Bringing on the crazy! A character study

Since the time the New Testament canons were written, some of the authors and/or editors of these texts were convinced the world was coming to an end in their generation. The fact that 1900+ years have gone by and we're still here does not appear to weaken the opportunity for con men and true believers seasoned with a dash of capitalistic fervor to make a lot of money and gain an enormous amount of power shilling the end of world. Guyatt travels to the sources of this hucksterism showing how these religious leaders convince a particular group of people into believing the natural laws of the universe will be suddenly disrupted by a very angry God as described by the unknown author of an ancient text that Thomas Jefferson believed was written by an insane person. Nicholas Guyatt opens us up to the world of the evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity at its craziest in an approach perfect for the topic, he minimizes his own perspective and focuses on providing them with a forum to answer questions a sane, educated person divorced from the cult of rapture believers would ask. Guyatt's non-threatening approach to his interview subjects has most of them opening up so that we get an unvarnished look into their world, even learning how much the leaders and their adherents look forward to the world suffering through a tribulation in order that they can be proved right in their beliefs, which provides justification for this sub-title, "Why Millions of Americans are Looking Forward to the End of the World". Guyatt digs in deep enough to show the various factions within the Christian evangelical and fundamentalist community regarding the non-liberal Christian version of the end times, from reconstructionists like Gary DeMar who wants to mutate American government rule to Old Testament teachings where we can only wear one fabric, stone gays, and we are ordered to personally execute unruly children and heretical neighbors, to John Hagee, who has an unnerving amount of influence on our government's policies regarding Israel and his impassioned desire to see World War III waged between Russia and Iran against Israel and America all the while whistling to the bank. Guyatt also does a great job of reporting on who these religious leaders claim "could be" and sometimes even going so far as claiming with certainty "are" the Antichrist, something most of them are now less adverse to promoting since they've realized this market opportunity presents long-term financial opportunities that are at risk if proven wrong, with the exception of Hal Lindsey whose adherents don't seem to mind his predictions continuing to fall flat for 40+ years now and Tim LaHaye as described below. Guyatt's excellent reportage on Tim LaHaye is spot-on though LaHaye does not provide much access to Guyatt, one of the few that doesn't. LaHaye continues to enjoy enormous popularity even though he made claims with absolute certainty a couple of decades ago that the rapture would occur with

Believe It or Not, Prophecy Affects You

Many of my neighbors, since I live here in the Bible Belt, are convinced that soon, within the next few years and certainly within their lifetimes, they will vanish from the Earth. They won't die, but they will disappear into the skies because they have a particular relationship with Jesus that will allow this to happen, and those of us who do not have such a relationship will be left behind to fend for ourselves. For me, and certainly for most of the world, this is just not the sort of thing that happens, but such beliefs are not uncommon here. In fact, 60% of Americans believe that prophecies including The Rapture are going to come true, and 20% think it will happen in their lifetimes, according to statistics provided in _Have a Nice Doomsday: Why Millions of Americans Are Looking Forward to the End of the World_ (Harper Perennial) by Nicholas Guyatt. Guyatt is a historian educated in Cambridge, England, and his previous books have to do with American history rather than the current events described in this one. He now lives and teaches in Vancouver, and although he brings an outsider's inspection to this particular manifestation of Born-Again America, and although he manages a humorous tour of apocalyptic history and current events, he is never patronizing with his subject or with the many as-yet-to-be-Raptured experts he has interviewed. That does not keep him from being amused, or conveying his amusement in this entertaining and breezy book, but he has made serious enquiries and takes the answers he has found seriously; given that so many Americans take these prophecies seriously, it is clear that even those of us unswayed by prophecy ought to take the phenomenon of such beliefs seriously, especially as it affects current politics and culture. Using the Bible to predict the future is nothing new. St. Augustine, Martin Luther, and Newton all thought about doing so. Prophesied dates have come and gone, but Apocalyptic preachers tend not to give firm dates nowadays, since every time they have done so they have been proven wrong when the date came. Guyatt shows how in the 1970s prophets concentrated on Communism, and had to give that up, and then upon the enmity between Egypt and Israel, and had to give that up, and are turning to Islam, which had not previously been emphasized. The extremely popular _Left Behind_ series, authored by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, deals with how the unraptured will handle the Antichrist who has gotten himself appointed head of that conservative bogeyman, the United Nations. There are spinoffs, like the Left Behind video game Guyatt tries out, massacring some unbelievers and converting others. If the Apocalypse is anything like the game, there will be advantages to converting: "When you convert men, they transform into identical preppy kids wearing V-necks. Women suddenly sport an orange jumper, like Velma from Scooby-Doo." Other authors have come to this table, like Mel Odom, author of _Apocalypse