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{God} may be preparing to confound our language, to jam our communications, scatter our efforts, and judge us for our sin and rebellion against His Lordship. We are hearing from many sources that January 1, 2000, will be a fateful day in the history of the world
-Jerry Falwell, Old Time Gospel Hour TV show,
(qtd. in Kellner, "Secular")
IT IS PARADOXICAL THAT IN THE UNITED STATES-ONE OF THE MOST technologically advanced industrialized economies in the world today-a significant minority of the population are biblical literalists who contend that God created the heavens and the earth in six days, Jonah survived in the belly of a fish, and the world will be destroyed in a series of catastrophic events as foretold in the Bible (Bruce 1; Halsell; Mojtabai). Moreover, eschatological beliefs about the end of the world, while more pronounced among conservative Protestant Christians, pervade the wider cultural landscape. And as the new millennium approached, apocalypticism gained momentum. Televangelists such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, among other evangelical elites, warned that the Y2K computer problem was a likely omen that foreshadowed impending disaster. Pundits predicted that widespread computer failures could lead to massive disruptions ("chaos"), or even Armageddon, the final cataclysmic battle between good and evil portended in the Bible. Trusting that God would save his faithful remnant, born-again believers prepared for the possibility of societal collapse by hoarding food and water, stockpiling gold and cash, and acquiring handguns.
Premillennial tension is not a new phenomenon, of course, nor are fundamentalist fears about expanding technologies, reflecting deep-seated anxieties about modernity and secularization (Wuthnow, Restructuring', Marsden). However, what is intriguing about the responses to Y2K among evangelicals and fundamentalists is the extent to which a potential computer glitch heated up endtime speculation, and the actions taken by some prophecy believers in accordance with their convictions. Thus, the aptly named "millennium bug" had an unexpected side effect: exposing the pervasiveness of apocalyptic thinking in contemporary American society in the countdown to January 1, 2000 (Wojcik 3; Boyer x, 338-39).
Apocalyptic Nightmares/Millennialist Dreams
From the Greek meaning "veiled," an apocalypse initially referred to passages of text in which the events leading up to the Day of judgment could be deciphered (Boyer 23). Over time, "apocalypse" came to...