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The Reformation lives
Why should anyone apart from scholars pay any attention to Europe's 16th-century Reformation? While I was writing a very large book on the Reformation, one of my purposes was to show readers that this series of ancient upheavals lived on into the present, not least because it was tangled up with the founding of colonies in north America, the nucleus of the United States. The thoughts and struggles of Martin Luther, a German monk seized by a longing to tell the Christian story in an older and purer form than he found in the Church of his day, are still shaping world events - and if those involved do not understand that, then disaster may follow.

Admittedly, the 16th century can seem very strange to us. Sixteenth century Europeans burned one another for denying that bread could become God. But if we forget or misread the past, it will often catch up with us in unexpected ways and places. Reformation Europe manages to be alarmingly similar to many swathes of the world at the present day, and no more so than in the re-emergence of a very old idea. Historians have come to realise that in 16th-century Europe, a very large proportion of otherwise apparently sane Catholics and Protestants were convinced that the Last Days were about to arrive: God was about to judge the world and bring an end to everyday society. Already he was sending plenty of signs: the Pope's power was destroyed through much of Europe, monasteries were being sacked, and above all the Islamic armies of the Ottoman Empire were remorselessly advancing westwards, wrecking Christian powers like the Kingdom of Hungary, an ancient and cultured European monarchy which was simply annihilated by the Turks over less than two decades. That is one of the reasons why the Reformation was such an urgent, bloody affair, because those involved had to get things right with God before he came on his final tour of inspection in the Last Days.

The imminence of the Last Days seemed to make sense during the Reformation - only it did not happen, despite continual ingenious recalculations of all the biblical data. Now once more, the varied tribulations of the world have convinced countless Christians that this time it is for real. The belief is common in Africa and Asia, but it has especial significance in the United States. The Last Days theme is infinitely malleable, and in its present American form it has a new aspect which did not figure in Reformation discussion: a nineteenth-century American Protestant preacher invented a particular sub-theme, the 'Rapture' of the saved before God's final tribulation, which is based on a strained interpretation of one of Paul's epistles to the Thessalonians. The success of the ‘Rapture' notion can be gauged by the publishing phenomenon of the 12 ‘Left Behind' novels of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins: well past 62 million copies now. Those sort of sales begin to rival those of the Book of Revelation and the Epistle to the Thessalonians which inspired the fiction.

Why is this so important? The Last Days theme, which LaHaye and Jenkins have made central to a certain sort of American popular culture, has also become a major motor in the contemporary foreign policy of the United States. Just as in 16th- and 17th-century Europe, the American Christian Right holds a strong belief that we need to sort out the world before the Last Days arrive. ...