Evangelical bestsellers framed military rearmament as a religious requirement

Evidence

In Listen, America! Falwell had lamented that the United States was “no longer the military might of the world,” no longer “committed to victory,” no longer “committed to greatness”; for the first time in two centuries, Americans’ survival as a free people was in doubt. In America at the Crossroads, John Price, too, had mourned the decline of US military power. In forgetting God, the nation had let its strength ebb away, and only when America “comes to its senses” and “repents of its sins and turns to God” would its military position be restored. Perhaps the most influential evangelical book on military rearmament was Hal Lindsey’s The 1980’s: Countdown to Armageddon, a sequel to his best-selling The Late Great Planet Earth that was timed to the 1980 election. For Lindsey, rearmament was not simply a pragmatic decision; it was a religious requirement. The Bible was telling the United States to build a powerful military force, to “become strong again.” The book spent twenty-one weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 256

Categorization

• XREF: The book-as-commercial-artifact method connects to the earlier chapters’ catalog of consumer media (books, records) transmitting the militant masculine ideal — this is the mechanism made concrete again.
• SEED: Angle: how a prophecy book timed to an election and selling on the NYT list is the very definition of Du Mez’s ‘consumer culture’ transmission — the marketplace, not the pulpit, as the mechanism.