It's also clear the Left is pushing all religions toward an ecumenical faith, or an amalgamated one-world religion. Which for any Christian here familiar with end-time prophecy, is clearly leading toward the False Prophet and the Antichrist.
I haven't had the time to formulate a response with the level of detail your posts merit, but I would like to take this opportunity while I'm thinking about it to point out that there is in fact a
significant diversity of doctrine and theology when it comes to
eschatology - the study of the end times in Scripture. The imagery used in the book of Revelation is extraordinarily open to interpretation, but almost all "end-time prophecy" we hear about in Christian media - and in fact what's informed most pop-culture interpretation of the Rapture or the Antichrist - is filtered through the perspective of Neocalvinist dispensationalism. Now, I don't know your specific denominational background (I'm a Nazarene so make of that what you will) - and please don't think that I'm bashing or disparaging your theology or your reading of the Bible - but that school of thought actually represents a very small minority of Christian denominations and traditions. Because of the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention and other high-profile evangelical traditions during the 1970s and 80s - and because of the influence of wealthy families in those traditions - this small minority actually has a virtual stranglehold on American Protestant television, radio, and print outlets to the point where that's the only description or depiction of non-Catholic Christianity in mass media. If you ask both most Christians and most non-Christians on the street in any major American city, you'll find that many
think Christianity falls within a particular set of doctrines when in many cases their denomination may not share that interpretation of the Bible at all. I guess what I'm saying is that the standard American Christian understanding of the End Times has been very heavily influenced by pop culture and by very specific strains of theology. "High churches" like Catholics, Lutherans, and Episcopalians don't preach the "Left Behind" picture of the Revelation, nor does much of the rest of Christianity elsewhere in the world. It's a little like the realization that our picture of both Heaven and Hell comes almost wholesale out of Dante and owes way more to Greek and early European thought than to Jewish or early Christian teachings. We have to be careful that our understanding of our faith isn't unduly influenced by those trying to manipulate us into supporting a given political ideology. At any rate, thanks for reading and responding to the article and I hope to have more to say soon.
