Apocalypse without End: Christian Right Politics and Affect in Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness

Abstract: Apocalypse is a genre forged in the fires of empire. Using scholarship on the Bible and Ancient Near East (ANE) religions, this paper argues that extreme moral dualism and the proliferation of divine beings are as important as eschatology for contemporary apocalypse. Frank Peretti’s evangelical bestseller This Present Darkness (1986) heralded a turn in contemporary evangelical apocalypse, from passive waiting for God’s intervention to activist, even militant, struggle against the enemies of God. Because This Present Darkness is apocalyptic in this deeper sense, my method ventures beyond the eschatology-focused Book of Revelation to analyze the Second Temple (516 BCE to 70 CE) biblical and parabiblical apocalypses that continue to structure the genre all these centuries later. Restoring this more expansive, deep-time understanding of apocalypse to our discussion in literature and religion studies allows us to better grasp the Christian Right fiction, affect, and politics of our day. While the proliferation of warring divine beings as angels and demons more narrowly defines New Apostolic Reformation theology, This Present Darkness is a theodicy that more widely captures the feelings of grievance and persecution characteristic of the Christian Right’s sense that their social and political foes are God’s own enemies, as well as their fears of eroding status and power. I conclude with the suggestion that the aim of literature and religion studies must be to accurately map the territory of their intersection, which means paying attention to popular evangelical fiction without leaving behind serious literary writers.