Unless you live on a remote Montana homestead and generate your own electricity (in which case you have nothing to worry about), you’ve heard about the Y2K bug. When the digital clocks on billions of computers roll over from 11:59:59 to 12:00:00 on December 31, 1999, Western civilization could cease to exist. Power will cut off, groceries vanish from store shelves, banks go broke. Nuclear warheads might automatically launch themselves from unstable Middle Eastern dictatorships. In fact, God’s wrath will finally descend upon our evil civilization, and we know the exact day (and minute, and second) it will arrive. “Dust Y2K,” declares one best-selling Christian author, “and you will find the fingerprints of God all over it. This is not the first time God has interrupted the plans of man. The first time He confused language. This time He is going to confuse technology.”
According to Gary North, the Reconstructionist historian who has become Christianity’s loudest Y2K doomsayer, this is “the biggest problem that the modern world has ever faced.” North’s opinion is shared by Hal Lindsey (Facing Millennium Midnight), Michael Hyatt (The Millennium Bug: How to Survive the Coming Chaos), Steve Farrar (Spiritual Survival During the Y2K Crisis), Grant Jeffrey (The Millennium Meltdown), and a score of other evangelical prophets. Y2K is bigger than World War II, the Bomb, the Cold War, Ebola, Chinese nuclear capabilities, or sunspots. Y2K is the strongest contender for TEOTWAWKI (“The End of the World As We Know It”) since Jerusalem fell to the Romans in a.d. 70.
By an odd coincidence, none of these doomsayers is a programmer.
“I have no expertise in computers,” writes Steve Farrar. “My training is in Bible and in theology.” Gary North’s disclaimer is similar: “I’m not a programmer. My Ph.D. is in history.” Michael Hyatt, who has written two bestselling Y2K tomes and maintains an alarming Y2K Preparation Web site, is a book publishing executive with a B.A. in philosophy. Grant Jeffrey is a prophecy maven and ex-financial planner. Hal Lindsey needs no introduction.
Whatever the probabilities of the world’s ending in January may be (and they may, realistically, be high; I am not here attempting to calculate the odds), such widespread and all-consuming interest on the part of Christians who have no technical expertise suggests that the Y2K threat sounds some deep and powerful resonance with evangelical thought.
Why has this computer glitch so fired the Christian imagination?
Once upon a time, folks sat out on their front porches and swapped stories as the sun set. Children sprawled on the floor in front of the fire, reading books full of complex sentences and high ideals. Families spent quality time together—poring over McGuffey’s Readers, making hand-cranked ice cream, milking the cows, reading Shakespeare by firelight. Local people depended on each other for help. Public opinion kept moral standards high. Schools taught real math and grammar.
After the computers crash, this world may be born again.
At Gary North’s Web site, the mother of all Y2K Web sites (even Time online provides a link to North), a simple theme repeats itself again and again: Prepare for a return to the nineteenth century. “If most mainframe computers in 2000 read 2000 as 1900,” North writes, “then it soon will be 1900, economically speaking.” Any occupation that did not exist at this century’s turn, North warns, will not exist after the next; therefore, learn a trade and be prepared to use your hands. All journalists, he adds with ill-concealed glee and a surprising disregard for history, will soon be unemployed.
The Y2K Preparedness Links leading from North’s site round out this picture of an America that looks (once you get out of the burning cities) a lot like a rosy episode of Little House on the Prairie. Y2K preparedness companies sell home remedies, herb-growing kits, kerosene lanterns, canning and pickling supplies, farm implements, and treadle sewing machines. Links from Michael Hyatt’s Y2K site point to the Cumberland General Store (which sells woodburning stoves, pine churns, candle-making kits, windmills and—their most popular item—top hats) and to the Robinson Curriculum for homeschoolers (once Western civilization ends, home education will be your only option). The Robinson Curriculum, advertised as a complete self-teaching program for grades K–12, prides itself on using no book published after 1913.
Indeed, late-twentieth-century evangelicals seem to have a deep longing for the nineteenth century. Christian bookstores carry Thomas Kinkade’s retro paintings, done in the style of the nineteenth-century Luminists and inviting viewers to “bask in the nostalgia of earlier, less stressful times.” Prairie romances and historical novels sweep readers back to a simpler, godlier America. A leading Christian newsmagazine helps to promote the Lost Classics Book Company, which publishes nineteenth-century books guaranteed to “rekindle, in children and parents alike, a fuller appreciation of the virtues which shaped the lives of our forefathers and made America great.” According to the Washington Times, these old books are making a phenomenal comeback among Christian readers: “There were norms back then,” one evangelical parent tells reporter Julia Duin. “There were expectations of behavior. People acted in proper ways and were concerned with doing the right thing. … There’s nothing good being written today.”
Notwithstanding the disadvantages (lynchings, grinding immigrant poverty, robber barons, abandoned children, rampant disease), there is at least one good reason to regret the passing of the nineteenth century: In 1895, Microsoft, Disney, and Time-Warner could not reach into every living room. The web of telephone switches, electrical connections, and software applications that allows me to shoot five e-mails per day off to my brother in Colorado Springs, half a continent away, also allows NBC to invade my daily routine and order me (through the ads that punctuate the news, through the pop-up announcements that appear on my computer screen) to watch Thursday Night TV. Our use of technology has woven the routine of our lives together with the wishes of corporate marketers, and these interconnections have pulled us away from that neighborly nineteenth-century ethos. Wendell Berry says it well, in an essay excerpted by the Family Research Council’s bimonthly,Family Policy:
There used to be a sort of institution in our part of the country known as “sitting till bedtime.” After supper, when they weren’t too tired, neighbors would walk across the fields to visit each other. They popped corn, my friend said, and ate apples and talked. They told each other stories … about each other, about themselves, living again in their own memories and thus keeping their memories alive. … But most of us no longer talk with each other, much less tell each other stories. We tell our stories now mostly to doctors or lawyers or psychiatrists or insurance adjusters or the police, not to our neighbors for their (and our) entertainment. The stories that now entertain us are made up for us in New York or Los Angeles or other centers of such commerce.
—”The Work of Local Culture,” in What Are People For? Essays by Wendell Berry, North Point Press, 1990.
The interconnections that make modern times possible may make life easier, but they also replace the local imagination with the mass-produced version. They destroy local culture in favor of flavorless culture manufactured by corporations for the sake of profit. We can’t sit on the front porch any more and swap stories over a bowl of popcorn; the front porch is in a drive-by shooting zone created by rap music and Hollywood gangster films, the boss needs numbers crunched so that the deal with the overseas corporation can go through, and the kids are inside surfing the Web. We can’t shake free.
Fear of this web of interconnections is central to Y2K doomsaying. As Grant Jeffrey tells us, the fact that America is “interconnected in countless ways by complex and often hidden computer systems” makes us “tremendously vulnerable.” “If you lose electricity,” Michael Hyatt warns, “everything else is moot . …Planes are grounded, the majority of other vehicles stop running as petroleum products are used up. Basic food items cannot be delivered and supermarkets are empty, people are hungry. There are no phones. … Perhaps the President invokes the emergency powers act and there is martial law.” International connections are even more alarming: “What happens when Japanese housewives draw cash out of the already shaky Japanese banks?” Gary North asks. “Those banks hold billions of dollars of U.S. Treasury debt. … What happens to the dollar? To U.S. interest rates? To the world’s stock markets?”
Computers tie the whole mess together. But Y2K will unravel it.
“Technology has become God in the United States,” writes Steve Farrar. “And this god of technology to which we have all become so accustomed could be melted down in minutes, as Moses melted down the golden calf centuries ago.” Y2K, he predicts, will bring revival to America. But despite repeated affirmations that Y2K is an instrument of God, the crisis imagined by North et al. is essentially a secular apocalypse. And the age that follows the computer breakdown is most certainly a secular millennium; only the well-prepared shall enter in.
As I type, a digital clock on the shelf across the room counts off the minutes: 9:54 a.m. At the bottom of my computer screen, another clock ticks off the seconds: 9:54:36 a.m. Without this innovation—standardized time that allows us to reckon the turn of the century with such precision—the Y2K panic would not exist. The computers will crash, as Gary North warns us, at the second that the digital clocks turn from 11:59:59 to 12:00:00. We all know exactly what year, what day, what hour, minute, and second the end will come.
In this, we are far different from the Christians of the last millennium. In their novel Y2K: The Day the World Shut Down, Michael Hyatt and George Grant describe the midnight panic of December 31, 999:
The old church of St. Peter in Rome was thronged with the faithful. … Weeping and wailing, they had gathered there to await the end of the world . …The tormented cries of the people hung in the air, thick like incense. The great bells in the towers above the adjacent courtyard began to toll ominously. Every sight, sound, texture, and aroma bore the manifest taint of judgment. Grievous, they were observing a wake for the world. The holy seers had all foretold this dreadful day—indeed, most had expected it for quite some time.
Compelling as it is, this scenario is unlikely. “There were no Terrors of the Year 1000,” concludes Damian Thompson in The End of Time: Faith and Fear in the Shadow of the Millennium. “It is a romantic invention, dating back no further than the sixteenth century.” Some clerics did think that the world would end 1,000 years after Christ’s birth, but others plumped for 1033 (1,000 years after the resurrection). And for most people, the question was irrelevant. There was no mass panic, Thompson dryly notes, “for the simple reason that the vast majority of people did not know what year it was.”
As December 31 of 1999 approaches, we all know the year—down to the very second. Historian Ann Douglas calls this preoccupation with split-second accuracy “clock culture,” and dates it from the 1920s. She writes in Terrible Honesty:
More precision, more exactitude, was available in the 1920s than ever before . …Wristwatches replaced the old-fashioned and ponderous watch kept in a vest pocket—people now needed to know the time all the time—and the various terms still in use today for commodifying time gained wide circulation. People “buy time,” “pass the time,” “spend time,” “borrow time.”
The clock, Douglas concludes, became “the ultimate reality check.” And the clock, not God, is the ultimate power behind the looming 2000 apocalypse. In Grant Jeffrey’s The Millennium Meltdown, the ticking clock has replaced God’s sovereign will as the bringer of disaster on this present evil age: “Every day brings this danger twenty-four hours closer. There is no time to waste. … Remember: time is of the essence, and countdown to the Year 2000 cannot be stopped.”
“The Y2K problem,” Gary North warns, “is about an absolutely fixed deadline. There has never been a more fixed deadline in recorded history. Will the world meet it? I don’t think so.” In North’s apocalyptic scenario, the clocks may even bring martyrdom:
To survive a breakdown in the banking system, let alone the power grid, you must take an emotional stand against your government, your church, your friends, your in-laws, and maybe your spouse. … You will remain alone until the people you warned show up on your doorstep, hats in hand, saying, “Now we’ll listen. In the meantime, feed us.” You will get agreement only when the new converts want something from you. And if you don’t provide it, you will be hated. Maybe killed.
This overtly religious language, applied to a man-designed and man-triggered apocalypse, provides a chilling contrast to the words of Christ himself. “It is not for you to know the times or dates,” Jesus tells the overinquisitive disciples; and there is no reason to think that the invention of the digital clock has altered this command.
If the Y2K apocalypse is essentially secular, the millennium that follows is even more so.
To enjoy the nineteenth-century America that’s coming, you have to spend money now. Lots of money. A Glowmaster kerosene lantern (“A must for any emergency situation!”) is $60. A single nonhybrid seed kit (three 10-lb. cans) from Y2K Foods costs $185. A water filter from Y2K Chaos costs $300. A one-year supply of food for a family of four from Y2K Prep costs $3,395 (plus shipping).
In 1999, Y2K hucksterism has become a mainstay of Christian marketing. Y2K products warn about the dangers of interrelated systems, but the Y2K publishing and supply industry feeds on the national audience that can be reached only through the advertising and entertainment channels that Farrar and North deplore. Hyatt’s The Millennium Bug: How to Survive the Coming Chaos is positioned as “The hot new blockbuster book! Already on the New York Times bestseller list!” Steve Farrar, the publisher’s blurb in forms us, is “nationally known,” a “best-selling author” whose last book sold more than 300,000 copies.
Everyone is selling. In early 1999, Bookstore Journal, the trade journal of the Christian Booksellers Association, ran an entire feature on prophecy/apocalypse/Y2K books, calling them the “hot test-selling category around.” The article exhorts Christian retailers to make endcaps and special displays for these books, promising them that sales of merchandise will “impact their communities for Christ.” The selling of Y2K books (and the making of profit) has become a religious duty. The buying of supplies has also taken on moral overtones. Michael Hyatt, Y2K Prep’s founder and president, exhorts his customers, “Even if there are just two of you or you feel that the Millennium Bug will never be more than a ‘Brown Out’ and last only a few weeks or so, I urge you to purchase the full one-year, four-person package [for $3,395]. You MUST have enough food to allow you to rebuild your life and help those who have been unable to prepare. You don’t want to turn friends and neighbors into adversaries by turning them away in their hour of need.”
Only those who purchase will survive into the coming millennium. That cozy, nineteenth-century, postapocalypse America is reserved for the prepared. Wendy M. Grossman, author of net.wars, describes the strong element of satisfaction among Y2K doomsayers: they are the “in-group that is going to survive be cause they’re smarter and tougher than the rest of us.” Like all millennia that are not built by God alone, the kinder, simpler, post-Y2K world is occupied by the fittest.
Hyatt’s The Millennium Bug warns us: “Y2K will affect your life. Can you do anything to protect yourself and your family?” Fortunately, the answer is yes. Call the publisher’s toll-free number and shell out the cover price of the book, and you too can be among the elect.
In his classic study, Primitive Rebels, historian Eric Hobsbawm separates those who believe in the End into two camps. The religious camp thinks that God will bring about the end of history and establish the new world that follows; the secularists think that mankind will manage both the destruction and the rebuilding on its own. And the Y2K doomsayers have edged perilously close to the secular tents.
Secularists have the comfort of prediction. Because they are not depending on a dangerous and omnipotent deity to bring apocalypse, they can forecast disaster and outline its possible paths. But there’s a downside to this man-centered eschatology: Secularists have no radically new pattern to use as they strive to build a new world from the wreckage of the old. They cannot reach outside their own experience to envision a completely different way of life. They can only revert to the patterns of the past.
Secularists are reformers; they believe that the basic structure of civilization is sound, if only the rotting excesses could be trimmed away. If we could return, well-stocked with goods, to a nineteenth-century America no longer dependent on Japanese computers, we could fix the present mess. If only we could clear the corruption from the government, and put good men back into office, the institutions would work again. For a stunningly clear illustration of this, consider that extremely long Kevin Costner vehicle, The Postman, in which the remanned United States Postal Service brings about millennial restoration after a civilization-destroying apocalypse.
My local post office has a Countdown to the Millennium digital clock; it is about three hours slow.
But a truly Christian vision is revolutionary, not reforming. God will remake the world from scratch, and the new creation of the divine mind will go far beyond what we can think and imagine. Only fire can cleanse the world, and only the Messiah (coming unpredictably into creation from the outside) can set it right. And no prophet will make a single dime from the catastrophe.
Susan Wise Bauer is a novelist; she teaches literature at the College of William & Mary. Her book The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home, written with her mother, Jessie Wise, has just been published by Norton.
Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
