Armageddonists

Mailed to my zipcode, a few months ago.

This having been a five-day event, the inside of the flyer offered more End Times clip art illustrating the scheduled topics:

Revelation's Final Glimpse of Things to Come
The Next New World Order is Coming
The Longest Time Prophecy in the Bible Reveals the Judgment Hour
Whatever Happened to Right and Wrong?

That was Friday through Monday. For the last day:

The Mark of the Beast — 666, Part I

How clever: Part I must have left the crowd waiting for the circus' return to town!

Now this was thoughtful—

With so much to peruse, I missed the gem of (precise? symbolic?) scheduling that Clever Sister pointed to—
Yes, the end of the world has long been a favorite of hucksters in the religion biz.

But it wasn't until the 1980s when it began being inserted into politics. And among the many other dubious innovations of his two terms, Reagan became the first president to publicly talk it up.

A couple of quotes from Paul Slansky's The Clothes Have No Emperor:

12/6 [1983] "[Not] until now has there ever been a time in which so many of the prophecies are coming together. There have been times in the past when people thought the end of the world was coming, and so forth, but never anything like this."

10/23 [1984] The Christic Instititute releases a statement from close to 100 religious leaders who find President Reagan's belief in the imminence of Armageddon "profoundly disturbing."

Gore Vidal writes in a 1987 essay, "Armageddon?" (included in his collection, At Home)—

For those, and I am one, who have been mystified by this president's weird indifference to the general welfare at home and the preservation of peace abroad, the most plausible answer has now been given in a carefully documented and deeply alarming book called Prophecy and Politics: Militant Evangelists on the Road to Nuclear War. [Grace Halsell, 1986]

Halsell covers the right-wing evangelicals who were coming to prominence in the 1970s-80s and their Rapture scenario. In the environment of continued Cold War, they rooted for nuclear war to bring about their predictions.

Halsell notes: "A Nielsen survey released in October 1985 shows that 61 million Americans (40 percent of all regular viewers) listen to preachers who tell them that we can do nothing to prevent a nuclear war in out lifetime." But do the 61 million believe what they hear? I suspect that they probably do on the grounds that so little other information gets to them. They are not book-readers (The United States has dropped to twenty-fourth place among book-reading nations); the public educational system has been allowed to deteriorate as public money goes mostly to defense; while television news is simply entertainment and the principal entertainer... is a trained actor who knows very little about anything other than his necessary craft, which is to sell emotions—and Armageddon. But, again, does the salesman believe in the product he sells? Halsell believes that he does.

Vidal goes on to describe the accounts of Reagan's meetings with evangelicals while governor of California in the early 70s. Led by George Otis, a delegation introduced Reagan to The Rapture—and "prophesized" his election to the presidency. A year later, Reagan was gushing to the president of the California senate about the signs of Armageddon, coming soon.

"Very Date Sensitive," indeed—even if this never happens on the date promised.
Instead, they hang on, and on: tax-free and "non-profit."