Jogging again through the convoluted housing development near my parents' place, I passed a parked car with a yellow bumper sticker I've seen before:

"WARNING: In the event of Rapture, this car will be unmanned." This is hardly a new example of born-again wit, of course. And it's been dutifully mocked in turn ("When the Rapture comes, can I have your car?"), which is not what I propose to do here.

Christian fundamentalism, particularly in its St. John of Patmos mode, with its Rapture and its Beast, its diabolical Antichrist and its UPC-code Marks, has always been a particularly attractive target of scorn among the geek set in which I've spent so much of my time. The ostensible reason for this is that the whole thing is just so preposterous and silly, routinely pitching to the young nerd obliging slow pitches with which to practice his or her argumentative swing. Serve up Biblical authority as the linchpin to a non-churchgoing eighth-grader with a penchant for reading and computers, and you're going to get whacked right out of the park. (Not that the Christian in the transaction sees this as what's happening at all -- but the experience is rewarding to the Agnostic-in-Training).

But to see the apocalyptic Christian mythos as one which your average sci-fi reading youngster simply opposes is perhaps to overlook a potentially more profound thing which fundamentalists offer up: an incredibly detailed, deliciously scary imaginative vision of the future. When I see a sticker like the one above, my spine tingles in a way that the X-Files, at its best, could only approximate. Like a lot of kids growing up in the South who don't come from a fundamentalist family, my first exposure to the whole narrative of the Rapture, Armageddon and the Second Coming was roughly synchronous with my reading of Tolkien and Susan Cooper, and only a year or so prior to my exposure to the world of fantasy role-playing games. I began to notice and quietly read the pamphlets that were on the coffee tables of several school friends' families.

The apocalyptic fantasy of good and evil in a secret, preparatory battle which will then culminate in a superheroic struggle characterized by the clouds opening up, people flying around, monstrous dystopic one-world governments imposing their will, angels and evil wizards in battle, is a pretty captivating one, and it's surprising that more of your swords-and-sorcery types don't acknowledge its pre-eminence as an American myth of redemptive destruction and hidden, transformative significance. In the world of apocalyptic fantasy, the ordinary world is a rather drab veil over the exciting landscape of a struggle both spiritual and material. Harry Potter, for all his appeal, doesn't face anything like the multitude of adventures that an ordinary Christian must undertake to survive in this Jerry Bruckheimer-esque version of Pilgrim's Progress. That's a hook that's been captured shrewdly by a few insightful creators from both the believing and the atheist camps.

Running past that bumpersticker on a manicured street that remains, whenever I am there, almost empty of people (no children at play in the yards, no one washing their car in the driveway: the lawns of Northern Virginia are more for display than for use), I feel a delicious and tangible chill. Somewhere a secret fraternity plots the rise of Antichrist. Somewhere else a dedicated Biblical scholar races against the clock to master the coded significance of the vision of St. John and predict the terrifying events to come. God bides His triune time, waiting for precisely the right moment to press [ENTER] and run the ENDOFTHEWORLD.EXE program.

The adolescent contours of such fantasy are for me a nostalgic distraction from the really scary shit that is happening now, which fits into no myth, and can't be dismissed with mockery. And of course, the horrible irony isn't lost on me: part of the problem in today's global nightmare is the way these myths (or very similar narratives) are considered, by people both elsewhere and in our own goverment, more like an advance copy of next week's Times than a lost episode of Buffy. More's the pity.