Matching Tracksuits

“YOUR own future is laid bare, now, in prophecy!” Though intended as a compelling beginning, a startling call for readers to wake up and realize the cold reality they’re facing, almost sixty years later the opening sentence of Herbert Armstrong’s 1975 in Prophecy reads like the dating advertising copy it essentially was.

Written in 1956, it was a centerpiece booklet in his radio ministry. Claiming to have discovered — rather, to have received through divine inspiration — the key to unlocking Biblical prophecy, Armstrong claimed a certain clairvoyance unique among other religious figures. To his credit, he didn’t take credit for it: he was merely an instrument of God. Still, there is a certain headiness in being the one to whom has been revealed a startling truth that, for ages, no one knew.

Prophecies that were closed and sealed tight now stand REVEALED. This mystifying, neglected third of the Bible now becomes plain. Mysteries of God, never before understood, now become crystal-clear. God’s own time for this revealing has come. The KEYS that locked the future have been found.

Hidden prophecies seldom sell if they’re absolutely and completely good. Like those who slow down and crane their necks when passing the scene of an auto accident, we all have a touch of the morbid in us and a suggestion of how bad things are really going to get can be utterly fascinating. This could be even more true in the 1950s, when 1975 in Prophecy first appeared. As the Cold War continually escalated, nuclear war with the Soviet Union seemed a very real possibility. Indeed, it wasn’t so much a question of if it happened but rather when for most Americans. Catastrophe waited in the not-so-distant future, and it was this uncertainty upon which Armstrong built his ministry, and it was with this expected nuclear showdown with the Soviets that Armstrong created his catch, because of course, there was always a catch, according to Armstrong:

But what is actually going to happen is not what the world expects!

Today this world is changing – fast! Unprecedented events are shaking the world already. Yet what we have seen is mild compared to the catastrophic happenings that will rock this world in the near future!

You’ll have to live into these tremendous times. This is YOUR life! You live here, in this erupting world! It behooves you to know what the Creator-RULER of the Universe now makes known!

Armstrong claimed that the United States and Western Europe were in fact the original ten tribes of Israel, supposedly lost to the mists of time. (Jews were only of the two break-away tribes the formed the Kingdom of Judah.) The Germans, though, were an exception: they were the ancient Assyrians, forever battling the Israelites. This battle spilled into the twentieth century, and explained both world wars. It was to be the Germans, not the Soviets, who attacked and conquered America.

Before getting to the bad news, though, and perhaps in an effort to pad the manuscript, Armstrong rehearses all the technological advances of the mid-twentieth century.

Feverishly, science, technology and industry are working to produce a fantastic, push-button world of leisure by 1975. The emphasis today is on “saving steps.” Everything is to be done for us, by machines. Just push the magic button, and your work will be done automatically.

Already automobiles are equipped with push-buttons to shift the gears, raise or lower windows, move the seat forward, backward, up or down.

It’s difficult to look at our current reality, with in-dash GPS, smart phones, and loads of cheap Chinese imports, and not think the advances of the 1950s somehow quaint. In spite of the stresses of the Cold War, there was a certain naivety at the time, on both sides of the Communist-capitalist ideological spectrum. Both sides were sure that their economic model would produce a not-too-far-in-the-future utopia. Francis Spufford recently portrayed this in Red Plenty, a clever, well-researched novel about the hope in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev that the Soviet Union would soon be the envy of the West; Armstrong beat Spufford by fifty years with his visions in 1975 in Prophecy:

In the dream-world MAN is devising for tomorrow, it will no longer be necessary to cook food on stoves. Food is to be cooked by heat waves in packages. You’ll no longer bother taking a bath in a tub or shower. You’ll take an effortless and quicker waterless bath by using supersonic waves! When you pick up your telephone, you’ll see the party at the other end! The new automobiles, the new homes, the new schools are to be truly fantastic. The stores, hotels, and railroad trains will take your breath!

So far, surprisingly close to the reality we experience. Of course the waterless shower never took off — or appeared, as best I can remember — but we have had microwave dinners for over thirty years now while Skype and smart phones make land lines obsolete.

And air travel? Well, already leading air lines have placed multi-million dollar orders for still larger jet planes that will leave New York at 11 in the morning and arrive at Los Angeles by noon. These are under production, now. But what do you suppose air travel will be like by 1975?

For one thing, it is expected that many people will commute in their own private helicopters. Very probably these immense jets now being built will then be obsolete, and we’ll travel in rockets at two or three thousand miles per hour. Think of it! Elapsed flying-time, New York to Los Angeles reduced to one hour! Since it is only 9 A.M. in Los Angeles when it’s noon in New York, we may be flying across the continent, and arriving in Los Angeles two hours before we start! And elapsed flying-time from London to New York will be reduced to 1½ hours! As it is noon in London when it’s only 7 A.M. in New York, we may be flying across the Atlantic and arriving in New York 3½ hours before we start!

Yes, MAN is devising fantastic things!

Unfortunately for Armstrong and the other futurists of the 1950s, their own predictions were among the “fantastic” things, though in their case, it’s meant in the original adjectival form of “fantasy.”

It’s easy to look back on those predictions and mock them. We have the obvious advantage that it’s no longer prophecy but history.

Under Cover in Europe

While America has been focusing its sole attention on its clumsy effort to meet psychological cold-war with antiquated diplomacy and military might, the real number one enemy has been perfecting its plans SECRETLY, UNDER COVER, IN EUROPE!

These plans were laid by Adolph Hitler, during World War II. The methodical Germans took into consideration the possibility they might lose, even as they had lost World War I. This time their plans for coming back and launching World War III were carefully laid before the close of World War II.

The day that war ended, the Nazi organization went underground! Their plans for coming back have been proceeding, under cover, since 1945!

Already Nazis are in many key positions-in German industry – in German education-in the new German ARMY!

In World War I, the Kaiser, allied with Austria, sought to conquer France, Britain and America. American Industry finally beat him. In World War II, Hitler tried to conquer the world, first by taking Austria and the Sudetenland thru diplomatic gangsterism; then second, with lightning-quick war, taking Poland, Denmark and Norway, Holland, Belgium and France; and third, while holding these nations by the throat with his Gestapo, and allied with his junior partner Mussolini, to conquer Russia on the east and Britain on the west. But again, American Industry, three Acts of God, at Dunkirk, El Alamein, and the destruction of the German hydrogen-bomb plant at Peenemuende defeated Hitler.

But this time the Nazis plan to side step the causes of past defeats. Instead of exhausting their own strength by holding European nations as captives at the expense of vital Gestapo man-power, they plan to head and dominate a UNITED STATES OF EUROPE — and add the man-power of those nations to their own military divisions. And secondly, they plan to strike their first blow, NOT at France or Poland in Europe, but with hydrogen bombs by surprise attack on the centers of AMERICAN INDUSTRY!

I suppose with enough imagination, one could imagine in the mid-fifties, only ten years on from World War Two, that the Nazis had somehow managed to regroup and were planning a horrific third attempt at world domination. Such a theory certainly would work well with those still dealing with the consequences of the war, with so many people still dealing with the loss of life and property in the war.

It was this coming cataclysmic doom — famines and pandemics would also accompany the military defeat — that 1975 in Prophecy was using to sell Armstrong’s theology. The booklet came complete with graphic, violent images depicting the coming horrors, called the Great Tribulation in Armstrongian theology.

The man-made horrors would not be enough to cause humanity to repent, Armstrong reasoned, so the natural world would add to the world’s misery with great earthquakes, tidal waves, famines, and pandemics.

Armstrong had Basil Wolverton, a cartoonist who joined Armstrong’s church in 1941, used his typical over-the-top comic style, creating images that disturb not only because of their content but also their style.

When I flipped through the booklet as a kid, I found these images repulsive and fascinating at the same time, not to mention confusing. They were supposed to be depictions of the coming holocaust, but by the time I was flipping through the booklet, it was the mid-eighties and all of this was supposed to have already taken place.

It will be, yet it was supposed to have already been.

And now, forty years later, there are still religious groups that believe Germany at the head of the EU will rise again and conquer the United States. The Philadelphia Church of God, the Restored Church of God, the United Church of God, and the Living Church of God are the three biggest groups holding such beliefs, with dozens of smaller groups professing the same thing. They all insist that this is coming, that Armstrong was ultimately correct, and that these pictures are legitimate depictions of the coming horrors.

I find it difficult to believe that people could be so naive, given the fact that so much of what Armstrong taught has been shown to be false. Most significantly, Armstrongists are in the same situation as Mormons due to advances in DNA testing, which show that both groups’ claims about the ultimate destiny of the so-called Lost Tribes of Israel are radically wrong: there are no Semitic markers in the European population (except, surprisingly, the Jews), thus discounting Armstrong’s theory, and the Native Americans similarly lack such markers, thus disproving Joseph Smith’s theory. Still, these organizations pull in members and money.

Long ago I wrote a letter to one of these organizations only to find out later that my letter was read to the entire church as an example of the horrendous persecution that awaits the leader.

I regret that letter in a sense: it seems like I’m saying at the end that I look forward to the death of the group’s leader, David Pack. Not at all. Even in my most skeptical periods, I would have never have wished death upon someone. What I meant was that I was looking forward to seeing the scramble for power and more interesting the desperate attempt to remold Pack’s statements that he would live to see these prophecies come to pass as something less prophetic than they were, just as Armstrong apologists do with Armstrong’s assurances that it would all be over by 1975. Perhaps I should write again and apologize?