Woke Up Wanting to See the World Burn Down
by Joe Bartzel
Voiny Apokalipsika (Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse) by Viktor Vasnetsov, oil on canvas, 1887.
Apocalypse is a concept that has been central to my understanding of the Christian worldview for as long as I can remember. While I was growing up, my father taught Sunday school at the predominantly and historically black Missionary Baptist church we attended. For him, the eschaton (or End Times) constituted the culmination of the meaning and hope of the Christian message. Both in his Sunday school classes and at home, when it came to interpreting the events described in the bible’s apocalyptic literature, he emphasized the importance of strict adherence to dispensational premillennialism—the view that the End Times will occur in stages, with Jesus returning for a literal thousand-year reign on earth before inaugurating the eternal “new heavens and new earth” promised at the end of the Book of Revelation. I suspect I never really did adopt the dispensational premillennialist outlook myself (partly because, even when I was a child, its convoluted timeline struck me as outlandish, but also partly because I could never keep that timeline completely straight in my head). Nevertheless, something about my father’s preoccupation with the End Times has undoubtedly stuck with me through the years. Though I may not be a believer in the secret rapture, the Great Tribulation or Satan’s little season, apocalypse remains firmly fixed in my mind as a lens for understanding the world. For dispensational premillennialists and the rest of us alike, of course, this work of making sense of the world around us is exactly what the concept of apocalypse has always done.
I was moved to think about apocalypse once again recently when I watched remarks delivered by Atlanta rapper Killer Mike at a press conference convened on May 29, 2020, by Atlanta’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, after a night of nationwide unrest in response to the police killing of George Floyd via asphyxiation in Minneapolis a few days prior. Killer Mike might be an unexpected figure to weigh in on the apocalypse, given that he has been an outspoken critic of Christianity. In “New Jesus,” the fourth episode of his Netflix series Trigger Warning with Killer Mike, he contends that Christianity has been harmful to the black community in the United States. In particular, he sets his critical sights on a propensity that he sees in Christianity to foster among black Americans both a condition of dependency and a tendency to look outside ourselves and our own communities for uplift and deliverance from the forces that repress us. As I listened to his remarks at the May 29 press conference, though, his comments there struck me as continuous with his critique of Christianity, as well as suggestive of an alternative eschatological path for those aspiring to dismantle systems of anti-black oppression in the United States.
“I’m mad. As. Hell,” Killer Mike intoned in his comments at the Atlanta press conference, his words interspersed with pauses to drive home his anger, continuing with rhythmic thumps on the lectern that punctuated the words at the end of his next sentence: “I woke up wanting to see the world burn down yesterday because I’m tired of seeing black men die.” What leads one man to want to see the world burn down, and countless others to start the fires of destruction and dissent? The Book of Revelation suggests a reason for the enduring appeal of visions of the fiery end of the world. New Testament scholar Allen D. Callahan notes that the text’s author, John (sometimes called John the Revelator or the Seer), found himself in a Roman imperial social world at the end of the first century CE where state terror and domination by the rich over the poor were the norm. John and the communities of Jesus followers to whom he wrote, his text suggests, were personally acquainted with the Roman Empire’s cruelty. The Roman Empire, Callahan writes, “was a world whose principals were monsters, and its power was extraordinary. More and less than human, it was inhuman and anti-human.” As far as the dispensing of cruelty was concerned, those atop the Roman hierarchy had honed the instruments of imperial power into a well-oiled machine. Against that backdrop, Callahan notes, John “knew better than to try to persuade power that had perfected the art of persuasion, and he would not waste his time calling for its reform.” Instead, in the Book of Revelation, John wrote an end to that world. In Callahan’s words, “John knew that for the sake of justice his world could not be rehabilitated. It could only be incinerated.”
It was not just his own Roman imperial world that John’s pen condemned and consigned to apocalyptic flames, though, Callahan argues. Instead, according to Callahan, “in all the ways that truly matter, John’s world … is very much our own”: As the continued plight of African Americans demonstrates, the powerless in our society are still oppressed, murdered and dominated by the powerful, just as their counterparts in the Roman Empire were nearly two millennia ago. Thus, when Killer Mike announces that he “woke up wanting to see the world burn down,” we hear in these words the same judgment that John pronounced over his world—viz., that our world too is beyond incremental reform and beyond the reach of moral persuasion, and the only remaining viable course of action is its incineration.
As he gives voice to that apocalyptic impulse, though, Killer Mike immediately confronts his listeners with a sobering reminder that taking to the streets to enact apocalyptic destruction lacks the makings of a truly viable political program: On the one hand, in his statement that he too “woke up wanting to see the world burn down,” we can clearly hear that he understands the appeal of apocalyptic thinking and even feels its pull himself, going on to explain that “that’s why children are burning [businesses] to the ground: They don’t know what else to do.” Even so, he implores his listeners, “it is your duty not to burn your own house down for anger with an enemy.” However suitable it may be for burning the world down, Killer Mike suggests, the all-too-understandable apocalyptic impulse toward once-and-for-all destruction is less useful in the important work of building the world that comes next.
“I hate I can’t fix it in a snap,” Killer Mike says regarding the historic and systemic structures that continue to marginalize black Americans. In John the Seer’s apocalyptic vision, by contrast, after the all-consuming flames have thoroughly incinerated the previous social order, God delivers a New Jerusalem directly from heaven, replacing the char and ash that those flames leave behind with a ready-made new social order whose arrival means that all wrongs are instantly and permanently made right. That’s quite the fix in a snap, and yet Killer Mike’s comments remind his listeners that we cannot expect a New Jerusalem—or a New Atlanta—to descend from the heavens via special delivery. Here the intuitive appeal of the apocalyptic yields to Killer Mike’s critique of Christianity and its promises to bring deliverance to black Americans through others’ hands. “If we lose Atlanta,” he asks instead, “what else we got?”
“After it burns,” Killer Mike asks, “will we be left with char, or will we rise like a phoenix out of the ashes [like] Atlanta has always done?” In this choice between rubble on the one hand and rebirth on the other, Killer Mike suggests two eschatological paths: The first burns only physical buildings and leaves in its wake nothing but char and ash. Rather than simply seeing businesses torched, though, he assures his listeners, “we wanna see the system that sets up for systemic racism burnt to the ground.” That second variety of eschatological event, however—the kind that burns systemic and institutional structures rather than mere physical ones—is not the sort that is accomplished in a single night. The path toward its realization, instead, is encapsulated in the plea that Killer Mike makes to his listeners no less than five times in the course of his eight-minute remarks: Plot, plan, strategize, organize and mobilize.
In calling for racist systems to be burned to the ground, Killer Mike maintains an eschatological focus, calling as he does for a definitive end to the existing social world and institutional order. At the same time, though, his call to plot, plan, strategize, organize and mobilize shifts the horizon on which that eschatological event occurs, from the transcendent (i.e., the other-worldly) to the immanent (the this-worldly). Numerous Christian theological traditions affirm the eschaton as an event enacted not by God but by human beings ourselves, with its promises realized not in another world or an afterlife but in the here and now. As Killer Mike proposes the possibility of his hometown of Atlanta rising like a phoenix out of the ashes of destruction, he echoes the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words in “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” his final speech delivered in Memphis on April 3, 1968, the night before his assassination: “It’s all right to talk about the New Jerusalem, but one day God’s preacher must talk about the new New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee.”
“20200529-_DSC8322” by Hungryogrephotos is licensed under CC0 1.0 (public domain)
As King’s words demonstrate, many African American Christian traditions in particular emphasize casting apocalyptic imagery as a call to action in transforming the social systems of this world and this life, and not merely a promise of individual reward in the next. African American Christianity is hardly alone in this regard. The twentieth century German Catholic political theologian Johann Baptist Metz, for instance, contends that the eschatological hope of Christian faith constitutes “a critical liberating imperative for our times,” insisting that the eschatological promises “must ‘make’ their truth; for their truth must be ‘done.’” Thus, for the theologian who immanentizes the eschaton, victory over the forces of oppression and violence is hard won by the work of the faithful on earth, not delivered from above in the ultimate deus ex machina. Still, the apocalyptic hope—Killer Mike’s hope—that we will see the institutions that perpetuate systemic racism burned to the ground remains: The eschatological promise that God is on the side of those who fight against systems of oppression may not guarantee victory at any point in the perilous steps along the way, but it does continuously renew those who fight for justice with the strength and will to stay in the battle. And Killer Mike’s words contain the accelerants with which those who heed his call can burn down the structures of systemic oppression and make the eschatological promises true: Plot, plan, strategize, organize and mobilize.
Apocalypse is a specter that has hung over the world for millennia. At my own wedding just a few years ago, the service that my wife and I wrote was a celebration of marriage as the immanent fulfillment of the eschatological promises of Jesus’s proclamation of the Empire of God—complete with readings from, and preaching about, the Book of Revelation, along with a recession set to what is indisputably the greatest musical adaptation of Revelation ever recorded (Genesis’s 1972 progressive rock epic “Supper’s Ready”). For many, apocalypse remains a source of hope that oppression and injustice will one day be overthrown and replaced by the realization of a community characterized by freedom, justice, dignity and equality. In the hands of other theologians, apocalypse has been more about payback and exclusion than it is about justice. Apocalypse can be as frightening and confounding to many as it was to me as a child, and no doubt the fact that it often is scary and confusing is part of why it remains endlessly fascinating. Its enduring power, though, resides in its most decidedly immanent feature: viz., that we mortals can—and do—decide its meaning for ourselves as each new generation encounters the changing realities of the world around us.
I am grateful to Jon Trerise for bringing Killer Mike’s remarks to my attention,
and to Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Constance Furey and Cooper Harriss for comments on previous drafts of this essay.
Joe Bartzel is a Visiting Research Fellow at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. He received a PhD in religious studies from Indiana University in 2019, and is a recipient of the Social Science Research Council’s Religion, Spirituality and Democratic Renewal Fellowship, in support of research on racial reconciliation and the memorialization of racial unrest and racial tragedy in the United States.