Colorado Springs, Colorado, December, 2077, Saturday…
The megachurch was located in what was once a covered football stadium. They had constructed a rambling two-story building on one side where the administration of Brother Ashford's megaministry was carried out.
Ralph Ashford's pedigree as a dedicated Southern Baptist was as good as it could be. Before the turn of the century, Great grandpa Ashford had been very active in the Southern Baptist Convention, helping to engineer its takeover by pious Texans in the 1980s.
A lot of water under the bridge since then. From his office window Ralph looked out over the empty parking lots which would all fill come Sunday. We've come a long way. How far can we go? Great grandpa had preached the fire and brimstone of the Old Testament and the coming Armageddon of the New. He had known the Bible backwards and forwards. He would always have the right chapter and verse to support his opinions, although he sometimes had to do some creative editing from time to time to fit them into his sermons. A whole line of Ashfords had honed his technique to perfection.
Ralph knew the basic outline of his next sermon already. This one was to be about Armageddon. It was an easy one to give and the faithful loved it.
The belief in Armageddon was older than Great grandpa Ashford, though. It could mostly be traced to a defrocked Anglican priest, John Nelson Darby, who visited the US eight times during the 1860s and 70s, ultimately gaining more adherents in the New World than he had in the old as religious zealots at the beginning of the 21st century actively proclaimed his message. A multimedia barrage of books, tapes, and DVDs made the propagators of that message rich and power brokers in turn-of-the-century politics.
What Darby had proclaimed and others embellished was the story of an Earth in turmoil now in the last of seven periods or dispensations that will end with the rapture of true believers suddenly pulled into the sky to be with Christ. Next follows the seven-year tribulation, when the satanic antichrist will arise in Europe and seize world power. At its end Christ and his armies will triumph in a great battle in Har-Megiddo, near Haifa in what is now Israel. From Jerusalem Christ will proclaim the start of a one-thousand year reign of peace.
