Uninhabited Lands

When Empire Becomes Prophecy

by Will James

I’ve been thinking a lot about empire and decolonization recently. This underlying aspect of deconstruction is often overlooked. To fully understand your worldview, you have to ask how the culture you live in has shaped and likely distorted it. Our interpretations are always filtered through our own limited perspectives. That is not inherently bad unless you fail to realize those limits.

Limitations that allowed for genocides, the dehumanization of mass people groups through the institution and maintenance of slavery, rampant misogyny, or any other injustice the Bible has been used to prop up or defend. For instance, we should be aware of how the Christianity we have was brought here by empire and conquest, and they interpreted the Bible as their divine manifest for empire and conquest.

In the wake of both Trump administrations, I’ve seen more people begin the work of decolonization. They’ve sat in churches they’ve attended for decades and watched American nationalism push their pastors and fellow members to say strange, dangerous things. I get it. Seeing racism or ‘otherisms’ wrapped in biblical language should give us pause, but we shouldn’t stop digging so close to the surface.

Not all remnants of empirical thinking involve blasphemy or direct hate from the pulpit. The most insidious ideas are woven deeper into the fabric. They become embedded in theological footnotes, hidden from prominent rhetoric. The “otherism” becomes a link in the chain holding our certainty together.

What if your end-time theology only worked because it erased the people group who were here before you? In Adventism and other denominations built along similar prophetic frameworks, the intent was to critique empire. It is beastly. However, the foundations paradoxically affirm empire. They do so by reading American colonial expansion as prophetic fulfillment, not empirical conquest.

Adventism is one denomination where we read Apocalyptic Scripture both literally and figuratively, meaning, none of the symbols are literal, there are no dragons or weird seven headed beasts coming out of anywhere, but every symbol is a figure of something literal and everything those symbols do will be literally done. In Adventism, there is a belief that the United States of America was a clearly predicted global superpower referenced in the Book of Revelation. The Beast of Revelation 13.

It takes some biblical gymnastics and a metric ton of assumptions stacked like drunken Jenga to get there, and if any piece jostles, the whole tower starts to collapse. The basic idea is that Daniel and Revelation collectively mention four beasts that all come out of the sea, which many stages and denominations of Christianity have believed represent the successive old-world empires of Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome.

That list is already contested as ‘Medo-Persia’ is a historical compromise made only by those who look to read these prophecies as extending into our modern world as some ancestral remnant of fallen Rome. However, the Medes and the Persians are two distinct empires. That would be even more true and evident if you were living through these conquests. ONLY scholars who choose to read the book of Daniel as having to reach forward in time to predict the rise of Rome combine the Medes and the Persians into “Medio-Persia.” They must cram 5 empires into a vision of 4 (Daniel 2 and 7). But I digress.

In Revelation, there is a beast with characteristics of the three prior beasts, which Adventism (and presumably many others) teaches represents Papal Rome. Then, in chapter 13, one final beast is said to look like a lamb but speak like a dragon. Most importantly, it is said to come out of the earth. It is the only beast that is said to come from the earth.

Pastors love finding ways all the descriptors of this beast in Revelation 13 clearly reference America and could only reference America, but the most common and convincing clue is that Revelation 17 talks about a prostitute sitting by a sea and an angel says “the water you saw are Peoples, multitudes, and nations.”

Now, the scene in Revelation 17 with the woman by the many waters is its own scene. It is not an extension of the scene in Revelation 13 of a beast coming out of the sea. In fact, the revelator is told to “come with” the angel, and he is taken to a different place in Revelation 13.

Despite this, the theory goes that a beast coming from the earth must be the opposite of a beast that came from the sea. It can’t be simply that it arises from somewhere else; it must be something representative of the opposite of the many waters the woman sat by.

It must come from a place without people, multitudes, and nations. Uninhabited lands. Now, for obvious reasons, over the years that has been massaged into meaning “scarcely populated” instead of unpopulated, but don’t get it twisted, the clear assertion here is that the America’s were not populated until around the 1700s after “enough” Europeans showed up.

Now, I don’t want you to simply take my word on that, so here’s what Ellen G. White wrote about this in The Great Controversy, so no one can say this isn’t a thought structured into Adventism:

“The beast with lamblike horns was seen “coming up out of the earth.” Instead of overthrowing other powers to establish itself, the nation thus represented must arise in territory previously unoccupied and grow up gradually and peacefully.”

Then she says this points “unmistakably to the United States of America.”

I’ll give you that the Americas were likely “less” populated than Europe and the Middle East in 1492, but knowing for sure is impossible because the Christians that showed up on these shores committed a genocide against the various Indigenous groups across the continent. However, I believe scholarly estimates are somewhere around 60 million people in the Americas compared to Europe with around 77-88 million.

Now, I’ll give you that there’s a lot more land in the Americas than Europe, but let’s talk about the multiple layers of erasure employed in the concept Ellen White proffered:

1. She appears to be arguing that in God’s eyes and the Revelator’s eyes, the people that were here before the Europeans arrived didn’t count as a population of people.

   
   

2. She ignores the many clans, tribes, languages, and cultures that existed on this land, which are no less different from the French and the German. No different from a Palestinian and an Israeli or any other distinct peoples who share land but not an identity.

   
   

3. She is showing that God respects the governments and societal divisions of the Europeans as distinguishing them into Multitudes and Nations, but not so for the Western Hemisphere.

   
   

4. She whitewashes the many genocides of up to 90% of these populations like the faceless masses of “itites” and “anites” in the first testament who stood in Ancient Israel’s path.

   
   

5. She somehow did not count that vast violence as “overthrowing” other powers to establish itself.”

   
   

6. She claims the American experiment grew peacefully, an adjective that neither describes the tales captured in the Old Testament, nor the history of this nation.

   
   

7. She completely ignores her own logic. The nation that arose here as the United States is not a mysterious new nation from an uninhabited land. It is an extension of the empires that would have come from the sea. If Babylon, the Medes, Persia, Greece and Rome were beasts from the sea, it is their descendants that traversed the ocean and stopped paying their taxes.

   
   

Had the indigenous groups sailed to European or South Asian shores and overthrown the dominant empire, maybe, but that is not what happened.

America did not arise from empty land. America fought its own parents for independence after taking something that wasn’t its own. The United States didn’t hold off an invading empire; it was the invading empire. If the native people of the Americas had sailed the ocean and settled in the Middle East, this theory would make sense.

This hermeneutic does little more than attempt to baptize European empirical expansion.

How often do we stop and think about what our beliefs mean in addition to what we admit out loud? How often does the Adventist consider the erasure that this belief in “uninhabited land” attempts? Not often, but it is fundamental to its interpretation of prophecy, and it’s an incorrect conclusion based on racist, revisionist, and nationalist logic.

The simplest solution would be to say, ‘coming from the earth’ just meant ‘arising from some place else, somewhere foreign, or even that it meant returning from land previously unknown. With those interpretations, Adventism and similar interpretive trees could keep their manifest destiny claims if they so chose. But they haven’t adopted them. To change the conclusions would be to admit a flaw in the foundations. These systems would have to face the fact that their hermeneutics employed racist, dehumanizing thoughts. Not only that, but these thoughts and the dehumanizing way you’ve been taught to interpret them were established with the help of God’s last inspired messenger.

Adventism can’t adjust this ‘uninhabited lands’ theory because Ellen White spoke on it. To call her wrong in her biblical interpretation, even though it wouldn’t necessarily change the Adventist conclusion, would mean her inspired writings contained errors. Not errors about something insignificant, but errors of prophetic interpretation.

Simultaneously, to claim it is not error is to argue that God showed John a vision utilizing the racist ideals of Ellen’s day as the key to unlocking the metaphor from John’s day. It’s to argue that the Spirit of God is as dismissive of unfamiliar cultures as Christopher Columbus?

I am uncomfortable with that. I’m uncomfortable with a god that arbitrarily dehumanizes whole people groups just to paint a still confusing picture.

I am uncomfortable with a God that would see nothing but fertile land for the European when He crafted these shores; a god that placed a culture here to tend and care for the land until His chosen nation arrived.

He sounds too much like the God that saw nothing but beasts of labor on Africa’s shores.

I don’t believe in either of those gods.

No loving God anointed the birth of this nation by authorizing the atrocities committed against the indigenous peoples of this nation.

The Empire simply empired.