The Book of Revelation, The X-Files, and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion
https://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1424&context=consensus
Harry O. Maier
Associate Professor of New Testament Studies
Vancouver School of Theology


Entertainment and the End of Politics

Scenario One
Special FBI agents Dana Scully and Fox Mulder enter a large
underground room in a top-secret GS Intelligence building.
In it they discover row upon row of filing cabinets as far as the
 eye can see. Each one is filled with tens of thousands of cards. On each
I card is the name of a GS citizen and the date and place of his elementary school vaccinations, coinciding roughly with the suspected crash of an alien spaceship at Roswell Airforce Base shortly after WW 11. With each card is a slide with a sample of blood. Irrefutable proof of what Mulder has been telling Scully all along: the GS government has been engaged in a covert scheme to inject each citizen with a secret chemical agent designed, Mulder hypothesises, to make them more susceptible to social control as part of a grand scheme involving a to-thedeath-battle with extraterrestrials. Gntil now the government has been successful in its ability to dupe the American public. Mulder, however, intends to blow its cover and reveal the lies and deception of the GS government

 Scenario Two
Neo Anderson is seated before Mopheus, an undercover agent who believes that Neo is “The Chosen One”, the one destined to save human civilisation. But first Neo must choose whether he wants to learn “the truth” or not. Mopheus offers him the choice between taking a blue pill or a red pill. The former will return him to his daily life and he will forget ever meeting Mopheus. The red pill offers him the promise of revelation.

Neo chooses the latter and thereby sees the truth masked behind what he had mistaken for reality. He sees that what humankind believes is reality is in fact an illusion fabricated by a powerful computer programme called “The Matrix”. Although it appears to be 1999, in truth it is the Century and humans are farmed to feed a machine in control of theearth. Neo is the Chosen One destined to make the Matrix crash and to free humankind from its servitude to illusory “reality”. Following a crash course in learning to discern fact from fiction, Neo enters the Matrix where he battles computer simulations of FBI agents (virtual bodyguards of the“The Operating System”). An apocalyptic battle ensues and Neo Anderson proves himself the long-promised Messiah, the “New Son of Man” his name coincidentally denotes, the one to free the world from its slavery to the illusion of virtual reality.

These are the cultural stepchildren of the Book of Revelation. Apocalypse of course literally means “uncovering”. Each of our scenarios treat its audience to a privileged uncovering of a secret alleged to be hidden by everyday reality. Like John of Patmos who travels to heaven to report the contents of a revelation uncovered by the breaking of a seven-sealed
scroll (Revelation 5: 1-6:1), hit-TV show X-File characters Scully and Mulder, as well as Matrix film characters Neo Anderson and Mopheus offer their audiences revelatory journeys to break the seals of secrecy.

Recent studies have scrutinized the role of the Apocalypse in shaping cultural expectations in these last years leading up to a new millennium. For example, Mark Kingswell’s Dreams of Millennium: Report From a Culture on the Brink (Toronto: Viking, 1996) and the consciousness and expectations of western European societies.

 Eugen Weber’s Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults and Millennial Beliefs through the Ages (Toronto: Random, 1999; the content of the Barbara Frum Lecture Series broadcast by the CBC in Spring, 1999) offer thumbnail sketches of the role of the Book of Revelation in shapinges, even in their most secular forms. 

These studies excellently show how millennial thinking borrowed from the Apocalypse has dominated western views of progress and social ideals. Not noted, however, is the degree to which it has provided millennial themes with a counterpoint of suspicion. The Marxist class-free worker’s Paradise of an inevitable historical dialectic discovers its tonality in the hymns of the vindicated saints of Revelation 19:6-8 and the final four chapters of the Apocalypse. So does the Nazi Thousand Year Reich. But it is suspicion that furnishes these political philosophies with their dissonant melodies. Marx insisted he was unveiling the true economic processes at work in the bourgeois construction of ideology.


The National Socialists claimed to uncover a Marxist-Jewish conspiracy to destroy the German race. Ronald Reagan’s depiction of America, “The City on the Hill” pitted against the intrigues of “The Evil Empire” of the Soviet Union, provided the rationale for the largest build-up of mili- tary arms in recorded history. Suspicion makes these theories powerfully captivating; paranoia is especially immune to disconfirmation since every attempt to prove it unwarranted can always be turned around as a subtle temptation from the enemy to drop one’s guard. It is to these apocalyptic modulations of suspicion that our two scenarios sketched above join in chorus.