From a distance, Vicki Weaver looked like an angel. One indistinct photograph is all most of us have ever seen of her, and in that image, taken by FBI surveillance, her face is as white as her long dress. She wears her dark hair loose, past her shoulders, and she has crossed her arms against her chest, as if she is distressed. Her family is barely out of frame in their cabin. They are besieged by federal agents on a hill called Ruby Ridge, where a sniper would attempt to shoot her husband, Randy, and struck her instead. Each day is an apocalypse to someone, and on August 22, 1992, it arrived for her. She crumpled to the cabin floor “like a washrag,” Randy said, and her corpse stayed there until it began to decompose. Weaver had become a martyr.

Or so a version of the story goes. The American far right says the federal government declared war on a simple Christian family, who’d retreated to northern Idaho in order to wait out doomsday. There is some truth to this account of the Ruby Ridge standoff, as Chris Jennings reports in his new book on the incident and its afterlife. The Weavers were conspiratorial and heavily armed, but U.S. officials had vastly overestimated the family and only realized the mistake toward the end of the siege. By then, their targets seemed less like a “murderous gang” and “more like a terrified family whose conspiratorial and apocalyptic faith rendered reasonable choices all but impossible,” Jennings explains in End of Days: Ruby Ridge, the Apocalypse, and the Unmaking of America. But federal misconduct is not the only explanation for Ruby Ridge or its importance to the American psyche.

The distinctive power of Ruby Ridge lies in the details, which Jennings carefully teases out in End of Days. The Weavers may be understood best through their ideas. Jennings works backward from QAnon to Ruby Ridge and beyond, to a fundamentalism that reshaped the Christian faith and America with it. In this telling, the Weavers aren’t true anomalies. Although they adopted extreme positions that range from white nationalism to gun-rights obsession and survivalism, they shared their belief in an imminent cataclysm with millions of other people. Some unbelievers might recognize the theme. Armageddon is a pop-culture staple, and so is the Antichrist; Rapture prophecies amuse the internet. At root, though, apocalyptic Christianity is more sadistic than anything Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins imagined in the Left Behind series. The road to Ruby Ridge — and beyond — starts with brutal faith.

If I were a preacher, this is where I would pause, look down at my King James Bible, and turn dramatically to the Book of Revelation. The whore of Babylon originates here, and so does the Antichrist and the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse. Many Christians consider John of Patmos the author of Revelation, but scholars do not agree on this subject or nearly anything else about this brief but strange text. Nobody knows for certain what John meant when he said the great star Wormwood would fall from the heavens and turn a third of the waters bitter. Yet it is impossible to get the Weavers, or much of anything else about America, without first understanding that a lot of people take John very seriously and very literally. When he sees locusts emerge from a bottomless pit in the earth, he is relating the future. There will be a real pit, and it will birth real locusts who have human faces, women’s hair, and lions’ teeth, and they are going to torture real people.

A version of this story convinced me to accept Christ as my savior when I was 5 years old. This is not so unusual. I grew up in the 1990s and early 2000s, when Armageddon........

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