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 was an obsession for millions of Christians. Our church library stocked Left Behind and later, its YA spinoff, because postpubescent children are still subject to God’s judgment. I recall watching A Thief in the Night in our gym, and I knew, or thought I did, that the Antichrist would guillotine his enemies. Our youth group once set the events of Revelation to a series of interpretive hand motions. Although church history is pockmarked with millenarian movements and warnings of the end, the explosive growth of Christian media in the 1970s and ’80s ushered in a new and lurid era.

In the early 1970s, Randy and Vicki Weaver began family life just as “the volume of prophecy-oriented” films, books, and pamphlets available to them “was something new,” Jennings writes. Key texts like Hal Lindsey’s best-selling The Late Great Planet Earth based their predictions, in part, on “dispensationalism,” a theological system that assumes a literal interpretation of Bible prophecy and divides history into distinctive ages. Long before Lindsey, there was John Nelson Darby, a 19th-century Protestant theologian who belonged to the Plymouth Brethren movement. Darby popularized dispensationism, making him one of the most important and possibly least-understood influences on American Evangelicalism. There are few Brethren assemblies left, but my parents attended several before I was born, and I knew more about Darby than I ever did about the Backstreet Boys. As Jennings writes, Darby popularized “a pseudo-empirical” for “understanding world events” through the lens of biblical prophecy, and that is an accurate description. Dispensationalists love a chart. One of my exams for a college Bible course required me to fill out a timeline of the end-times, placing each apocalyptic event in a precise order. There are variations on dispensationalism, but mine was premillennial and mirrored Darby’s, which meant that history moves in a straight line and unfolds in seven dispensations, or epochs. We live somewhere toward the end of the sixth dispensation, meaning Christ could Rapture all believers from the earth at any moment. After that, the Antichrist will rule for a set period, and humanity will suffer unspeakable horrors.

Before the End comes, there will be signs, like natural disasters or peace in the Middle East. As a teenager, I searched the news for evidence of the Antichrist, likely a charismatic man from somewhere in Europe. (LaHaye and Jenkins nominated Romania.) I thought Russia would be a good fit for either Gog or Magog, the wicked kingdoms who will oppose Christ in the final battle of Armageddon.The Weavers reached a similar conclusion decades earlier, about the USSR. Jennings writes that the “slide into conspiracism looks like a descent: down the rabbit hole; off the deep end; deeper and deeper into the darkness of unreason,” at least from outside. “From within, it feels like the opposite, a journey upward into the clear light of truth, like the angel’s-eye view of history offered by prophecy,” he adds. There is always more to uncover. The Weavers kept diving.

Soon the Weavers moved away from Darby and mainstream fundamentalism into a netherworld that most Christians do not visit. They discovered ZOG, or Zionist Occupied Government, an antisemitic conspiracy theory that says a Jewish cabal controls the U.S. ZOG does not appear in the Bible, and that is a question of fact, not interpretation. Jennings describes a steady radicalization as the family insulated themselves from a world of apostates. They left a conservative Baptist church in Iowa, their birthplace, and began meeting with like-minded neighbors on their own. Soon their beliefs resembled Christian Identity, an ideology that manipulates scripture to condemn “race-mixing” ahead of an apocalyptic race war. The Weavers relocated to northern Idaho amid a wave of white-nationalist and anti-government activity in the region. Idaho attracted the family partly because of the state’s reluctance to regulate homeschooling. Vicki could — and did — sequester her children on Ruby Ridge with few external influences. The neo-Nazi preacher Richard Butler founded the Aryan Nations compound not far from Ruby Ridge, and the Weavers attended meetings on the property.

A certain apocalyptic logic structures much of white nationalism. Jennings argues that The Turner Diaries, a 1978 novel that depicts a merciless uprising of Christian whites against a nation of race traitors, “tells a lightly updated version” of the timeline “laid down in Revelation: decline > cabal > bloodfest > paradise.” Indeed, the Diaries are lurid and culminate in the Day of the Rope, or the mass execution of political enemies. The book is a retributive fantasy at the core, and so is Revelation.

The famous horsemen of the apocalypse arrive in the sixth chapter of Revelation. John says the rider of the final horse will kill a fourth of the world’s population, with sword and famine and pestilence, and “by the wild beasts of the Earth.” As a child, I wanted to know more about this horse — and its rider, and his purpose. Why kill a fourth of the human race? Why not a third? Half? Why did God want to destroy anyone at all?

The answers, as I learned them, dealt mostly with sin. In theory, God is our judge, not the individual Christian, but the doctrine lends itself easily to political and personal disputes. Premillennial dispensationalists were prone to a “circular logic” in the 19th century, the scholar Matthew Avery Sutton writes in American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism. Because they could not persuade all Christians to adopt their beliefs, they decided that dissent must be another sign of pending doom. Premillennialists “explained first that in the last days a great apostasy away from true theology would occur,” Sutton adds, and “since large numbers of people denied that premillennialism was true, the apostasy must be under way.” The doctrine accumulated partisan baggage over time. As Sutton notes, LaHaye wrote a book citing “wars, rumors of wars, global travel, increased knowledge, growing labor-capital conflicts, homosexuality, Israel’s statehood, and the creation of the UN” as evidence of our doom, decades before he dropped Left Behind into American public life.

As Jennings puts it, “The notion that evil elites are pulling the strings in the runup to Armageddon is built into the eschatology of millions of American Protestants.” Enter the Weavers and their white-nationalist phantasmagoria. Everything was a sign. Everyone could be an enemy. The end was always coming, over the next hill with the next dawn. Because it never arrived, no one could disprove its existence. When Randy Weaver sold two illegal shotguns to a federal informant, the family decided that tribulation was upon them at last.

There is, Jennings writes, “a special misfortune to become a stand-in — for your private suffering to become a metonym for some larger phenomenon.” In the case of Ruby Ridge, it might also be unavoidable. The Weaver family achieved a special status in the far-right firmament before the siege was even over. White nationalists from the Aryan Nations mingled with militia members and worried neighbors on a road near the property, and that gathering would spawn another in Colorado, organized by a Christian Identity leader. Less than a year after Vicki Weaver collapsed to the floor of her cabin, the Waco siege would energize militants once again. The 25th anniversary of Ruby Ridge arrived in 2017, not long after Donald Trump first took office on the wings of a radicalized right wing. In an interview with ABC News at the time, the white nationalist Jared Taylor called the siege “an outrage” akin to Waco, “an extraordinary example” of “overweaning federal power.” Martyrdom has broad appeal, and it is particularly vital to apocalyptic fantasies. The heroes of Left Behind aren’t believers who disappear in the Rapture, but the Tribulation Force, whose members convert later and fight the Antichrist until the end.

Jennings has written an unsettling book. He is right to link Ruby Ridge and its modern-day consequences to the prevalence of apocalyptic Christianity, and he avoids easy solutions, which is wise because they do not exist. As the FBI learned in 1992, it is one thing to shoot a woman in the head and quite another to shoot an idea out of human consciousness. Jennings writes, at one point, that it “hardly makes sense” to call dispensationalists “paranoid” because they take their faith seriously, and I must disagree. The doctrine is paranoid, and it attracts the paranoid, to whom it promises eternal domination and the eradication of their foes. If the kingdoms of Gog and Magog must exist some day, they must have predecessors somewhere on earth, and they must be enemies of the true religion. Outside those basic parameters, the kingdoms are so nebulous that they can become whatever a believer wants them to be. The doctrine offers the appearance of rigor and ultimate truth without demanding any discomfort or disquiet from those who believe. There are other ways to interpret the Bible and different ways to be Christian; this one persists because it is so damnably satisfying.

Perhaps that’s why the Antichrist is everywhere these days. I find him in places I never expected him to appear. Peter Thiel is not an Evangelical, but he is fixed on doomsday and says the Antichrist will rise soon. Usually the Antichrist is whoever and whatever he most dislikes, defined as some threat to his personal power. The wealthy are building bunkers and prepping for something ominous. Sometimes the apocalypse is a bit more tangible. After Vance Boelter killed two Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota last year, he told his wife to “prepare for war.” Reports described his Christian belief in a spiritual conflict that pits the allies of Satan against the servants of God.

The Christianity I knew is mutating into something else, even if the violence at its heart is the same. The scholar Matthew D. Taylor says a “victorious eschatology” or theology of the end is becoming preeminent, and it gives believers permission “to fight like (and against) hell to bring God’s kingdom to the earth.” No one wants to wait anymore. They would rather take the war straight to the enemy so they can grind him under their boots. For many on the right, the government has become a means to an end and its agents a tool of divine justice. Jennings concludes that “some measure of shared reality is a civic necessity,” and the events of Ruby Ridge illustrate “what can happen when a group of people live within myths that cannot be reconciled with life in an ever-changing society or the slow, hard work of democratic governance.” If Vicki Weaver were still alive, she might understand what he means.

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