American Apocalypse: never-ending predictions that the world is about to end.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Culture and Reviews

IN HIS 1702 opus Magnalia Christi Americana, the prominent Puritan Cotton Mather related a story about Francis Higginson, the first minister to serve the citizens of Salem, Massachusetts. Before Higginson sailed to New England in 1629, Mather wrote, he preached one last sermon to his old congregation in Leicester. The Lord, it seemed, was preparing a punishment for England. A war was coming, and Leicester in particular was going to suffer. So Higginson was heading across the sea to seek shelter in a place where God's people could build a more holy commonwealth, a place safe from the destruction to come. The colonists, he concluded, were following the advice of Christ: "When you see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then flee to the mountains."

Mather wrote those words long after the English civil war that saw Leicester besieged and sacked. Skeptics might suspect him of inventing or exaggerating a story that made a fellow Puritan look prophetic. But the idea that America could serve as refuge from an Old World apocalypse was not limited to the perhaps-apocryphal story of Higginson's final preachment.

John Winthrop, an early governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, declared that "God hath provided this place to be a refuge for many whome he meanes to save out of the generall callamity." William Bradford, an early governor of Plymouth, cited "the divine proverb, that a wise man seeth the plague when it cometh, and hideth himself." After that civil war did break out in England, the Puritan poet and minister Michael Wigglesworth described the New World as a "hiding place, which thou/Jehovah, didst provide ... When th' overflowing scourge did pass/ Through Europe, like a flood." City upon a hill, schmitty upon a hill: America was a fallout shelter.

It wasn't long before the settlers started spotting signs of Armageddon on this side of the Atlantic too. Wigglesworth described America as a place with "no enemyes" and with "such peace/As none enjoyd before," but for Mather it was "a World in every Nook whereof, the devil is encamped." When the Puritans weren't fighting actual wars with French Catholic settlers and Native Americans, they were imagining conspiracies of Catholics, Indians, and invisible spirits all around them. Sometimes those alleged plots combined into a single cabal. At "their Cheef Witch-meetings," Mather warned, "there has been present some French canadians, and some Indian Sagamores, to concert the methods of ruining New...