Apocalypse 2016: the leading candidates to replace Barack Obama think America is going to hell.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the Top

FANS OF APOCALYPTIC religious scenarios have plenty of rich material to work with in Seventh-day Adventism, a church whose most famous contemporary member is Republican presidential co-frontrunner Ben Carson. As formulated by former member Beth S. Carpenter, writing in Mashable, Adventism's tenets include "that the United States will follow a Biblical prophecy" in which Washington "will 'speak like a dragon' and persecute Adventists, aligning with the Catholic Church to force Sunday church attendance." The pope here is the "Antichrist," and his alliance with a fallen America will drive Carson's co-religionists to the hills. The results will be bloody, and spectacular.

I mention this not to malign Seventh-day Adventism--to the contrary, I'm gratified that yet another comparatively new and marginal church is being absorbed into the great American mainstream. If anything, the faith's doctrinal apocalypticism seems uniquely resonant with the howling dissatisfaction and rhetorical pessimism that so far has characterized the remarkable 2016 presidential campaign. Starting with Carson himself.

At the October 28 GOP debate in Boulder, Colorado, Carson asserted--in a response to a question about his opinion of same-sex marriage--that "P.C. culture" is "destroying this nation." In the August debate in Cleveland, the neurosurgeon stated that continuing the policies of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will "destroy this country." In September, at the Reagan Library, Carson said "our children will have no future" unless we kill off the "global jihadists who actually want to destroy us."

There is a fate worse than mere destruction, of course: A country could become actively and murderously evil, a result of too many good men doing nothing in the face of corruption and hatred. America, Carson said in a March 2014 interview, is "very much like Nazi Germany."

Was that a one-off rhetorical slip of the tongue? No. "I know you're not supposed to say 'Nazi Germany,'" he continued, "but I don't care about political correctness. You know, you had a government using its tools to intimidate the population. We now live in a society where people are afraid to say what they actually believe. And it's because of the P.C. police, it's because of politicians, it's because of news. All of these things are combining to stifle people's conversation. The reason that is so horrible is because the only way you have harmony and reach a consensus is by talking. But if, in fact...