If you've read one of the trashy "Left Behind" novels you have a clue as to the belief system of millions of your fellow Americans. Basically, it's this: God is really pissed off because we the people are sexual slobs, and we keep wanting to create socialism as a way of life. This immorality is so bad that Jesus is going to come back to earth armed with a sword meant for slaying. Lots of blood will flow, but Christians who keep themselves pure, or, at least confess like Jimmy Swaggart did after getting caught impure -- those Christians will escape up into Heaven before the bloodletting begins.
Eventually the wrath of our Lord and Savior will calm down and peace will be restored and everyone will live happily ever after.
Seriously, many of your personal neighbors believe this stuff. But it's worse than you think.
I was once one of them. Somehow, in a bizzaro world, it made sense to me that we were living at the end of history, a history that had been scripted by God. Somehow it made sense to me that we human beings deserved a hideous death and eternal torture just because we didn't say the magic words, "Lord Jesus, come into my life and save me from my sins." Somehow it made sense to me that the majority of those living, and those who had ever lived, were frying in the damnation of Hellfire.
But then I grew up, and such meanness of spirit no longer made sense.
Today the notion of end times thinking is undergoing a radical change. Instead of the world getting so bad that Jesus has to come back and kill everybody, the new way of thinking is that Christians need to seize control and power over the world.
Once Christians have power the prayer Jesus taught his followers, "God's kingdom come on earth as in Heaven," will be fulfilled and Jesus will kindly float back down from Heaven and we will all live happily ever after. This new way of being Christian is growing by leaps and bounds. The theology is called Dominionism, and it is the dominant strand of Christianity behind the ascension of Republican whack jobs like Palin, Bachmann, Santorum and Perry.
Whereas the old end times thinking only wanted to save your soul before the tribulation, this new end times thinking wants to organize Christians to seize control over culture, government, commerce, the military, media, education, arts and religion. Those who won't get out of the way need to be removed as obstacles. This crusading impulse within Christianity, the spiritual need to totalize civilization to serve Christian clerics, is on the rise again.
And as history teaches us, when Christians want power, blood will flow in abundance. This ain't Grandma's Christianity anymore.