Patrons, Prayers, and Persecution: How This Present Darkness Appropriates Ancient Apocalyptic Traditions to Comfort White Evangelical Americans

Abstract

This essay argues that Frank Peretti’s Evangelical novel, This Present Darkness (1986), appropriates ancient apocalyptic conventions from the Book of Daniel, a text written to comfort a violently persecuted Jewish readership. This appropriation functions to comfort a white Evangelical American audience, a demographic eager to imagine their own oppression in the face of diminishing privilege at the end of the twentieth century. Drawing on critical Bible scholarship, this essay describes four continuities between This Present Darkness and the Book of Daniel: the alternative cosmology, patron deities, determinism, and praxises of resistance. This work analyzes the fabricated persecution of Evangelicals that drives their attempt to reassert white Christian supremacy today.