Excerpt from A Whole Lot More of Jesus and Lot Less Rock and Roll: Christian Militancy and Millennial Conflict (Trucross Press, 2063).

The New World Order's (NWO) reaction to the Pan-Islamic capture of Tel Aviv in 2008 and the subsequent genocide went beyond the usual sequence of shock-at-media-clips, U.N. resolutions, refugee relief funds, and appearances of HoloII chic on the fashion runways: The halogens burned late in NWO capitals with their realization of the vigour and determination of the Baghdad-Teheran axis (BTA). Threat, propaganda, and oil money had harnessed the disruptive energies of Fundamentalist Islam to ageless Fertile Crescent Imperialism.

Consolidating its Israeli conquest (too sudden and swift for a U.S. non-nuclear retaliation) with the occupation of Egypt, BTA confirmed NWO's deepest fears by its stepped-up recruitment and propagandizing within the Islamic peoples of the former Soviet Union. A paralysed India and militant Pakistan thrust Afghanistan into serving as a conduit for bootlegged Russian nuclear weapons in one direction, and supplies for Siberian insurgency in the other.

BTA's playing of the Siberian card provoked the religious revival culminating in the second-tier nuclear exchanges that in turn reconfigured our biosphere. Siberia, as everyone knows, provided NWO's last, best hope for a millennial-length supply of fossilized energy. For this, the tottering Russian regime was propped up; for this, Russia was permitted its re-entry into Eastern Europe (though under the guise of guarantor of Bosnian peace); for this, capital-intensive recycling processes attracted investment whose payoff would not arrive before Siberia had been paved. BTA's territorial aggrandisement caused no lights to burn late; it was the spectre of an interdicted energy supply that produced the NWO Great Fear that went on to spark the Great Awakening.

The mainline Protestant churches had turned into wedding chapels and mortuaries; Catholicism, an embattled Latino and African institution, dissipated itself with holy rollers for control of the globe's economic black holes. Only the fully technologized, politicized, and increasingly militant American networks of conservative, media-savvy electronic congregations could arouse the frenzied demands for a roll-back of the Islamic offensive. The television ministries furnished the heralds for the New Crusade.

While NWO pundits masticated endlessly the cud of spiritual hungers that might lead to a millennial religious revival, the forces that actually governed their world were at work. Government set in place (through a series of barely-noticed tax exemptions bolstering the Christian right's domination of the U.S. media) an institutional platform for a fervid, xenophobic civic religion that fanned readiness for an armed confrontation with Islam. Reviving not only the spirit, but at times the iconography of the mediaeval Crusades (endless variations on the white cloaks and red Maltese crosses appearing as if by magic on MTV), the Lord of Hosts Movement-talk-show hosts, someone called it-spread throughout NWO. It heightened a belligerence among a ruling elite that by temperament disdained the caution that had marked their effete forebears at the close of the Cold War.

Those who ran the Cold War, however, played their pawns with greater skill than the newcomers. The unsmotherable Bosnian conflict had long been a cockpit for great power rivalries, but the presence of the unstable Iraqi air-support units generated an uncontrollable degree of escalation. By the time the two sets of holy warriors had finished their many rounds of "tactical" nuclear exchanges, an area from Istanbul to Bari had become a hot spot, and the stage was set for the "grudge-match" exchanges that incinerated the capitals of both sides.

This process hastened the reconstruction of Washington and Teheran in the image of sacred sites, and strengthened the mutual resolve to exempt these shrine cities from the inevitable further strikes at the conclusion of the Grace Period.

Dennis Duffy is a professor of English at Innis College, the University of Toronto.