After the End

What living inside the Book of Revelation for seven years revealed about empire, endurance, and Christian complicity

I didn’t begin a PhD in the UK because I wanted to be reshaped. I began it because I wanted to master something that was already causing me spiritual and existential discomfort.

Like many people who come out of American evangelical ecosystems—especially fundamentalist-adjacent ones—I carried an unspoken assumption that knowledge was something you conquer. You assemble it. Defend it. Organize it. Weaponize it, if necessary. A doctorate, in that imagination, is a fortified position: credentials as battlements, footnotes as artillery.

Seven years later, I can say with some clarity: that fantasy did not survive contact with the apocalypse. I didn’t spend seven years writing a thesis on Revelation. I spent seven years being slowly, sometimes painfully, unmade and reassembled by it.

And not in the way popular Christian culture imagines “apocalyptic transformation.” There were no prophetic timelines, no charts, no geopolitical clairvoyance. No secret knowledge that let me feel smarter than everyone else scrolling past headlines.

Instead, there was embarrassment. Unlearning. Silence. The slow realization that the text I thought I knew had never been speaking the language I was taught to hear.

The First Lie: That Revelation Is About Prediction

If you grow up in fundamentalist evangelical spaces, Revelation is treated less like Scripture and more like a codex. It is a book you crack, not a world you enter.

I was raised on interpretations that treated Revelation as a divine crossword puzzle whose clues could be solved if you knew the right newspapers, the right enemies, the right moral panics. The apocalypse was always just about to happen, always slightly out of reach, always useful for motivating fear-based obedience.

What no one prepared me for was the possibility that Revelation was not written to inform future readers—but to form present ones.

Studying it in a UK context—particularly through biblical performance criticism—collapsed that illusion quickly. The questions were not, “What does this symbol secretly refer to?” but, “What does this scene do to the hearer?” Not, “Who is the Beast?” but, “How does empire train people to love their own domination?”

That shift alone destabilized everything.

Revelation, I learned, does not care whether you can identify Rome on a map. It cares whether Rome lives in your imagination—whether you’ve internalized its rhythms, its rewards, its definitions of victory and success.

That is not predictive literature.

That is surgical.

The Second Lie: That the Apocalypse Is Violent for Violence’s Sake

Fundamentalist readings love the violence of Revelation. They insist they don’t—but they do.

The plagues, the blood, the cosmic collapse are often framed as divine payback, righteous catharsis, God finally doing what “needs to be done.” Violence becomes proof of God’s seriousness. Of God’s alignment with our grievances.

But when you read Revelation as performance—as something meant to be heard aloud by oppressed communities—you begin to notice something deeply uncomfortable: the violence is almost never something the faithful are told to enact.

Instead, it is seen. Heard. Witnessed. Endured. Lived.

The martyrs do not fight back. They testify. The Lamb does not conquer by force. He bears the marks of slaughter. The victory of God is not achieved through escalation but exposure—evil revealed so fully that it collapses under its own weight.

That realization dismantled years of inherited theology.

Revelation is not a permission slip for Christian aggression. It is a warning against becoming fluent in the grammar of domination. Its most terrifying images are not God’s wrath—but humanity’s addiction to spectacle, coercion, and false security.

Apocalypse, in its truest sense, is not destruction, but unveiling. In fact, that’s what apocalypse (apokalypsis) means.

And what it unveils is not flattering.

The Third Lie: That Revelation Is About Escape

Another deeply ingrained evangelical instinct is to treat Revelation as an exit strategy.

This world is going to burn. The faithful will be spared. The goal is evacuation, not repair.

But that reading collapses the moment you take seriously the book’s ending.

The New Jerusalem does not lift believers out of creation.

It descends into it.

God does not abandon the earth.

God dwells with it.

There is no rapture in Revelation—no removal of the faithful from responsibility, history, or embodiment. Instead, there is endurance. Presence. Costly faithfulness inside systems that reward compromise.

The apocalypse does not train readers to flee the world; It trains them to resist being owned by it.

And that resistance is not abstract. It is economic. Liturgical. Political. It asks: Who do you worship with your money? With your time? With your imagination? With your willingness to stay quiet?

Those questions landed far too close to home.

What the UK Context Taught Me

Writing a PhD in a UK system does something subtle but profound to an American student: it removes the illusion that your voice is automatically central.

There is no grade inflation of confidence. No performative certainty rewarded for its own sake. You are expected to listen—longer than you want to. To speak less than feels comfortable. To justify every claim, not with passion, but with patience.

That discipline changed how I read Scripture.

I stopped asking what the text could support and started asking what it resisted. I learned to sit with ambiguity without rushing to domesticate it. I learned that faithfulness does not require certainty—only honesty.

Most importantly, I learned that Revelation is not interested in reinforcing the moral superiority of its hearers. It is interested in whether they can hear themselves being named.

That is a terrifying thing for anyone trained to read Scripture primarily as affirmation.

The Apocalypse and the Death of Easy Faith

Seven years inside Revelation stripped me of several comforts I didn’t know I was protecting.

It dismantled the idea that being “on the right side” of theology guarantees moral clarity.

It exposed how often religious certainty functions as insulation against repentance.

It made it impossible to pretend that faith is primarily about belief rather than allegiance.

Revelation is brutally honest about this: people are not destroyed because they lack information. They are destroyed because they refuse to change.

They cling to systems that reward them. They worship what feeds them. They call violence “order” and exploitation “blessing.” And when confronted with truth, they double down.

That diagnosis is not ancient.

It is devastatingly current.

How the Thesis Wrote Me

Somewhere around year five, I realized I was no longer writing the thesis I set out to write.

The project had begun as an analysis of garments, crowns, bodies, spectacle—how Revelation uses clothing and adornment to communicate identity and allegiance.

What it became was a mirror.

I could no longer treat the text as an object. It had become a presence—one that asked whether I was willing to be seen as I truly was, not as I imagined myself to be.

It interrogated my own performances: academic, religious, masculine, political. It asked whether my language clarified or concealed. Whether my silence was wisdom or fear. Whether my certainty was conviction or control.

That kind of reading changes you whether you want it to or not.

And I didn’t always want it to.

There were seasons where I resented the work. Where I envied colleagues writing on “safer” texts. Where I wanted the Apocalypse to stop staring back at me and let me finish the damn chapter.

But the book would not cooperate.

It kept insisting that interpretation is never neutral. That to read Revelation faithfully is to submit to its critique—not just of empire, but of the church’s complicity with it.

The Hardest Truth of All

If I had to distill seven years of apocalyptic study into one hard truth, it would be this:

Revelation is not concerned with whether you call yourself a Christian. It is concerned with whether you practice resurrection-shaped life under pressure.

The faithful in Revelation are not those with the right doctrinal statements. They are those who refuse to lie—even when lying would keep them safe.

They refuse to worship what demands their silence. They refuse to make peace with systems that require sacrifice they are not willing to name.

That kind of faith is costly. It does not scale well. It does not trend.

And it certainly does not play nicely with fundamentalist fantasies of control.

After the Apocalypse

I finished the thesis.

I’m currently waiting on my viva date and conferment of the degree.

But the more significant outcome is harder to quantify.

I no longer believe Scripture exists to confirm my worldview. I believe it exists to disrupt it.

I no longer believe faith is proven by certainty. I believe it is revealed by endurance, humility, and truth-telling under pressure.

And I no longer believe Revelation belongs to those who shout the loudest about the end of the world.

It belongs to those willing to let their worlds end—again and again—until something more honest can take their place.

Seven years ago, I thought I was writing about the apocalypse.

I was wrong.

The apocalypse was writing me.