Come to think of it, things have been awfully quiet on the End Times front. Living in the South, one grows accustomed to hearing about a never-ending series of conspiratorial threats and eschatological panics. Prophetic fads sweep the region. It’s Satan worshippers one year, “secular humanists” the next. Subliminal messages are descried in popular music; supermarket bar codes harbor the mark of the beast; logos on boxes of soap suds give evidence of corporate diabolism. Under President George W. Bush, a series of preposterously bad novels by evangelical authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins became huge bestsellers. Dramatizing the …