" The Middle Ages are generally reckoned to have ended at least a century before America’s founding. By the 1620s in the Old World, literal belief in biblical end-time prophecies was fading, along with other medieval artifacts. But not among the Puritans. They took the Bible as literally as they could, especially this most spectacular piece of it. That the Catholics had for centuries downplayed end-of-the-world prophecies was, for Puritans, all the more reason those prophecies must be true. "

― Kurt Andersen , Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History