Existential Threats - Lisa Vox

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the scientific apocalyptic developed alongside dispensational premillennialism in the United States, these theories responded to the same societal trends. Despite their similarities, the two apocalyptics consciously characterized themselves as constituting opposing worldviews by the end of the twentieth century. Chapter 1 describes how dispensational premillennialism, imported from Britain, began making inroads among evangelicals during the same period that witnessed the emergence of the scientific apocalyptic among the British and Europeans in the wake of On the Origin of Species (1859). Both were initially minority viewpoints in the United States. Postrevolutionary Americans had entered the nineteenth century having embraced the empirical and political ideals of the Enlightenment as well as the emphases on personal salvation and evangelism of the Great Awakening. Even after the Civil War, Americans were confident in the human capability for progress, but racial superiority helped broker the peace between Yankee and Confederate.9 By the turn of the century, most white Americans agreed with Europeans that Western nations were spiritually, culturally, and racially better suited to lead the rest of the world.

      Chapter 2 demonstrates how the development of the scientific apocalyptic and the spread of dispensational premillennialism proceeded apace up until World War II, despite this optimism. Americans prided themselves on their technological accomplishments, but, whether evangelical or not, there was also a growing foreboding about the future of the United States and the world. Christian and secular-minded British and Europeans alike shared in this mounting fear that the world was in a state of decline with destruction perpetually threatening, and Americans engaged this viewpoint in fiction and nonfiction.

      The idea that human history was not a never-ending story of progress eventually gave way to apocalypticism among scientists and science fiction writers on both sides of the Atlantic with the invention of the nuclear bomb in 1945. Chapter 3 focuses on how the bomb became the first existential threat to penetrate the public consciousness, captivating both religious and scientific apocalypticists in the United States. As scientific apocalypticists learned to live with the perennial threat of destruction, the scientific doomsday became as ingrained and commonplace as that of premillennialists.

      In Chapter 4’s chronicle of environmentalism, atomic fears led naturally to environmental ones and the incorporation of environmental disasters into the scientific apocalyptic occurred within the religious apocalyptic. Fame and profit accrued to both religious and scientific apocalyptic writers and observers during the 1970s, accompanying a decline among Americans in their faith in government, national destiny, and scientific authority.

      By the 1980s, the period covered in Chapter 5, the politicization of evangelicals had happened alongside the politicization of nuclear and environmental threats, and scientific and religious apocalypticists had begun to address one another overtly while still sharing assumptions about the state of the world. Chapter 6 covers the interregnum between the Cold War and the War on Terror, when nuclear anxiety receded in favor of environmental worries. Though dispensational premillennialists started to question the science behind the environmental threat, scientists and their supporters joined the rest of the country in worrying that science, without a spiritual transformation, could not solve the world’s problems.

      From 9/11 to the present, as I portray in Chapter 7, scientific and religious apocalypticists have produced an incredible amount of fiction and nonfiction, flooding all forms of media with apocalyptic fantasies. Even as Americans have become aware of the differences between dispensational premillennialism (minus the details) and a scientific understanding of how the world will end, the two still share language and scenarios as well as assumptions about the future. The result is a distinctive American apocalypticism that enthralls a divided country in the context of mounting doubts over the War on Terror, continued American power, and the fate of humanity in a warming world.

      Recognizing the entanglement of religious and scientific understandings of the world should encourage more empathy from people who place themselves firmly in one camp or the other. Though the media continues to speak of red states pitted against blue, history can show the common ground that even the extremes of those two perspectives occupy. When we look at the history and evolution of scientific apocalyptic beliefs as well as of dispensational premillennialism, we could impose a simplistic story of good versus evil on the one hand or of ignorant superstition versus rational intellect on the other. Neither narrative would capture adequately how and why Americans have responded to modern-day existential threats in ways that recall both the book of Revelation and On the Origin of Species.

       CHAPTER 1

      SECULARIZING THE APOCALYPSE

      Westerners did not seriously consider that the world could end without a supernatural cause until scientists offered a convincing explanation for a naturalistic origin of the world. Creation stories help societies make sense of their existence, but an account of the beginning of the world and the origins of humankind would be incomplete without an account of its ending.1 Until the late nineteenth century, the dominant assumption in the West for over two thousand years had been that a supernatural force created humanity and would similarly act as the instrument of the world’s destruction. Prior to the late nineteenth century, intellectuals who rejected a supernatural model of creation struggled with the project of offering alternative models of the world’s beginning or posited an infinite universe, often in order to strengthen atheistic beliefs. Scholars have debated to what degree these alternative models anticipated the theory of evolution.2 The lack of a secular explanation for what would happen to the world in the future corresponded to the lack of a solid account of how the world might have come into being without God.

      In 1859 Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection provided the basis for the widespread acceptance of evolution, but Darwin’s theory also unintentionally furnished a naturalistic “creation story,” bolstering religious skepticism. With an established scientific origins story, Westerners began to theorize that the world could end (or at least humanity could become extinct) without any assistance from God or possibly even due to human misadventure. Darwin’s theory constituted an important intellectual shift, as scientists increasingly left theological concerns out of their work completely and argued that science and religion attempt to answer different questions.3 The American scientific apocalyptic emerged from the British and European discussions of Darwinism’s implications for human destiny.

      The historian Jacques Barzun’s observation that “the Origin of Species was greater as an event than as a book” emphasizes the importance that Darwin’s work had in its long-term impact as a synthesis of biological and geological studies, far beyond what Darwin and his supporters could have ever predicted.4 Though Darwin avoided talking about the origins of life itself, his work also had clear theological ramifications. Darwin was sensitive to that but worried far more about the critical response of other scientists, mostly geologists and paleontologists, to his work.5 When he finally published in 1859 after a lengthy delay, the impetus was the news that another scientist, Alfred Wallace, had come to similar conclusions and was about to scoop Darwin.6

      Darwin had a preview of a possible reaction to his Origin of Species in 1844 when a naturalistic history of the world by an anonymous author appeared in England. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation took the reader from the formation of stars and planets to the origins of humankind, arguing for the development of all things according to the action of natural laws. Victorian elites widely read and discussed the book, and, at the behest of the author, inexpensive editions came out in the hopes of broadening the audience even further. The controversy surrounding its author (Robert Chambers, a publisher and phrenologist, as it was finally revealed in 1884 after his death) aided its popularity as Victorians made a game out of identifying

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