But the influence hasn’t been solely in one direction: Religious writers, clergy, and evangelicals have readily borrowed scientific ideas to support their own ideologies. Vox argues that although the apocalyptic anxieties fostered by such events have been secularized, they inevitably draw heavily from religious roots. Wells, and the beginnings of science fiction as a defined literary genre in the 1920s all the way through the world wars, the atomic age, the environmental movement, to 21st-century terrorism. Beginning in the 19th century, with Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel “The Last Man” and several similar contemporary works, she proceeds steadily through Jules Verne, H.G. Such familiarity with American dispensationalist religion informs the book: Vox uses it as a springboard for an examination of how such religious notions as the Second Coming, the Rapture, and the rise of the Antichrist have influenced and intertwined with the secular apocalypticism of environmental disaster, nuclear war, worldwide plagues, and killer asteroids. “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,” writes Lisa Vox in her new book “Existential Threats: American Apocalyptic Beliefs in the Technological Era.” Vox, an expert in American history and history of religion at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, approaches doomsday from both a professional and personal perspective, noting in the book’s preface that growing up in the “Southern Baptist stronghold” of Memphis, Tennessee, “bathed my childhood in apocalyptic anxiety.” Whereas before, the world could end only through divine fiat, now doomsday was imaginable without any God at all. Then in the 19th century, the work of scientists such as Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin showed that the Earth was far older than previously thought and that living creatures didn’t just spring into being by God’s creation but had evolved (and eventually also succumbed to extinction) over deep time. For most of history, they were just stories, however fervently believed - based in the supernatural rather than in scientific reality. Maybe that odd admixture of horror and seductiveness is why doomsday narratives have been part of human culture since ancient times. Yet at the same time, it’s the unspeakable, unimaginable horror, the ultimate failure, something to be avoided at all costs. The idea of humanity united in oblivion, dying as a communal experience, seems to have a special purity, at one blow settling all accounts, solving all problems, wiping the slate clean. It’s not just your world that dies - it’s everyone else’s too, and pretty much all at the same time. But the end of the world is something else. University of Pennsylvania Press, 288 pages.Īll of us, of course, know we’re doomed to die someday, a realization that usually comes very young with the death of a beloved dog, cat, or goldfish. BOOK REVIEW - “Existential Threats: American Apocalyptic Beliefs in the Technological Era,” by Lisa Vox.
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