Existential Threats - by Lisa Vox (Hardcover)

About the Book

In Existential Threats, Lisa Vox explores the growth of dispensationalist premillennialism alongside scientific understandings of the end of the world and contends that these two allegedly competing visions have converged to create an American apocalyptic imagination.

Book Synopsis

Americans have long been enthralled by visions of the apocalypse. Will the world end through nuclear war, environmental degradation, and declining biodiversity? Or, perhaps, through the second coming of Christ, rapture of the faithful, and arrival of the Antichrist--a set of beliefs known as dispensationalist premillennialism? These seemingly competing apocalyptic fantasies are not as dissimilar as we might think. In fact, Lisa Vox argues, although these secular and religious visions of the end of the world developed independently, they have converged to create the landscape of our current apocalyptic imagination.

In Existential Threats, Vox assembles a wide range of media--science fiction movies, biblical tractates, rapture fiction--to develop a critical history of the apocalyptic imagination from the late 1800s to the present. Apocalypticism was once solely a religious ideology, Vox contends, which has secularized in response to increasing technological and political threats to American safety. Vox reads texts ranging from Christianity Today articles on ecology and the atomic bomb to Dr. Strangelove, and from Mary Shelley's The Last Man to the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, demonstrating along the way that conservative evangelicals have not been as resistant to science as popularly believed and that scientists and science writers have unwittingly reproduced evangelical eschatological themes and scenarios in their own works. Existential Threats argues that American apocalypticism reflects and propagates our ongoing debates over the authority of science, the place of religion, uses of technology, and America's evolving role in global politics.

Review Quotes

"Existential Threats offers lucidly written and knowledgeable discussions of fundamentalism, Pentecostalism, premillennialism, and dispensationalism and brings them to bear on a topic of interest to both religion and science: the end of the world as Americans imagine it."-- "Ronald L. Numbers, University of Wisconsin-Madison"

"As a reference book for apocalyptic thought at the intersection of science, religion, and environmentalism, Existential Threats is extremely useful . . . Vox exhaustively canvasses works of fiction, nonfiction, and film, with attention to shared themes and rhetoric. Her in-depth treatment of apocalyptic science fiction, in and of itself, makes this book a valuable resource."-- "Environmental History"

"Deeply researched and impeccably even-handed in its treatment of scientists and evangelicals, Existential Threats fills a large gap in the historical literature about apocalyptic writings in American culture."-- "Grant Wacker, author of America's Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation"

About the Author

Lisa Vox teaches history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.