The death wish of humanity: Religious and scientific apocalypticism in the United States, 1859--200

Scholars writing about modern American apocalyptic beliefs tend to separate the secular from the religious. The most prominent form of popular religious apocalypticism in the twentieth century U.S., dispensational premillennialism, developed among American conservative Protestants at the same time that the beginnings of a scientific apocalyptic was being articulated in the late nineteenth century. These two forms of apocalypticism matured alongside each other in the United States, ultimately converging on the twin threats of nuclear war and environmental destruction after World War II.;Though their adherents usually differed politically, there is a surprising amount of correlation between the two accounts of the end. Conservative evangelicals writing on Bible prophecy believed that scientific revelations about the effects of nuclear weapons as well as environmental threats provided insight into how to interpret prophetic books of the Bible like Revelation. Scientific apocalypticists, in the form of scientists writing popular works and science fiction authors grappling with the same issues, struggled to find solutions to these threats and give meaning to human existence in the face of such catastrophe. The result was that American religious and scientific visions of the end, far from being diametrically opposed to one another, became more compatible during the twentieth century. This continued right up until the millennium, when the slow fracturing of scientific authority that took place over the last half of the twentieth century began to be reflected in both the religious and scientific apocalyptics.