Lisa Vox. Existential Threats

The works of Mark Twain, Philip Wylie, Paul R. Ehrlich, Wilbur Smith, and Salem Kirban, among many others, come together in surprising ways in this ambitious book. In Existential Threats: American Apocalyptic Beliefs in the Technological Era, Lisa Vox identifies themes of end-times fears and apocalyptic threats pervading secular, scientific, science fiction, and premillennial dispensational literature. These long-standing, if also evolving, cultural motifs demonstrate connections between the “scientific apocalyptic” and premillennial dispensationalist evangelical beliefs. “The result,” Vox claims, “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” (xv). Historians who have examined the role of apocalypticism in American culture have long shown how religious ideas about the future have linked subcultures of the faithful to larger communities. Paul Boyer’s When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (1992) has become a classic of the genre with its argument that Protestant eschatology has been more widespread in American history than secularists realize, and that understanding the prophetic convictions of religious groups can reveal much about the histories and worldviews of those subcultures. The latter argument is explored more recently in Matthew Avery Sutton’s American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (2014), which contends that apocalyptic beliefs at the heart of evangelicalism shaped American religious history. Vox’s book adds to the literature by highlighting the end-times language shared by scientific and religious apocalypticists, communities otherwise contentiously related, especially in the aftermath of the culture-war battles at the end of the twentieth century.

Apocalypticism · Argument (complex analysis) · Art · Context (archaeology) · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Eschatology · Existentialism · Humanity · Judaism · Literature · Manifest destiny · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Protestantism · Theology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies