Existential Threats. Lisa Vox

       PREFACE

      I grew up during the Reagan era in a Southern Baptist stronghold—the suburbs of Memphis—where dispensationalist premillennialism bathed my childhood in apocalyptic anxiety. I worried about being “left behind” long before Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins wrote their series of novels under that title. In college and graduate school at the turn of the millennium, I discovered the extent to which nonevangelicals found it difficult to take such ideas seriously, which surprised me because I knew so many people for whom those ideas constituted a compelling reality. But my surprise was also because the dispensationalist concepts of the Rapture, societal decline, and an Antichrist never seemed that far afield from American culture to me, either as a child living in that milieu or as an adult working in the academy. I became interested in explaining the power of conservative evangelical beliefs about the end-times and understanding how they came to be. This book is the result. Existential Threats explores how dispensationalist premillennialism emerged alongside a scientific understanding of the end of the world during the late nineteenth century and how these two allegedly competing visions of the world have dominated American cultural conversations about the future since 1945.

      During my 1980s childhood, fearing a nuclear war with the Soviets and worrying about the rise of the Antichrist didn’t seem contradictory, though the adult purveyors of those two visions viewed each other with disdain. When we look at the history and development of the two worldviews, their similarities outshine their differences. Apocalyptic writers and commentators have acknowledged the similarities between dispensational premillennialism and scientific apocalypticism at times, but by the new millennium, proponents of each saw the other as knowingly dealing in false ideas.

      The end of the Cold War in 1991 was supposed to end conflicts over big ideas, proving that secular democratic capitalism was, as the political scientist Francis Fukuyama put it, “the end of history.” What a shock for secular Westerners that the even older wars of religion were not over. When 9/11 awakened the West to religiously fueled rage from the East, premillennialists incorporated the emergence of Islamic terrorism into their worldviews far more easily since they believed that the final battle of Armageddon would be the ultimate religious conflict. Liberal Americans struggled to balance a fear of Islamic terrorism with their ideals of tolerance and diversity. Some liberals, like conservatives, have since concluded that Islam itself is incompatible with Western ideals, but more often they have decided that a faulty reading of Islam or fundamentalist versions of religion in general is the problem.¹ At its most extreme, this argument says rid the world of supernaturalism and we will all live happily together Star Trek–style on Spaceship Earth until the computers become sentient and either kill us or translate our spirits from our bodies into 0s and 1s for eternity.

      Does that last bit seem far-fetched to you? Conservative evangelicals are not the only ones confronted with doubt or even ridicule for their beliefs about the destiny of humankind. Though we lack a scientific understanding of human consciousness, prominent figures in science and technology, such as Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Steve Wozniak, have warned that the development of artificial intelligence could lead to human extinction. Musk labeled smart computers as “our biggest existential threat” on a list that most recently includes climate change, species extinction, pandemics, and asteroid impacts.²

      Judging the likelihood of such scenarios is not the goal of my work. I do not treat science as a mere social construction, nor do I deny the reality of existential threats like climate change facing us today. Rather, my narrative describes how over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Americans interpreted scientific and technological threats to humanity through an eschatological framework by using the languages of science and religion.

      The eschatological ideas monopolizing twenty-first-century American culture originated in the late nineteenth century. The theory of evolution as articulated by Charles Darwin provided the underpinnings for one scenario, while the other emerged among the conservative evangelicals who adopted a systematic version of Bible prophecy known as dispensational premillennialism. Contemporaries advanced the notion that