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If American culture is going to endure, we need to remain obsessed about the end times.
There's nothing like an apocalypse to renew our feelings of optimism.
I remember looking forward to Y2K on New Year's Eve in 1999; I stayed up late, waiting for civilization to end, but nothing happened. Windows 98 went on working, as well as it ever did.
Apocalypticism goes back a long way in the Christian tradition, and it's especially strong in the United States. Puritans such as Michael Wigglesworth--author of the poem "The Day of Doom"--believed they were living in the last days. Later, ministers such as Jonathan Edwards exhorted their congregations to accept salvation before time ran out. In 1843, about 100,000 Millerites were planning for the end of the world between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844. When it didn't come, they moved the date to October 22, a day remembered by believers as "The Great Disappointment."
Those may have been good times, but I think we are living in the real Golden Age of Apocalypses. The Population Bomb, by Paul Ehrlich, was published the year I was born: Famines were predicted for my childhood and adolescence, and it was already too late to avoid them, Ehrlich warned. Meanwhile, there was a hole in the ozone layer, and it was growing fast. Pesticides were working their way up the food chain. Killer bees were crossing the southern border. And, if we were lucky, all of those problems might have been solved by the comet Kohoutek, which was supposed to slam into the Earth in 1973. My teenage years--continuing a theme going back to the 50s--were preoccupied by the possibility of a full nuclear exchange; if we survived till The Day After, we'd slowly starve in the nuclear winter that followed.
Nowadays, it seems like every fifth movie or novel has an apocalyptic theme. For a long time I was reading students' essays on Tim LaHaye and the Left Behind novels on premillennial dispensationalism: the belief that the saved will be "raptured" into heaven, leaving the rest of us here to deal with the great tribulation before the Second Coming. The Christian radio personality Harold Camping said the rapture would occur between 1994 and 2011. Nothing happened...