When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture

"This was the book that really got me started on this particular subject area. He points out that most people tend to think about apocalypticism as the preserve of wild eyed fanatics, but it’s not. He’s focused more on the 20th century. He does the background and moves quickly through the 18th and 19th centuries, but he spends the bulk of his time in the 20th century, talking about how millennialism and apocalypticism became the most important aspects of evangelical Protestantism, especially after World War II. They have become a big part of general American religious culture, but they’ve also become part of America’s overall culture. Instead of Boyer’s book, I could have chosen a book by Daniel Wojcik called The End of the World as We Know It: Faith Fatalism and Apocalypse in America , which deals a little bit more with pop-cultural elements of this phenomenon, focusing especially on the Cold War and late-century fatalism. If you grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, as I did, you’re pretty familiar with that sense of these two superpowers having nuclear weapons trained on each other, and it being a matter not of if, but when, there’s going to be a war that kills everything—I think of Duran Duran back in the 1980s promoting themselves as the band you want to be listening to when the bomb drops. I was a big Duran Duran fan at the time and I thought, ‘yeah, there’s worse things you could be listening to.’ But I thought Boyer is better because of his tone of a detached outside observer. He helps you understand the zero sum nature of American politics today, its winner-take-all character, where the stakes are always catastrophic. If you like the wrong person, the entire civilization is going to fall. You’re voting for the devil. It’s almost that bad. Boyer is good for providing a reminder that it’s not just that Christianity is a dominant aspect of American culture. It’s this apocalyptic, millenarian aspect it has, that’s so much stronger in the United States than in any other country in the world with a Christian majority."