Story by Keegan Clements-Housser
Illustration by Charlotte Cheng
Before this year concludes, something will happen to bring the world as we know it to an end. Or at least, that’s the case if a bewildering number of tabloids and websites are to be believed. 2012 is the end of the road, they say, and we might as well get ready for it. To get a better idea of what’s ahead, three experts offer their takes on end of the world culture. What they share explains the workings of apocalyptic prophecies and reinforces how insatiably fascinated humans are with mass extinction.
Jerry Walls, PhD
Author and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame
Jerry Walls has based his career on eschatology, or the way different cultures view the end of the world, and he has found that there are three distinct ways people approach apocalypse.
“There are a lot of people in these survival movements that are expecting some sort of apocalyptic event—nuclear war, economic meltdown, something of the like—that will throw the world into chaos,” he says. “These people basically think that they’ll weather the storm, the end of the world as they know it, and then they’ll rebuild after the apocalyptic events have passed.”
Others think the world will have a definite conclusion: Something will happen that wipes out our species and potentially all life. It could be anything from an atmospheric change to a super asteroid.
Both schools of thought have grown more popular in modern times, especially since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when scientific advancements provided a baseline by which to gauge the fragility of human life compared to the wider universe. The twentieth century development of nuclear weapons only strengthened the belief that we pose a great threat to ourselves.
Throughout Western history, however, a third view about the end, one guided by theology, has dominated.
“Religious believers tend to think, by and large, that the world has an end, a goal, a purpose,” Walls says. “They believe that there’s a narrative that is not driven solely by the human actors; there’s a bigger director telling the story and He’s taking it somewhere.”
The three different approaches are like theater, Walls says. The first two resemble a tragedy, in which all or almost all of the actors perish and nothing good results. The third approach more closely mimics a comedy, with an ending that, though perhaps difficult to get to, is ultimately uplifting.
In any case, eschatological thinking seems to be newly popular in Western culture. A higher level of secularism and scientific understanding has given a strong boost to the “weathering the storm” and absolute end beliefs, while the third version continues to draw the most attention as evidenced by the recent rash of Rapture predictions and the smash-hit success of religious fiction series like Jerry Jenkins’s Left Behind.
Walls believes he knows the reason behind the upswing; his thinking echoes that of many of his contemporaries, both religious and secular.
“Anytime things seem out of control and hope is on the decline, there’s a tendency to think, ‘OK, we need something outside of ourselves, something to deliver us; we need a source of salvation, a source of being, a source of rescue that no human being will come up with,’” Walls says. “[Fatalism] is always worst when hopes are high and then are dashed. That’s been the case throughout history.”
Jerry Jenkins
New York Times best-selling Christian fiction author
“I wrote novels based on biblical prophecy, which clearly slaked a thirst people have about the future,” Jerry Jenkins says. He’s referring to the Left Behind series, which Jenkins co-authored with Christian theologian and evangelist Tim LaHaye. “We live in scary times and people are looking for something beyond themselves. Fiction based on biblical prophecy seems to meet that need.”
The 16 books of Left Behind follow a group of non-believers who remain on Earth after the Rapture. The group eventually accepts Christ and works to save others from the Antichrist before the Second Coming. Since the first book’s debut in 1995, the series has sold more than 63 million copies and found a place on the New York Times Best Sellers list, one of the few works of religious fiction to do so.
Left Behind has also had a massive impact on the evangelical Christian community. The series spread the idea that the Rapture described in the Bible could be both abrupt and literal. Shortly after the first book’s release, author and evangelical commentator Jerry Falwell wrote: “In terms of its impact on Christianity, [this book] is probably greater than that of any other book in modern times, outside the Bible.”
Despite this praise, Jenkins is quick to point out that “God is not tied to our calendar,” and that it would be foolish to try and predict when something as momentous as the Rapture will occur.
“As prophecy does not say when this will happen and even Jesus told His disciples that He Himself didn’t know but only His Father, it is folly for us to try to set dates,” Jenkins says.
Though he concedes that many of the signs the Bible lists as heralds to the Great Tribulation have already been revealed, Jenkins doesn’t think that the Rapture is necessarily right around the corner.
“The Bible says that in God’s economy of time, a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day,” he says, “so if in His mercy He waits one more day, that would be a thousand of our years.”
Nevertheless, the idea of ascending into Heaven strikes a chord with many evangelicals. For example, Harold Camping, the man who blanketed the US with literature and billboards proclaiming the Rapture would arrive on May 21, 2011.
Even though Camping’s Rapture failed to manifest, it likely won’t be the last such prediction. After all, Camping wasn’t the first to announce the end: The Rapture has been predicted numerous times in American history, starting with William Miller, founder of Adventist Christianity, and his prediction that the Rapture would happen some time between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844.
Whenever it comes, Jenkins says the end of the world will arrive quickly and that humanity should prepare.
“I don’t think it will be at all subtle. It will be instantaneous and chaotic,” he says. “We are told to watch and wait for the imminent return, and so I think it behooves people to be ready.”
Michael Molcher
Freelance journalist and editor in chief of The End is Nigh magazine
According to Michael Molcher, apocalyptic thinking isn’t exactly novel.
“If you look at the last 350 years of Western civilization, you’ll see that the end of the world has been a pretty constant preoccupation and certainly nothing new,” he says. “People have been prophesying the imminent end of all things fairly constantly.”
What the end will be was, in fact, the focus of The End is Nigh. Before going under in 2011, the United Kingdom-based publication investigated how various end-times scenarios would play out. The magazine covered a wide variety of apocalyptic topics, ranging from zombies and biblical judgment to the H1N1 scare and the ticking of the University of Chicago’s iconic doomsday clock.
An innate human fear of death was the reason The End is Nigh had so much material to work with, Molcher says.
“The idea of an untimely demise is an unsettling one, so it needs to be rationalized and controlled, given a ‘purpose’ or meaning of its own,” he says. “Those giving these predictions can often be seen to be trying to ‘control’ this fear. By giving a time and date, they are claiming to have arcane knowledge and, in many circumstances, the specific ways to avoid this early demise.”
These predictions have, until recently, been uniformly religious or spiritual in nature, he adds. In the Western world they’ve been almost exclusively Christian in origin, in no small part because Christianity emphasizes a vision of cataclysm.
“As a monotheistic, eschatological religion Christianity is ripe for end of the world ideas,” Molcher says. “The whole structure of Christianity as we currently know it is geared toward the linear concept of time which supposes that one day the world will end in a final battle between good and evil.”
The prominence of a religion like Christianity leaves a mark on how Western cultures view uncertainty, he points out. However, things changed after the Y2K scare in 1999 that had people stockpiling supplies in case the dawn of the new millennium brought technological mayhem. Since then, Molcher says there’s been a shift away from biblical prophecy toward scientific disasters.
Some proposed scientific apocalypses are fringe theories, like radical ideas of spontaneous magnetic pole reversals, extraterrestrial intervention, rogue planets disrupting Earth’s orbit, or planetary collisions. There are far more realistic and immediate threats, however; take for example runaway climate change, supervolcanoes, shifts in major weather patterns like the Gulf Stream, or particularly bad solar flares frying communications satellites orbiting Earth.
Molcher thinks there’s some credibility to a few such doomsday scenarios. After all, science isn’t lying when it says that humans and Earth are, in the universal scheme of things, easy to destroy.
However, Molcher also feels certain that the Mayans didn’t have any particular insight when making their now infamous Long Count calendar (“If they were so good at predicting the future, why did they not predict the complete collapse and eradication of their society by the Spanish?”). With the number of supposed Raptures that have come and gone, he also doesn’t think the Christian eschatological predictions are likely to come true anytime soon.
“We shall see what the new fixation date is after December, but I ‘predict’ it will be tied to one of the forthcoming close by-passes of an asteroid or comet,” he says.
After all, if history is any guide, people will always have their doomsday theories.
The idea that the Mayan calendar marks December 21, 2012, as humanity’s last day is only one of many such predictions. Alien contact, catastrophic natural disasters, impending Raptures, prophecies extrapolated from long-dead societies, the rare people who resolutely and only half-jokingly prepare for a coming zombie invasion—all are apocalyptic doctrines. But no matter what form the doomsaying takes, one thing is clear: The mass fixation on 2012 reinforces the fact that we humans are fascinated by our own demise.

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