poring over the Bible for new insights in the light of modern science.180
Despite the incorporation of science and man-made weapons into their visions of the End, most conservative evangelicals, including Pentecostals, maintained an emphasis on the supernatural throughout this period, albeit sometimes combining discussion of the two. The fundamentalist founder of the Sword of the Lord, John R. Rice, in Bible Lessons on the Book of Revelation (1943), discussed natural phenomena alongside the supernatural. He expounded on the potentially apocalyptic effects of natural phenomena like comets and meteors, seeing the effects of a meteor crash in the description of Revelation 8:10–11: “scientific men have long known that if a great meteor should fall to earth it might kill many thousands of people, if in a populated section, and that the gases and chemicals might poison millions.”181 For Rice, even though God may work through natural phenomena, he certainly did not have to follow the laws of nature. Rice argued that Revelation 21:23–24 suggests “when the heavens pass away at the time when the earth is burned over (II Pet. 3:10, 12) that the sun will be done away with.”182 The Earth would continue, with Jesus Christ providing it the light it needs, in Rice’s interpretation.
The wartime context probably affected Rice’s pessimism very little, but World War II transformed scientific apocalypticism. The technological advances of the nineteenth century initially had inspired great optimism about the future among Westerners. The prominence of the English in directing scientific apocalypticism during this period suggested, however, that perceived threats to the national ascendancy of such a major power could seem apocalyptic. As Americans gained national power, they too began fearing what having such power and such technological expertise could mean. The world wars forced the United States to assume a greater role in world affairs. While World War I had induced apocalyptic fears—with some observers referring to World War I as “Armageddon” to evoke the new destructiveness of warfare—World War II proved to be the war that confirmed the idea that next time a war would mean an apocalypse. Because of Americans’ technological prowess, they could likely help cause it. Americans who pulled at this pessimistic strand unraveled the blanket trust in a technological age by the twenty-first century.
Unlike after World War II, one overriding apocalyptic concern did not dominate the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries leading up to 1945. After 1945 the nuclear bomb focused the attention of both scientific and Christian apocalypticists. In this earlier period, scientific apocalypticists expressed a variety of anxieties over race, technology, and natural disasters. Evolution provided a link for these different concerns; perceived racial groups within humanity and humanity itself were destined for extinction whether by their own obsolescence, their own technology, or a natural cause, like the death of the sun. In articulating these threats, scientific apocalypticists defined the end of the world in a new way. Some of these writers considered unambiguously how the Christian apocalypse might fit into their scheme of the End, while others implicitly incorporated ideas like humanity deserving judgment through destruction. Compared to later in the twentieth century, however, during the late 1800s and early 1900s, the scientific apocalyptic was less likely to borrow religious imagery to describe the End. Science popularizers’ concentration on the implications of evolution created a distinctive apocalyptic apart from premillennialism. When scientific apocalypticists proposed that humans could cause their own destruction, their formulations of the End became more similar to premillennialists. The idea of humanity causing its own death, however, was at odds with the optimistic idea that humanity could endure with technological help. The bomb ushered in the ideas that would resolve that tension. That humanity was in danger from itself pervaded post-1945 apocalyptic literature.
Christian apocalypticists on both sides of the Atlantic also did not display one overriding anxiety about the world; after 1945, for them, too, the bomb and the Cold War dominated their literature. In this earlier period, premillennialists were concerned with defending themselves against modernist interpretations of the Bible and promoting a politics in harmony with their beliefs. Modernists tended to see Christ’s Second Coming as metaphorical rather than literal, and for many conservative evangelicals, defense of dispensational premillennialism was just part of defending their faith. While modernists may have tempered their beliefs and their interpretations in accordance with what was scientifically plausible, conservative evangelicals used science in quite the opposite way: to show just how believable and possible biblical events were, especially in relation to the book of Revelation. Meanwhile, scientists constructed boundaries that excluded God and the Bible from professional work. When conservative evangelicals relied on science to explain the Bible, that practice took on the appearance of attacking science itself. This trend became more pronounced after 1945. The dual focus of scientific and religious apocalypticists on the bomb after the war meant that it became harder for scientific apocalypticists to pretend they were drawing their portraits of the End in isolation from religion.
CHAPTER 3
POSTNUCLEAR FANTASIES
For modern Americans World War II was the last “good war,” and the “greatest generation” was responsible for winning it. The creation of the bomb during that war completed the transformation of warfare begun during the Civil War. Nuclear weapons could accomplish the extensive slaughter of enemy soldiers and civilians without casualties. Subsequent wars required Americans to hold back their technological advantage, a situation that created moral complexities and retroactively romanticized World War II. The bomb also marked the maturity of both scientific apocalypticism and dispensationalist premillennialism. Speculation about human extinction no longer required much imagination, and dispensationalists did not have to hunt for scientific theories to match prophetic descriptions.
For scientific apocalypticists, the atomic bomb turned the possibility of an undirected apocalypse into an apparent probability. Popular science fiction and nonfiction writers immediately began to offer visions of atomic destruction after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. For American premillennialists, the advent of the bomb was less of a watershed event. Frank Kermode, an English literary scholar, in The Sense of an Ending (1966) argues that “it would be childish to argue, in a discussion of how people behave under eschatological threat, that nuclear bombs are more real and make one experience more authentic crisis-feelings than armies in the sky.”1 The atomic bomb did not make the apocalypse any more “real” for conservative American Protestants, but it did give Bible prophecy analysts further evidence that the apocalypse was approaching. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, premillennialists had grasped that science could bolster their visions of the End. The atomic bomb became yet another way in which scientific revelation could support biblical apocalypticism, lending support to an already strong apocalyptic tradition. For scientific apocalypticists the atomic bomb brought the scientific apocalyptic to the forefront of popular culture. Despite these differences, scientific and religious apocalypticists were in agreement: the atomic bomb made the end of the world more likely than ever before.
Some science fiction writers anticipated this development before even scientists recognized it. In 1911 the physicist Ernest Rutherford proposed a new conception of the atom: most of the mass of an atom was contained at its core in what Rutherford called the nucleus. Combined with Einstein’s proposal that mass can turn into energy and vice versa, Rutherford’s study of radioactive materials led him to observe that enormous energy is contained within the nuclei of atoms.2 If the nuclei could be split or if the nuclei of two atoms could be fused, then that energy could be released, but Rutherford did not think that humans would ever discover how to control such energy.3
Despite Rutherford’s doubts, as early as 1914, H. G. Wells wrote in The World Set Free of a world transformed by atomic energy.4 This was a vision with lasting historical impact; the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard read it for the first time in 1932 and referred to it when he described building the first nuclear reactor in a scientific report.5 A scientist in Wells’s novel proclaims that when humanity harnesses the power of the atom, “that perpetual struggle for existence, that perpetual struggle
