In one form of apocalyptic belief, the world is expected to deteriorate before it can be redeemed. This can foster a passive resignation about the world's problems: these are the "end times," so why bother? Why repair a house already slated for demolition?
Another form is more hopeful: a reforming attitude that reads history as something to be improved, even perfected, in preparation for what is to come. This has fuelled movements of real moral energy—the abolitionists and social reformers of the nineteenth century, the Social Gospel, the liberation theologies, the cadences of the American civil-rights movement with its confidence that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. Some of the most admirable moral campaigns of the modern era drew their stamina from precisely this expectation. A person convinced that history is going somewhere may work harder to help it arrive.
And there is a third possibility. The historian Norman Cohn, surveying the millenarian movements of medieval and early modern Europe, found something closer to the opposite of resignation: expectation of an imminent end more often produced upheaval—prophetic insurgencies, the seizure of cities, the settling of scores against those cast as agents of the enemy. Apocalyptic conviction did not put people to sleep; it put them in the streets.
So eschatology is not one thing, and it does not always make people passive. Rather, it destabilizes. It can send people out into the world or withdraw them from it, and which way it breaks seems to depend largely on whether believers understand themselves as hastening the end or merely as surviving it. What the two have in common is that both loosen the ordinary hold of the future on present conduct. My concern in what follows is with the quieter of the two, because in our own moment it is the one doing the most damage.
A 2022 Pew survey found that 39% of U.S. adults said humanity is "living in the end times," and that this belief tracked with lower concern about climate change: those who thought we were living in the end times were less likely than others to call climate change an extremely or very serious problem (51% versus 62%). While some of this effect is due to political leaning rather than religious belief, the political scientists David Barker and David Bearce found that belief in Christian end-times theology independently predicted weaker support for action on global warming, even after political partisanship was accounted for—an effect they attribute to a shortened "shadow of the future," the sense that there is little point in bearing present costs for a long-term benefit, since the world will not be around to enjoy it.
Yet the same Pew report also found that 80% of religiously affiliated Americans agreed that God gave humans a duty to protect and care for the Earth, and that roughly seven in ten Americans overall said the Earth is sacred—a view most common among mainline Protestants and Catholics, but shared by a majority even of atheists. The strictly premillennial position—that the world will deteriorate until Jesus returns—is held by a modest minority. So religious belief does not make people indifferent to the planet; the effect is narrower than that, confined largely to a small minority holding one particular doctrine.
Apocalyptic predictions have a record of repeated failure. Specific, confident predictions of the end have been made for two thousand years. William Miller's followers awaited Christ's return in October 1844; the non-event became known as the Great Disappointment, and the movement did not dissolve but recalculated, concluding that the predicted event had occurred in heaven rather than on earth. Harold Camping named May 21, 2011, and when nothing happened, revised to October. The pattern was studied directly by Leon Festinger and his colleagues, who infiltrated a small group awaiting rescue by flying saucer from a flood prophesied for December 1954. When the flood did not come, the members did not abandon the belief; they proselytized more energetically than before. Disconfirmation, it turns out, does not reliably weaken a sacred conviction—it is far more likely to be absorbed, reinterpreted, and used as fuel. This is the same self-sealing logic I described in connection with other unfounded beliefs, operating at the scale of history.
At its rare and lurid extreme, apocalyptic conviction can turn lethal. Heaven's Gate, a fringe new religious movement that fused Christianity with UFO mythology, ended in the mass suicide of 39 of its members near San Diego in March 1997, timed to the passage of the Hale-Bopp comet, which they took for the sign of a spacecraft come to carry them to the "Next Level." Such episodes are rare, and it would be unfair to let a doomsday cult stand in for the millions of ordinary believers who hold some version of end-times expectation and lead quiet, decent, engaged lives. But it belongs to the same family as the medieval upheavals Cohn described—the active pole of a volatile belief, where the end is not merely awaited but met halfway.
The graver harm, though, is the quiet one: letting the world itself deteriorate—a destabilizing climate, a fraying environment—and handing the damage to the generations that follow. It is like leaving your campsite fouled and your fire smouldering on the reasoning that the whole forest will soon burn down anyway—forgetting that the blaze may never come, and that the next people to pitch their tents are left to live in the mess you made.
Even if the world were ending, there would be something profoundly dishonourable in greeting it with passive resignation—or worse, with a quiet flicker of comfort—rather than with help. My own field has a discipline founded on precisely the opposite premise. Palliative care begins where cure ends: when the outcome is certain and the end is close, the work does not stop, it changes. Comfort, presence, the relief of pain, the dignity of the person in the bed—these matter more as the end approaches, not less. No one in that field has ever argued that a dying patient is not worth the trouble. If that is the right posture toward a life that is certainly ending, it is hard to see why it would be the wrong posture toward the world, even if we were in our last days.
And here I return to a thread from the previous chapter. A truly admirable person does not do good in order to get into heaven; they do good because it is the right thing to do—for the intrinsic worth of the act and the welfare of others, not for the prize one might earn after death. That was Rabia's insight, set against the whole economy of reward and punishment, and it applies with equal force to the end of a single life and to the imagined end of the world. To labour for a world one will not live to see, or that one believes will not last, is not futility. It may be the purest form the moral impulse can take.
References
Barker, D. C., & Bearce, D. H. (2013). End-times theology, the shadow of the future, and public resistance to addressing global climate change. Political Research Quarterly, 66(2), 267–279. https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912912442243
A multivariate analysis finding that Americans who hold Christian end-times beliefs are less supportive of governmental action on climate change, even after controlling for party, ideology, and other factors. The authors attribute the effect to a shortened "shadow of the future"—a reluctance to bear present costs for benefits one does not expect to see realized. The effect is modest but survives statistical controls that eliminate many similar associations.
Cohn, N. (1970). The pursuit of the millennium: Revolutionary millenarians and mystical anarchists of the Middle Ages(Rev. ed.). Oxford University Press.
The classic history of medieval and early modern apocalyptic movements, from the flagellants to the Anabaptist seizure of Münster. Cohn shows that the expectation of an imminent end has more often produced revolutionary upheaval and violence than passive withdrawal, frequently directed against groups cast as agents of the enemy. It remains the strongest evidence that eschatological fervour is volatile rather than reliably quietist.
Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1956). When prophecy fails: A social and psychological study of a modern group that predicted the destruction of the world. University of Minnesota Press.
The classic field study of a small apocalyptic group whose prophesied flood and flying-saucer rescue failed to arrive. Rather than abandoning the belief, committed members increased their proselytizing—the observation that gave rise to the theory of cognitive dissonance. It documents the central paradox of failed prophecy: disconfirmation, for the deeply committed, often strengthens conviction rather than dissolving it.
Pew Research Center. (2022). How religion intersects with Americans' views on the environment.https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/11/17/how-religion-intersects-with-americans-views-on-the-environment/
The source of the survey figures cited here, based on 10,156 U.S. adults surveyed in April 2022. It reports that 39% believe humanity is living in the end times and that this belief is associated with modestly lower concern about climate change, while also finding that 80% of religiously affiliated Americans endorse a God-given duty to protect the Earth and that about seven in ten Americans consider the Earth sacred. The report is careful to note that the climate association is heavily entangled with political partisanship.
Zeller, B. E. (2014). Heaven's Gate: America's UFO religion. New York University Press.
The standard scholarly account of the Heaven's Gate movement, its synthesis of Christian millenarianism and ufology, and the 1997 mass suicide of its 39 members. Zeller situates the group within the wider landscape of American new religious movements rather than treating it as a mere aberration. His account is notable for taking the members' theology seriously as theology rather than reducing it to pathology.
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