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Signature: _____________________________ ______________ Lisa Roy Vox Date The Death Wish of Humanity: Religious and Scientific Apocalypticism in the United States, 1859-2001 By Lisa Roy Vox Doctor of Philosophy History _________________________________________ Patrick Allitt, Ph.D. Advisor _________________________________________ Fraser Harbutt, Ph.D. Committee Member _________________________________________ E. Brooks Holifield, Ph.D. Committee Member Accepted: _________________________________________ Lisa A. Tedesco, Ph.D. Dean of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies ___________________ Date The Death Wish of Humanity: Religious and Scientific Apocalypticism in the United States, 1859-2001 By Lisa Roy Vox B.A., Rhodes College, 1999 M.A., Emory University, 2004 Advisor: Patrick N. Allitt, Ph.D. An abstract of A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies of Emory University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History 2010 Abstract The Death Wish of Humanity: Religious and Scientific Apocalypticism in the United States, 1859-2001 By Lisa Roy Vox Scholars writing about modern American apocalyptic beliefs tend to separate the secular from the religious. The most prominent form of popular religious apocalypticism in the twentieth century U.S., dispensational premillennialism, developed among American conservative Protestants at the same time that the beginnings of a scientific apocalyptic was being articulated in the late nineteenth century. These two forms of apocalypticism matured alongside each other in the United States, ultimately converging on the twin threats of nuclear war and environmental destruction after World War II. Though their adherents usually differed politically, there is a surprising amount of correlation between the two accounts of the end. Conservative evangelicals writing on Bible prophecy believed that scientific revelations about the effects of nuclear weapons as well as environmental threats provided insight into how to interpret prophetic books of the Bible like Revelation. Scientific apocalypticists, in the form of scientists writing popular works and science fiction authors grappling with the same issues, struggled to find solutions to these threats and give meaning to human existence in the face of such catastrophe. The result was that American religious and scientific visions of the end, far from being diametrically opposed to one another, became more compatible during the twentieth century. This continued right up until the millennium, when the slow fracturing of scientific authority that took place over the last half of the twentieth century began to be reflected in both the religious and scientific apocalyptics. The Death Wish of Humanity: Religious and Scientific Apocalypticism in the United States, 1859-2001 By Lisa Roy Vox B.A., Rhodes College, 1999 M.A., Emory University, 2004 Advisor: Patrick N. Allitt, Ph.D. A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies of Emory University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History 2010 Acknowledgments During the course of researching and writing this dissertation, I have acquired many debts. The employees of the Carondelet Branch of the St. Louis Public Library, especially Jennifer Halla-Sindelar, helped me to procure an abundance of books in the last two years of my work. My two readers, Dr. Fraser Harbutt and Dr. Brooks Holifield, provided me with invaluable support throughout the process. Dr. Harbutt encouraged me throughout my time at Emory, while Dr. Holifield helped me think through many of the major ideas at stake in this dissertation. My advisor, Dr. Patrick Allitt, was patient and supportive; his detailed commentary made this dissertation much stronger, and I could not have either embarked upon or completed this project without his invaluable guidance and consistent advocacy. My parents, Randy and Rosa Roy, gave me emotional and financial assistance throughout graduate school; they urged me on during difficult times. My husband, Ford Vox, watched apocalyptic films with me, listened to long soliloquies on the end of the world, and made sure I had the support I needed to finish this dissertation. Table of Contents Introduction 1 1 The Origins of Modern Apocalypticism 28 2 Science and the End of the World, 1859-1945 56 3 The Bomb: Fiery Ends and Strategic Dilemmas 106 4 Environmental Disasters and the Judgment of Humanity 148 5 Converging Apocalyptic Fears: The Eighties 190 6 Approaching the Millennium 239 Epilogue 283 Bibliography 290 1 Introduction Two seemingly different understandings of the history and destiny of man emerged during the late nineteenth century in the United States. One was based on the theory of evolution as articulated by Darwin, while the other emerged among conservative evangelicals who adopted a systematic version of Bible prophecy known as dispensational premillennialism. Contemporaries believed that these two understandings of the world were diametrically opposed to one another, aided by the American scientist (born in England) John William Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science in 1874 and historian Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom in 1896.1 These two works established the idea that there was an unbridgeable rift between religion and science. Modern scholars have largely rejected this thesis, sometimes called the “conflict thesis.” Ronald L. Numbers, a historian of science who has written on the American historiography of this idea, notes: In the form proposed by White and Draper and adopted by countless others, it [the conflict thesis] assumes the existence of two static entities, ‘science’ and ‘religion,’ thus ignoring the fact that many of the debates focused on the questions of what should be allowed to define them; it distorts a complex relationship that rarely, if ever, found scientists and theologians in simple opposition; it celebrates the triumphs of science in whiggish fashion; and, all too often, it fails to treat religious ideas and institutions with the respect accorded to the realm of science.2 Elsewhere, Numbers has argued along with fellow historian David C. Lindberg that science-and-religion studies need to approach the relationship without recourse to the simplistic warfare metaphor. They write, “in the future we must not ask 'Who was the 1 Note that Draper targeted Roman Catholicism as being much more oppressive than Protestantism historically towards science. 2 Ronald L. Numbers, “Science and Religion,” Osiris 1, 2nd series (1985): 80. See also George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism 1870-1925, new ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 212. 2 aggressor' but 'How were Christianity and science affected by their encounter?'”3 An analysis of the apocalyptic theories of conservative evangelical Christians, scientists, and science fiction writers illustrates how science and religion have interacted in modern America without necessarily existing in conflict. As scholars have repudiated the conflict thesis, they have reconceptualized the relationship between science and religion. At one extreme in defining this relationship lies the opinion of Stephen Jay Gould. Gould, a paleontologist, argues science and religion do not actually conflict: “Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings, and values—subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve.”4 Gould proposes a “respectful noninterference” between science and religion, which he names NOMA, or Non-Overlapping Magisteria.5 At the opposing end of the spectrum are astronomer Carl Sagan and physicist Stephen Hawking, both of whom see science as answering questions that Gould would consider in the purview of religion; they each hint at a modern version of the “conflict thesis.” Hawking describes attending a 1981 conference on cosmology at the Vatican in A Brief History of Time (1988). When the pope asked the cosmologists not to inquire into what existed prior to the Big Bang (thereby respecting the work of God), Hawking relates: “I was glad then that he did not know the subject of the talk I had just given at the conference—the possibility that space-time was finite but had no boundary, which means 3 David C. Lindberg and Ronald Numbers, “Beyond War and Peace: A Reappraisal of the Encounter between Christianity and Science,” Church History 55 (1986): 354. 4 Stephen