For much of the history of the United States, Europeans have stereotyped Americans as being annoyingly optimistic. Americans described their new era of democracy as a novus ordo seclorum—a new order for the ages—as the US one-dollar bill states. When he visited the United States in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville was struck by how Americans “have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man. . . . They admit that what appears to them to be good to-day may be superseded by something better to-morrow.” A century later, the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair offered exhibits like Homes of Tomorrow that cast a vision for an art deco future built with prefabricated materials and equipped with personal helicopter pads.

Underlying this American optimism was a complex array of trends and influences. Prominent among them was the theological belief in postmillennialism coupled with the modern Enlightenment notion of progress. Postmillennialism, the Protestant eschatological view that the kingdom of God would be brought about through the perfection of society, was embraced by American elites and commoners alike. The increasing complexity of technology, communication, social organization, and scientific knowledge through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries all fit a common interpretation of the world. In the words of historian James Moorhead, this interpretation allowed for the dual accomplishments of “the gradual evangelical conquest of the world and the triumph of secular progress.” Likewise, the Enlightenment notion of progress regarded history as containing a linear arc that tended toward freedom.

Because of the unprecedented superiority of the US military and economy after World War II, American belief in progress continued to increase, and in some places the belief persists. For example, the Harvard professor Steven Pinker has argued in the helpfully titled Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress that almost all macro trends about life expectancy, war, technology, and wealth are moving upward just as the Enlightenment philosophers predicted they would.

Yet even as progress has animated much of American culture (and elsewhere), it has a long history of being questioned as well. W.E.B. Du Bois, for instance, was attuned to how African Americans did not fit into—and suffered at the expense of—many arguments for progress. In his famous The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, he wrote that when he returned to a log schoolhouse he once taught at after ten years, it was gone. “In its place stood Progress; and Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly.” Later he explained, “So woefully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of ‘swift’ and ‘slow’ in human doing, and the limits of human perfectibility, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science.”

Progress and its discontents, then, have been with Americans for a while. Even critics like Du Bois took for granted notions of “human progress.” In a classic statement of his controversial “talented tenth” strategy of promoting an educated African American class of leaders, Du Bois wrote that “progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a push, a surging forward of the exceptional man, and the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage-ground.” What we might credit to Du Bois is a recognition of the limits of progress as conceived by its largely Protestant and elite proponents—a progress that was, as deployed in public discussion and scholarship, as much propaganda as reality.

Now the mood seems to have changed from progress to pessimism. Decline has been on the minds of Americans for at least a few decades. Beginning with the attacks on September 11, 2001, most Americans have interpreted what has transpired since as a loss: from the Iraq War to the Great Recession to contested presidential elections, from Enron’s collapse to church sex abuse to #MeToo, from rising crime rates to renewed international tensions. Even signs of seeming progress—social media and smartphones, for example—have since turned sour.

Observations of decline inform narratives of decline. The threat of climate change irreparably harming life on earth now dominates the concerns of many Americans. The widening gap in income inequality has been described as beckoning a “new Gilded Age.” Moral and cultural decay is invoked by Christians, to be sure, but also by many public intellectuals, who cite rising rates of loneliness, decreasing levels of young peoples’ self-esteem, and perceptions of a bleak future for younger generations in an age of cancel culture and limitless pornography, among other novelties.

Zombie Christian Eschatology

But progress and its inverse have a deeper history, one insightfully captured by the German philosopher Karl Löwith. Born in Munich in 1897 to a Christian family of Jewish descent, Löwith lived through some of the most destructive years of modern European history, which made him skeptical of claims to progress. In his 1949 book Meaning in History, he argued that modern secular notions of progress are, essentially, derivative of Christian eschatology. They contain all the promise of a grand purpose in history but without the theological underpinnings that give this purpose meaning. “The modern historical consciousness” is confused, he concluded, because “we have a historical consciousness which is as Christian by derivation as it is non-Christian by consequence.”

The animating power of this Christian eschatological vision was not necessarily conscious—in fact, some of the most ardent promoters of progress understood themselves to be entirely secular in their thinking. Yet Löwith insisted that anywhere that the past was presented as “events and successions” that “are unified and directed toward ultimate meaning,” history and theology were both in play. “We of today, concerned with the unity of universal history and with its progress toward an ultimate goal or at least toward a ‘better world,’” he concluded, “are still in the line of prophetic and messianic monotheism; we are still Jews and Christians, however little we may think of ourselves in those terms.”

In the American context, narratives of progress and decline also exhibit the long-standing American use of “jeremiads” dating to the Puritan settlers. In 1978 Canadian scholar Sacvan Bercovitch published his now classic text The American Jeremiad. Named after the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, the jeremiad, Bercovitch argues, is the “frame-story” explaining the gap between the promise of the utopian millennial kingdom of Christian eschatology and the failures of contemporary society to live up to that vision because of human sin. The “rhetoric of promise as threat, doomsday and millennium entwined,” Bercovitch writes—“that vision of America as an unfolding prophecy—became in time the foundational national story.” This vision recalls Löwith’s observation that “in the Hebrew and Christian view of history the past is a promise to the future; consequently, the interpretation of the past becomes a prophecy in reverse, demonstrating the past as a meaningful ‘preparation’ for the future.”

For his part, Bercovitch detected the jeremiad in the 1960s protests of the political Left and later in the cultural critiques of the political Right. The jeremiad, in other words, is a bipartisan rhetorical device. Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign slogan, “Change We Can Believe In,” fits just as well in this mode. “The circular logic of the jeremiad” calls attention to a set of unchanging national ideals and sees Obama’s election as constituting change back in this direction and away from decline. Even as its message was intended to rebuff the Obama era, “Make America Great Again” is cut from the same cloth.Today, the American jeremiad logic still has animating power and follows a set pattern: identifying the root cause for decline, diagnosing reasons for this state of affairs, emphasizing human agency as both the source and part of the solution, warning about what will happen if we do nothing but also noting the progress that could be accomplished if we act, and finally calling for tangible action that is individual but which contributes to systematic change.

Löwith’s critique of secular progress as zombie Christian eschatology and Bercovitch’s explanation of the American jeremiad are good points of departure for thinking about modern notions of worsening fortunes. Might we apply these concepts to American culture today? Can we say, even in an American society disaffiliating with organized religion at a historic pace (including and especially Christianity), that seemingly “secular” narratives of decline that dominate our culture are also indebted to Christian eschatology?

Haunted by Premillennialism

If surface-level similarities between religious and secular narratives are not entirely convincing, a historical lineage makes the connection more concrete. Just as secular notions of progress were indebted to optimistic postmillennial expectations of the kingdom of God, today’s secular notions of decline have intriguing associations to premillennialism, a competing school of eschatology that anticipates the world’s descent into chaos as a precursor to the second coming of Christ.

The idea of the premillennial return of Christ, that the second coming would herald the establishment of the millennial kingdom on earth, dated to the church fathers but only began to take on mass popularity in the United States in the nineteenth century. While before the Civil War the postmillennial revivalist Charles Finney called for the United States to abolish slavery as a “great national sin” to usher in the kingdom of God, after the war the premillennial revivalist Dwight L. Moody called for Christians to focus on saving souls and described the world as a “wrecked vessel” hopelessly replete with sin until the second coming.

Premillennialism influenced many twentieth-century fundamentalists and evangelicals. Through the influence of the Plymouth Brethren and American revivalists in the late nineteenth century, a subtradition called dispensationalism popularized a specific set of end-times teachings that became familiar to many Americans. Teachings included an any-moment rapture, a prominent role for the Jewish people and nation of Israel, a seven-year tribulation, an Antichrist world dictator, and a Battle of Armageddon that would culminate with the second coming. Through proponents of this view like Moody and productions like the Scofield Reference Bible, first published in 1909, dispensational eschatology became for millions of Americans the default understanding of the biblical end times.

Expectations of a sudden end to the world grew in popularity even during the height of American optimism about progress. The atomic bomb explosions in 1945, for example, pointed to, in the words of historian Paul Boyer, a wider cultural “renewal of eschatological vision.” This vision, for many, encouraged a “turn from social concerns toward issues of individual salvation and personal morality.” Boyer recounts an example of a Saturday Evening Post story in 1946 that offered vignettes of the moment when a global atomic blast destroys all life. “In the process,” he observes, the story unwittingly “echoed countless evangelical sermons in which the last trump catches heedless sinners unawares.”

Premillennial influence in American culture expanded in the late twentieth century, spearheaded by the 1970 publication of Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth, a popular presentation of the same ideas propounded by Moody and Scofield. In truth, Lindsey’s book, along with Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb (1968) and Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1970), was part of a booming cottage industry of “futurology” that prognosticated a looming cataclysmic break in the world or society and pondered what Americans could do to forestall the worst. In many ways these works mirrored the tradition of the American jeremiad. This cottage industry has been a crucial facet of American culture ever since.

The Late Great Planet Earth, though, was the most successful of the bunch, the best-selling non-fiction book of the decade according to the New York Times. It aimed to reach the “now generation” of baby boomers and spurred the mainlining of premillennial-inflected cultural productions, politics, and rhetoric into American culture. The resultant wave of “pop dispensationalism” in Lindsey’s wake filtered into Christian novels, comic books, films, television, and music. It also permeated broader cultural conversations.

Premillennialism, to follow Löwith’s trajectory, infiltrated American popular culture in secularized forms. For example, the works of Lindsey and others have since shaped much of the apocalyptic and dystopian genre of films, which according to one count grew from thirteen annual releases in the 1950s to more than a hundred in the 2010s. Dispensationalism’s influences range from Rapture-Palooza (2013), a Hollywood comedy drawing on themes of the rapture, the Antichrist, and literal prophecy fulfillment, to more sober offerings such as the HBO television series The Leftovers (2014–2017), which follows survivors of an unexplainable rapture-like event. The opening scene of the Marvel film Avengers: Endgame (2019) begins with the aftermath of the “snapture,” named so by fans as a plot device in which the movie’s villain snaps his finger to disappear in an instant half of all humanity. The first minutes of the movie are essentially a classic rapture scene as pioneered by films like A Thief in the Night (1972).

We might refer to this type of influence on otherwise non-Christian popular culture as evidence of the “soft” power of Christian eschatology on negative visions of the future. An example of “harder” cultural influence in the same medium is the most commercially successful end-times film of the 1970s, The Omen (1976). The film was commissioned by producer Harvey Bernhard, a recent convert to evangelical Christianity who drew on creative variations of dispensational theology to develop the film’s plot: the Antichrist is a human being, fulfilling biblical prophecy in a literal fashion, with the climactic plot centred on the ancient city of Tel Megiddo (the site of Armageddon). To cap it off, the film was released on June 6, 1976—the sixth day of the sixth month of the sixth year—to make sure “666” made it into the marketing. Actors clarified during the film’s press tour that they did not interpret the Bible’s apocalyptic passages literally but did believe in the Bible’s depiction of good and evil. This blurred distinction in one of the decade’s most successful movies is a testament to the rapidity of some of dispensationalism’s most marketable concepts entering popular culture.The important insight inspired by Löwith is that modern narratives of decline are indebted to Christian eschatology. These debts involve examples of both “soft” and “hard” power that stretch from the patterns of thought that structure American political calls to action to the way American popular culture en masse has been taken down the road of a premillennial “story frame.” The latter has produced complex stories of human interest, absurdist and comedic social commentaries and critiques, and haunting dystopias that create deeper resonances in the collective imagination of a culture.

Looking for a Deus ex Machina

A long-standing criticism of premillennialism is that it is fatalistic, essentially waiting on God to intervene while the world burns. Even though examples of adherents being highly engaged in society abound, outsiders consistently wonder what role human agency can play in a foreordained prophetic timeline. It is no surprise, given the blurry lines between religious and secular narratives of decline, that parallel concerns have been raised about human agency in the face of climate change. In a 2021 poll of ten thousand people under the age of thirty, more than half said climate change made them feel “afraid, sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and/or guilty.” A persistent sense of this feeling has been fittingly termed in media outlets as “apocalypse fatigue.”

Yet this fatigue is only half the story. In our contemporary sense of crisis, which continues the tradition of the American jeremiad, the capacity of humans to reverse the situation is open to debate. Apocalypse fatigue and calls to action can each be heard on a range of issues, often the same issues, whether climate change, gun violence, abortion, or political corruption. Who is right?

The same tension lies at the heart of Christian eschatology. The same conservative Christian leaders in the 1970s who sought to activate evangelicals into politics also preached God’s foreordained destruction of the world. Jerry Falwell Sr., Pat Robertson, and Tim LaHaye all believed in the literal fulfillment of biblical prophecy. But they also spent the 1970s and 1980s innovating their arguments and analysis to convince a larger segment of evangelicals to become active in politics.

For instance, in his 1980 book The Battle for the Mind, LaHaye introduced the concept of the “pre-tribulation Tribulation” and merged it with the threat of “secular humanism” to argue that the prophetic timeline hinged on Christian action. He stipulated a near-future era of Christian persecution (potentially preceding the rapture) that could be defeated with enough concerted effort on the part of Christians. This analysis called for urgent Christian counter-organizing on issues such as public education, abortion, media bias, and foreign policy.

The example of Tim LaHaye prompts a deeper challenge for Americans of all persuasions and political perspectives: how to structure political, moral, and social discourse within secularized narratives of decline. It is a pre-eminent “wicked problem” in today’s American culture.

For indeed, Löwith’s point in Meaning in History was not simply that moderns were deploying Christian theological concepts in their “secular” notions of progress. His point was more subtle and more chastening: “The modern mind has not made up its mind whether it should be Christian or pagan. It sees with one eye of faith and one of reason.” This meant that the “modern mind” had the worst of both worlds: “Its vision is necessarily dim in comparison with either” option on its own. Modern American narratives of decline operate in this poorly lit space too, being Christian and non-Christian in inspiration. One of the useful functions of pointing to a better past is to provide meaning amid a seemingly chaotic existence. Yet the significance is embedded not necessarily in the stories themselves but rather within broader frames of meaning.

Here is the malfunction of the modern American narrative of decline: we exist, to some extent at least, in a story of our own making that is opaque, by historical design, as to why the world is broken and where the world is headed. A jeremiad with no Jeremiah is like original sin without the cross, bestowing a set of penetrating diagnoses of the problem but no path to redemption except in the immanent frame. Americans may live in a culture influenced by secularized premillennial expectations, but then what plays the role of the second coming?

Ancient Greek plays often ended with a deus ex machina, a “god from the machine” that would solve a seemingly unsolvable plot. From one perspective, the second coming is a Christian fulfillment of this ancient story device. If American culture is animated by secularized narratives of decline, then it also succumbs to Löwith’s diagnosis of being “Christian by derivation” and “non-Christian by consequence.” In other words, we see the unsolvable problems, but, like so many other moderns, we regard the deus ex machina as a cheap and false consolation.

While many such consolations have been cheap and false, it might be that many Americans secretly prefer the opacity of “one eye of faith and one of reason.” In this sense, the double vision of secularized narratives of decline can be as comforting as it is disquieting. The dim illumination, Löwith might surmise if he were with us today, is soothing in its gloom. Yet so long as we see the Christian shape of history as a linear story with an ultimate purpose, we cannot escape the prospect that, without any form of deus ex machina to save us, what is left is only judgment.