The world is falling apart.
Admittedly, the world has always been falling apart—since Christ’s resurrection, we’ve been living in the last age, and the New Testament is full of an apocalyptic expectation—but in our modern world, we seem to be spinning apart even faster. In our pop culture, either “winter is coming” or zombies are. Robots who look just like us are threatening genocide or a perverse “Capitol” is forcing our kids to kill each other. How to Survive the Apocalypse, by Alissa Wilkinson and Rob Joustra, looks at this theme in modern culture and what it might tell us about ourselves.
This is a book written by college professors, and I mean that in the best possible way. They define their terms, keep us engaged, and push us toward engaging the world like the best professors do. And, like all good professors, they are honest about their ideological approach: They are strongly neo-reformed and use Charles Taylor’s opus A Secular Age to interpret the culture that they address.
Indeed, How to Survive the Apocalypse is basically a fleshing out of Taylor’s description of the modern age (and its difference from a pre-modern era) through fictional ends of the world. Wilkinson and Joustra examine individualism and autonomy, a quest for and skepticism of authenticity, and the appropriate source of power (the questions and obsessions that Taylor sees at the root of modernity) through a half-dozen TV and movie apocalypses and dystopias, ranging from The Hunger Games to Her. These questions press all the more in our age, in which we seem to have lost the transcendent.
This secularity makes the turn to the end of the world strange because, as Wilkinson and Joustra note, “apocalypse demands ... religion.” In edge situations, we can’t escape from dealing with serious questions of morality or how the world ought to work: What it means to be human and what it means to be dead.
Our modern apocalypses are good at showing the world fraying but worse at showing us how we might stitch it back together. They set up countless situations where we need something beyond the human but can’t quite reach it.
Christians have to respond to the pathos of the apocalyptic mindset that dominates our TV and movie landscape. It points to a primarily moral crisis in which we feel that the center cannot hold and that anarchy is loosed upon the world. In light of this, Wilkinson and Joustra encourage us to practice what James Davison Hunter might call “faithful presence.” They want us to realize that in a deeply conflicted modern age, we can’t fix everything “but we can make better choices, choices that open up more promise than peril in our modern life together.”
How to Survive the Apocalypse is weakest when it doesn’t explore what these apocalyptic or dystopian themes could tell us about a pursuit of justice. Positions of collapse are also positions of opportunity. The neo-reformed social theory that Wilkinson and Joustra use is deeply conservative, in a very good sense: The world has plenty worth conserving. It can, however, tend to obscure our need to grow past the current structures of the world into a place that can more adequately reflect the beauty of God’s kingdom.
The end of the world has been coming for 2,000 years, so you’d think we’d be getting good at it. In the modern age, though, all of our anxieties manifest through the end of the world, but we don’t have anything to reveal at that end—we just see naked power at the root of it all. Wilkinson and Joustra use Taylor’s framework from A Secular Age to expound on that and, like the good professors they are, inspire readers to make some change while we still can.
Greg Williams works in digital communications at an advocacy organization in Washington, D.C. He tweets @gwilliamsster and blogs at fourthconfession.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!