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Keywords

Apocalypse, American culture, End-of-the-world, Pop culture, Religious themes

Abstract

March 1997: Thirty-nine people poison themselves, committing suicide in order to board an alien space ship allegedly trailing the Hale-Bopp Comet. December 2009: A fa iled cure for cancer sparks a pandemic which immediately kills most of the population and leaves the rest ravaged and cannibalistic. January 2000: The turn of the century threatens to crash the world's computers, wreaking havoc on civilized society. These scenarios, a mixture of fabricated and factual, represent the variety of apocalyptic myths in American culture. The popularity of end-of-the-world themes has risen in recent years. Numerous depictions of such events in well-known books, films, and music, both reflect and perpetuate the prevalence of this theme in American culture. Movies like 2012, books like the Left Behind series, and songs like Bob Dylan's ''I'd Hate to Be You on that Dreadful Day" focus on what happens when the modern world ends. The stories of the apocalypse range from the ridiculous to the dramatic and, as many critics have noted, from the religious to the secular. Conrad Ostwalt, a prominent analyst of pop culture apocalypse depictions, has written on this last phenomenon, saying that popular media "has captured and fostered the seculariza tion of the apocalyptic tradition."' Yet Ostwalt and others who share his opinion have overlooked the prevalence of religious themes even in contemporary end-of-the-world media, especially as they relate to the teaching of premillennial dispensationalism, the nineteenth century movement popularized by John Nelson Darby. Darby's ideas centered on the worsening of society until cataclysm and redemption at Jesus Christ's second coming, all concepts which appear both overtly and subliminally in modern depictions of the apocalypse. Their prevalence in twentieth and twenty-first century culture reveals the pervasiveness of traditional apocalyptic ideals in American society.

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