From presidential bluster about nuclear “fire and fury” to experts’ increasingly frantic warnings about shrinking polar ice and ecosystem collapse, America's abiding obsession with the apocalyptic shows no signs of abating. In Existential Threats, University of Massachusetts historian Lisa Vox does an excellent job of contextualizing the contemporary fixation on the end times by exploring the interplay between American secular and sacred apocalyptic discourses from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Vox argues that Americans of all stripes have used the apocalyptic as a way to process the societal implications of major scientific discoveries ranging from Darwin's theory of evolution to climate change. Apocalyptic anxieties, whether they are fire-and-brimstone visions of divine punishment or warnings of ecological or nuclear devastation, are intensely revealing. As she recounts these nightmares, Vox persuasively concludes that “Americans have tended to see the end of the United States as only possible with the end of the world” (182–83).

Vox is profoundly influenced by the argument advanced by Peter Harrison's The Territories of Science and Religion (2015) and Ronald L. Numbers's 1985 Osiris article “Science and Religion” that characterizing the relationship between scientific and religious worldviews as one of “war” obscures substantial overlap between the two. The mutual and vocal acrimony between proponents of scientific doomsdays like the “nuclear-winter” thesis of the early 1980s and the Bible prophecy popularizers who warn of the Tribulation that will precede Christ's return belies the fact that both are interpreting “technological threats to humanity through an eschatological framework” that can be expressed through “the languages of science and religion” (x). Vox's description of fundamentalists scouring popular-science books to substantiate their biblical prophecies and science fiction writers who don the “mantle of prophecy” (xiii) to urge humanity to atone for its technological and environmental sins testifies to the lengthy history of dialogue and appropriation between the two strands of the American apocalyptic.

Vox's “Technological Era” begins in the latter half of the nineteenth century with British imports: dispensational premillennialism, a systematic eschatological theology, and Darwinism, which challenged traditional assumptions that a divinely created world could only be ended through divine means. Having discussed the American apocalyptic's transatlantic roots, Vox charts its evolution through juxtaposition against a British apocalyptic tradition that stretches back to the funereal “Last Man” novels of the early nineteenth-century Romantics. Prior to 1945, the American scientific apocalyptic was positively cheerful compared to a British sensibility coloured by fears of imperial decline and racial eclipse. Technological know-how could be counted on to deliver America from imagined ecological or Malthusian apocalypses. This optimism gradually ebbed away as Americans grappled with the responsibilities of superpower status under the shadow of the Bomb. Vox contends that “Scientific imaginings in the United States have [now] attained a gloomier sensibility on par with the British apocalyptic” (168). The religious apocalyptic has become bleaker too; America's prophetic role has dwindled as debate rages over whether the long-promised Tribulation has already begun (185–88).

The twin threats of the Bomb and environmental catastrophe loom large over the second half of Vox's narrative that details the “darkening tint of Americans’ formerly rose-coloured glasses” (181). In a nuanced elaboration on the late Paul Boyer's argument in Fallout (1998) that distinct waves of American engagement with nuclear weaponry's apocalyptic potential can be discerned, Vox argues that apocalyptic concerns did not subside alongside nuclear fear; instead, “nuclear awareness provoked environmental awareness” (75). The following discussion of the fractious relationship between Bible prophecy believers and the environmental movement is one of the book's highlights. Vox details how prophecy popularizers’ consistent conflation of environmentalists with the New Age movement, which they perceived as a satanic conspiracy, exacerbated mistrust between religious conservatives and environmentalists.

Existential Threats tells its story with the help of vast quantities of Bible prophecy literature, popular science and science fiction material. This impressively broad source base sometimes requires sacrifice in analytical depth. Discussion of filmic and television science fiction is frequently limited to recitation of plot rather than analysis of the apocalypse's visual representation on-screen or how these differ from literary doomsdays. Additionally, the survivalist ideology that spawned a consumerist “prepper” subculture dedicated to purchasing the right tools for overcoming the worst of civilization breakdown feels underexplored. These are minor caveats; Vox has identified an impressive corpus of American apocalyptic literature and pinpointed the subtle ways it evolved in response to major scientific and technological innovations. As well as being crucial reading for scholars of apocalyptic culture, her account of the bickering and borrowing that occurs between scientific and religious doomsayers will be most useful to those interested in the point at which the borders between religious and scientific discourses blur.