A Sociologist Appeals to Theological Hope in Postmodern Apocalypses

Abstract

A Sociologist Appeals to Theological Hope in Postmodern Apocalypses Sarah MacMillen When one reads the newspapers, apocalyptic narratives are overwhelming. From overpopulation and global warming, humans are threatened with natural collapse. In the Middle East, reactionaries, supported by the tenets of an apocalyptic Christian Zionism, dollars support the ushering in of a religious end time. Hugh Gusterson’s research even observed how some Christian fundamentalists find their way into conscious hopes for the end time while working on nuclear technologies in the deserts of the southwest corner of the United States. Politically, we have moved from Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” to Samuel Huntington’s doomed “clash of civilizations.” In the average American’s “tube scan,” one can find references to Nostradamus’ predictions or the Aztec cosmology’s end time in year 2012 in a weeknight’s television programming. The gap between “liberal” and “conservative” seems to widen, as predicted in James Davison Hunter’s book Culture Wars as the Tea Party threatens an apocalyptic, revolutionary terminus to the status quo. American and world politics present themselves with a fascination with apocalyptic narratives. It seems that the secular optimism of the 1990s has eclipsed into a post‐secular grasp of the certainty of reactionary political and religious belief. In this context, it is so easy to forget the voice of tradition. In postmodernity, the claims of science and tradition have been debunked, lost to a groundless state of being‐in‐the‐world where nothing can be counted on. In this context, reactionary religious belief gives a ground to many in the face of political and natural fallout. After the political–religious disaster of September 11th, researchers at the University of Chicago found that America’s reaction was to cling more strongly to religious communities and beliefs.1 But what kinds of beliefs and supports are the contemporary sphere offering? Certainty is offered. As a sociologist, I have recognized the limitation of modern and secular solutions to the various anxieties produced as a result of modernity. Religious demographics show a large shift to more conservative faiths among young people, largely in the turn to Orthodoxy and fundamentalism.2 As Jay Tolson has explored, young people are looking for “structure” in response to the perceived broken promises of modernity. This is prominent not only in the American religious landscape but also in various Muslim countries throughout the world. As Peter Berger and his colleagues have illustrated, there is throughout the world a resurgence of conservative religious frames of meaning for hundreds of millions of religious adherents throughout the globe. Secularization, as Rodney Stark has claimed, is dead (Stark, 1999). Berger retracted his secularization thesis, so famous from his book The Sacred Canopy. What this “new world order” of reactionary religion offers is certainty. In the traditional description of the rise of fundamentalism, an old trope has been used. Modernity is characterized as a time of upheaval and uncertainty (most famously addressed by Wuthnow). This comes from a long history of scholarship outlining how the alienated temporal perspective of modernity, with its displacement from the bosom of Gemeinschaft to the emptiness of Gesellschaft as outlined by Tönnies (1961) and its concomitant bleak Durkheimian anomie, motivates a person to retreat from the overabiding ambiance of uncertainty (Durkheim, 1973). From our theoretical and historical perspective that engages a long legacy of writing, certainty then presents itself as a particularly non‐modern accent to reality. We argue that certainty introduces itself as actually a value coming from the enlightenment, from modernity. Sociological discourse then finds its limitation on countering these reactionary movements because sociology cannot argue or define what “faith” is. Sociology is then hampered to correct or critique reactionary religion. An appeal to theology must be made. What the sociologist Adam Seligman has suggested sociologically (see Modernity’s Wager), although nuanced with the claims of tradition in his back pocket, is that contemporary religion’s stress on certainty is not a traditional appeal to the quest for truth from an orthodox religious point of view. Certainty is a modern construct. When religious reactionaries speak and argue for the certainty of end times or of the certainty of reactionary principles, they are borrowing from...