A Case Against Christian Doomerism

For the past few years, I’ve had the honor of teaching undergrads CH101 & 102. But as someone who works primarily in the theology end of academics, I typically skew toward big picture lectures that focus on large-scale historical trends that result from or advance theological innovations. As such, I give several Tom Holland, Rodney Stark-inspired, firehose lectures on the myriad ways Christianity altered the course of history—almost invariably for the better. And somewhere between learning how Greeks used to leave unwanted infants outside of trash heaps and the likelihood of being born a slave or dying from a disease antibiotics have now rendered obsolete, several students comment something like this: “I’m so thankful that I’m alive now and not then.” 

Students of all backgrounds, ages, and ethnicities inevitably build final presentations around the novelty of this idea—as if a thankfulness for being alive now had never occurred to them. For many of them, it’s the first time they’ve even been granted permission to wonder out loud whether their moment in history actually isn’t the worst of the bunch.  

The reality is that the world really isn’t as uniquely terrible as the average internet think piece or primetime news segment makes it out to be. It isn’t particularly good—but it’s not unilaterally bad. There’re many things that make living and breathing nowadays uniquely advantageous. 

One of the easiest showcases for this truism that I offer my students is simply the lightbulb. In 1^st century Rome, if you wanted to produce light after sundown, you had to acquire candles and matches that would’ve cost the equivalent of 12-20 USD per candle and only produced about 12-15 lumens. Worse, without building codes, a candle toppling over and setting fire to the whole neighborhood was an all-too-common occurrence. 

Today, it costs $0.005 to produce the same amount of light thanks to LED lightbulbs. It’s 2-4,000 times cheaper to light a room now than it was in the Roman Empire (and their fire-starting potential also probably decreased around 2-4,000 percent). Yet the luxury of easily navigating our homes in the night rarely crosses our minds. 

We also tend to take for granted plenty of other advancements: penicillin, city water filtration systems, or the efficiency and cleanliness of modern farming. Child mortality rates are the lowest they’ve ever been. A century and a half ago, if you had 10 children, it was anticipated that 3-5 of them wouldn’t survive into adulthood. And without medical imaging technology, they might not even understand why those children died.

My wife recently had a surgery that involved multiple incisions. 50 years ago, medical professionals used much larger incisions that would then lead to prolonged recovery time, risk of infection, and excessive pain. Thankfully, my wife was able to recover in less than a week with no risk of infection.

For all its multitude of negative effects, the market economy has still brought a lot of good. If you were born two centuries ago, your chance of being born into poverty hovered around 50%. Thanks to the spread of commerce, it’s now around 9%. Even though inflation is a cause for worry, the average working-class individual in a level four (first world) country still possesses more material luxuries than a 19^th century aristocrat. 

Further, while obesity is nothing to laugh at, it’s definitely revealing that our hunger problems have reversed so much so that overindulgence has become the more ostensible concern for Westerners. Regardless of our stance on the issue, saints throughout history like Francis de Sales believed it was healthier—both spiritually and physically—to lean toward indulgence rather than asceticism. Thankfully, this is now possible for the global majority. 

Then there are the moral evolutions. Early Christians banned “killing what is born” (Didache, 2.2) – as in, Christians had a responsibility to not abandon or expose infants to the elements. The fact that abandoning infants to starve or to be raised as sex slaves seems heinous is thanks to Christians normalizing its heinousness. Further, while the initial sex revolution of A.D. 60 is often overshadowed by the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the influence of the first revolution is seen in the fact that sex trafficking is now largely socially taboo. As scholar Kyle Harper put it, “The idea that everyone has a right to their own body is an idea that stems from Christianity.”

Much progress is still needed in the arena of gender and sexuality, of course. Yet even though concern about the younger generation’s sexual liberality is warranted, there’s sufficient evidence to suggest that the young are having less sex than ever. For the majority of young people, sex has become simultaneously less religious and yet more sacred, encouraging a vague chasteness. They’re also drinking less, smoking less, and abusing narcotics less than past generations.

Although the lack of religiosity and church attendance among is nothing to sneer at, America is still 62-69% Christian. Since 2012, the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of religious freedom in 15 of the 16 relevant cases. While many trends in religiosity aren’t necessarily uplifting, it’s not all entirely bad, without exception. 

There are many more uniquely advantageous aspects of living in the modern era, but this is a decent start. 

Now, the reason my students have never felt permission to express thankfulness for being alive today is thanks to the normalization of what historians call “chronocentrism.” Similar to ethnocentrists, chronocentrists believe their moment in history is the most significant of them all, thus rendering the past’s hard-won lessons and advancements irrelevant. Chronocentrists overestimate the importance of every daily headline, assuming it’s the turning point the next generation of historians will pen books about. However, today you’re less likely to run into loud and proud chronocentrists than their more popular offshoot: “doomers.” Doomerism assumes that global society is too far gone and beyond repair, which makes it pessimistic and largely hopeless. 

Interestingly, while researching church history, I’ve struggled to find any epoch where doomerism wasn’t present. Along with death and taxes, another certainty seems to be the Christian assumption that the things have never been worse and the end times are just around the corner. From the Thessalonians that Paul addresses in his second letter to their church to the 20^th century dispensationalists, we can trace an unbroken chain from Pentecost to now of theologians who’ve interpreted any sign  of civilizational decay as an omen that the end of all things was at hand. 

Now, there’s truth to the idea that the world will get worse before the eschaton. Lawlessness will increase along with rumors of war (Matt. 24:6, 9-12); ethics will degenerate (2 Tim. 3:1-5); disasters of all kinds will loom over the world (Luke 17:26-30). And yet, even though we’re to stay vigilant and stay awake (Matt. 25:1-13; 1 Thess. 4:13-18), there’s no imperative to worry about the degradation of all things—let alone attempt to predict it. Further, we know beyond a doubt that the Gospel must be proclaimed to every people group on earth before “the end will come” (Matt. 24:14). In some ways, doomerism’s assumptions about impending oblivion circumvent this reality—as if our socio-political forecasts overshadow the words of Jesus. 

My point here is not that the world is wonderful or even the best it’s ever been. Rather, it’s that it’s not as bad as most people, including Christians, assume. Sadly, Christian public voices are often more pessimistic than hopeful. This is problematic, because the continued, unregulated doomerism about everything is not a magnetic way to inhabit the world. The last people I want to receive a newsletter from are those who have become numb to hope because of the daily overload of negative headlines. It’s not a compelling way to embody Christ in and to the world. 

But neither am I unconcerned for the younger generations. They’re less outgoing, confident, and socially connected. Their attention spans and emotional regulation are worsening thanks to TikTok and screen technologies. Perhaps one of the most fundamentally indisputable problems today is the way that overstimulation gets in the way of us living deep, thoughtful, religiously robust lifestyles.

But even still, viewed historically, these concerns aren’t necessarily new. Centuries ago, the elder generations were in a moral panic over the “reading epidemic,” of young folks being so absorbed in reading books that adults worried their brains were rotting. Granted, reading books is objectively better for mental and emotional maturation than TikTok, but it’s helpful to put contemporary observations into conversation with historical trends. 

I’m not even particularly keen on arguing that we should be uniquely happy with society at the moment. I’m horrified by the way AI is impacting us intellectually and economically. It’s a promethean, unregulated technology that deserves more consistent and active criticism. I’m also sad that fewer people are comfortable with boredom and the way that our world’s brightest minds seem unilaterally focused on devising better and better schemes to get people to click on social media ads rather than cultivating moral ambition. 

Instead, what I’d much prefer to see is simply more clarity in the ways in which we define the world as bad. To say, “We’re in a moral decline” is only true for certain realms of morality, such as concern for unborn children. To say, “We’re in a spiritual crisis,” is only true for specific cities at specific times, not across the board everywhere. 

So even though the world is not uniquely bad, it’s also not uniquely good. Sin and the devil still have jurisdiction. Yet, defining everything as inherently bad, or accepting worries of drifting into a godless, TikTok fueled oblivion as if this concern is an established fact will necessarily sacrifice requisite Christian hope. Rather than comprehending Christ’s overcoming of the world, we come to imbibe the poor state we’ve projected onto the world. 

Now, accepting that the world isn’t the horror story news outlets make it out to be comes with the unfortunate potential of passivity. Those who assume the moral arc of history slants toward justice stand the risk of reclining in their chairs and allowing history to do the work. Assuming time and chance will do the work is, of course, nonsense. The only thing that stops evil men is good men who refuse silence and passivity. And the only reason history could ever appear animated by a moral imperative is because God used influential voices in each generation to puppeteer history into better directions. We don’t want to re-impassion a generation of couch potatoes.

Simultaneously, assuming that everything is burning down is just as much of an engine for directionlessness. This is what’s called “learned helplessness.” An overload of doomsday scenarios can frighten us into paralysis. As Eugene Peterson once argued, if we forget to read the headlines as footnotes to Scripture rather than the other way around, “we will finally be too afraid to get out of bed in the morning.” 

It’s natural to interpret the negative in the news as if it is more powerful and prominent than the good. This is just our brain’s negativity bias telling us to stay alert. But in a Christian theological perspective, we have an imperative to not let the negative outweigh the positive, the mourning to drown out the rejoicing, the pessimism to defeat the hope. As the philosopher Josef Pieper has argued, Christian festivity begins from the foundation that the world is “good, and it is good to exist.” This basic assumption is what justifies celebration, joy, the pleasure of communal connection. Without it, we’ll finally become irrevocably helpless.