The Apocalypse Goes Mainstream

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Believing

The Apocalypse Goes Mainstream

About 40 percent of American adults said in a 2022 poll that we are living in the “end times.” Where did that belief come from?

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The Ruby Ridge standoff in Idaho, in August 1992.

Credit...

Mason Marsh/Associated Press

By

Lauren Jackson

I am

the host of Believing

.

April 26, 2026,

5:11 a.m. ET

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I grew up on a cul-de-sac in Arkansas, in a suburban house with a basketball hoop, a trampoline and a few years’ worth of food stored in the garage. My parents built industrial shelves and lined them with gleaming canisters of freeze-dried potatoes and green beans, boxes of stabilized milk and Ziplocs of beef jerky. They also stored hundreds of pouches of mac n’ cheese for me, the family’s pickiest eater.

My parents believed that the apocalypse loomed. They weren’t alone.

About 40 percent of American adults said

in a 2022 poll

that we are living in the “end times.” For much of the country, it’s an idea that’s almost mundane. The rapture is spliced into their Sunday sermons and enchants their world with a fearsome possibility. I’d hear bad news on television as a kid and think, is this it? Has the time come?

It’s an idea that’s now bouncing around, too, at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

The Trump administration has framed its campaign in Iran as a biblically-prophesied holy war. Paula White-Cain, the head of the White House Faith Office,

asked

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu whether the conflict was a sign of the “End of Days.”

That’s also the title of a new book by Chris Jennings, a journalist who used to work at The New Yorker. The book looks back at Ruby Ridge, the violent 1990s standoff between federal law enforcement and a survivalist family in Idaho. It also seeks to explain the emergence of apocalyptic rhetoric in the United States, and how it has shaped modern conspiracies like QAnon.

Ruby Ridge, Jennings writes, portended “a slow-moving ontological crack up, the fracturing of American reality itself.” I am fascinated by that, so I asked him how apocalyptic thinking became so prevalent and potent in American life.

Your first book was about an early American

pursuit of utopia

, and your second was about a modern American embrace of apocalyptic fear. Do those come from the same impulse?

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