Midweek Musings - April 23, 2025
Doomsday Preparation; the Folly of Materialism; Teenage Saints; Who Speaks for the Trees?; Don't Forget the Peeps
Apparently doomsday prep is big business these days. I had no idea.
While the story ran in the New York Times Magazine a couple weeks ago, I missed Coralie Kraft’s feature when it came out. The story is a fascinating window into a current within American culture at the moment, but the photography with the story is especially captivating.
The growth of the industry is noteworthy, to be sure. But some of the anecdotes—including reports of a multimillion dollar compound under construction in Michigan with a flammable moat—are what really stand out.
I’m a conservative Christian so I’ll be the first to admit that my operating assumptions about human nature and the overall arc of history tend not to be the most cheery. However, I tend to think of myself as a pretty easygoing guy. Ask my family and those I work with and I suspect phrases like, “It’s going to work out” or “We’ll get there” are among some of my more overused ones. In fact, I once had a boss who seemed perturbed that I was not as perturbed as he was. I remain generally unperturbed.
That said, I think I can understand what might be fueling some of this doomsday zeitgeist. I am something of a student of Cold War America, after all, and suspect there are some echoes here. No, we’re not doing duck and cover drills in case of a Soviet nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile strike, nor are we fantasizing about an adolescent guerrilla resistance group fending off a commie invasion of Colorado (Wolverines!). But those anxieties did fuel a civil defense engine. among other things, they convinced a good number of Americans that having a well-stocked fallout shelter might a sound investment in case of a nuclear disaster.
During that era, those anxieties and the industries they fueled seemed predominantly focused on the threats from far away. While there may be some of that still (note the reference in the Times feature to one person who notes his preparation for the possibility of a North Korean strike), it seems like the perceived threats now are far more diverse and many of them domestic.
In one sense, it seems to reveal that we are not only fearful of other nations, but we’re also often deeply distrustful of our own neighbors and fellow citizens. Our own political culture here in the United States certainly seems to bear that out. We seem to have largely lost the ability to give one another the benefit of the doubt. So political disagreements are now construed as ideological death matches. We’ve lost the ability to have a serious intellectual and political debate where we begin with the assumption that the other side, as misguided as they may be, is still fundamentally committed to national flourishing.
And I suspect that this political culture has bled into religious communities, including churches. I’ll leave it to the sociologists and pollsters to give a proper assessment of that hunch. But I think we all sense that the very idea of extending trust, of giving the benefit of the doubt, of understanding the difference between an opponent and an enemy… all of these social goods seem to have eroded in recent years.
Of course, there are plenty of present circumstances one can point to as reasonable grounds for less trust, less civility, less solidarity. And I’ll leave that to the political scientists and pundits. Suffice it to say, American culture is in a state of profound disequilibrium and it does seem as though we are navigating through a season of political realignment and social upheaval. As has most often been the case in American history, I am hopeful it will yield a national renewal of civic bonds and social order.
So I’m actually optimistic about what might happen in the next ten years. That’s largely animated by my confidence in the American experiment and our constitutional democracy’s capacity to emerge through seasons of conflict and turmoil with renewed strength. But I’m far more eternally hopeful about what will happen in the next ten millennia. I could be wrong, but I don’t think Christ’s return will take that long. It’s that same impulse as a conservative Christian that makes me incredibly hopeful and confident about the ultimate plot line of human history and the eschaton. Yes, it’s going to get worse before it gets better. But Christian orthodoxy assures me that whatever blip this life is and however relatively brief human history really is on this side of Christ’s coming, it’s all really just a brief momentary prelude before the unending future storyline of a redeemed and renewed cosmos where all things are put to right.
I found it somewhat ironic that this development was featured in the New York Times in recent weeks, shortly before Easter. After all, Jesus taught us something about rightly ordered fears:
“Don’t fear those who kill the body but are not able to kill the soul; rather, fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28, CSB).
It may sound like fire and brimstone, but there is a sure doomsday coming. Prepping for that? Well, it looks more like repentance and faith in the risen Christ than it does digging a bunker or stockpiling iodine pills. After all, what fools would we be if we had flammable moats to protect us from whatever human dystopia we imagine but have not availed ourselves of the only safety available to us at the end of the age. You can build bigger barns (Luke 12:18)—and bunkers, I suppose—but if you haven’t prepared for the eschaton, you haven’t really prepared at all.
But the good news? It comes right there in Matthew 10, right after Jesus’ exhortation about who we should fear:
“Aren’t two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s consent” (Matthew 10:29, CSB).
Are you fearful and restless? Maybe the antidote is less bunkers and more birdwatching.
The Illusion of Reductive Materialism
If you enjoy philosophy, you’ll want to read Kit Wilson’s essay in The Hedgehog Review on the coherence of scientific materialism in the modern age. Here’s how it starts:
When we look back on history, we find in almost every culture some belief or other that commanded near-universal respect—that even acquired a kind of intellectual invulnerability—despite now seeming to us absurd. When future historians look back at our age, I think they will count reductive materialism among such beliefs.
Reductive materialism is the view that all of reality can be explained by, and ultimately reduced to, the purely physical. Whatever cannot be accounted for in this way—consciousness, morality, free will, feelings—must be illusory. As the biologist Francis Crick likes to point out, this includes even you: “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”
As Wilson points out, even the most adamant of the materialists don’t actually live like consistent materialists. To do so would, after all, demand the abandonment of any sort of universal moral standard or baseline of decency.
Teenage Boys and Saints in a Disenchanted Age
Emily Harnett has a long essay in the current issue of Harper’s telling the story of Carlo Acutis, an Italian teenager who died of leukemia in 2006 and is expected to be canonized by the Vatican in short order. Originally scheduled for this Sunday, the Vatican has suspended (postponed?) it after the death of Pope Francis. As Harnett notes, Acutis is of particular interest not only to devout Roman Catholics, but is also noteworthy as a “millennial saint.”
You’ll have to decide if you’re sufficiently interested in the whole story to read it in its entirety. No surprise, as a pretty rock-ribbed Protestant, I don’t go in for the canonization stuff. But there was a paragraph in Harnett’s feature that grabbed my attention:
“I rarely meet a teenage boy who isn’t nostalgic for a time he never actually knew. He lives in an era when chatbots can do his homework, when he can watch sports highlights in the middle of class, and yet still he binges episodes of Friends, fascinated by a time when people hung out at one another’s houses without the distraction of smartphones. People like to suggest that the young have replaced God with an idolatrous relationship with technology, but this seems, in part, a projection. No one, in my experience, is more disillusioned with technology than the American teenage boy, precisely because he’s so dependent on it. He makes fun of his classmates for their excessive screen time; he diagnoses his peers with phone-induced “brain rot.” He is convinced that the life he’s living—governed by school and homework, mediated increasingly by screens—is not real life. He is, more than anyone I know, desperate to be amazed.”
In Harnett’s telling this is part of her framework for trying to understand how someone of Acutis’ generation could have had such an interest in traditional expressions of Catholic devotion. But I think she’s right to suggest something even bigger here. I suspect our teenage boys are telling us something, if we’re listening. They’re longing for something bigger and grander than the next dopamine hit.
An Ode to (and Lament for) Trees
If you missed Earth Day this week, check out Peter Hitchens’ short reflection on trees and their disappearance from England:
“I hate the cutting down of trees, even though I know that it is sometimes necessary. Trees are the lovely works of God, still living in every city among the ugly works of man. These large friendly vegetables are not just plants, but stores of goodness, peace and calm. I once tried hugging one and got nothing out of it. But a walk amid great woods will always mysteriously refresh my spirit. If ever I hear chainsaws nearby, I fear the worst.”
I’ll leave it to the English to sort out their own arboreal dilemmas. But if the prophet Isaiah was right and there is a day coming when mountains will sing and trees will clap to the doxological worship chorus of the cosmos… well, Tolkien and Lewis were onto something.
Peep Appreciation
If you didn’t get your fill of Peeps during the Easter holiday, you’ll want to check out this feature from the Philadelphia Inquirer. I’m no devotee of the candied marshmallows, but have to admit I still found this interesting.
“Just Born makes 2 billion Peeps every year — enough to circle the globe two times, according to brand manager Caitlin Servian — and every one of the plump, fluffy, sugarcoated marshmallows is hatched on a conveyor belt inside this three-story Lehigh Valley plant. Peeps are not the only candy manufactured here, but they are undoubtedly what draws tourists to this otherwise-quiet part of Bethlehem, Pa., where the company has been headquartered since 1932.”
During my years in southeastern Pennsylvania, Peeps did seem to be ubiquitous (I mean, you can’t eat TastyKakes for every holiday can you? Oh wait, you can). But I had no idea about their ties to Lancaster:
Samuel Born started Just Born — at first specializing in "French chocolates" — in Brooklyn in 1923. By the time the company moved to Bethlehem, he had brought on his brothers-in-law, Irv and Jack Shaffer, and Just Born had started segueing toward jelly candies. It introduced Mike and Ikes in 1940 and Hot Tamales in 1950. In 1953, Just Born acquired Lancaster's Rodda Candy Co., known for its jelly eggs. They had also unwittingly purchased what would become the company's biggest brand.
Rodda had been making marshmallow Easter candy in Lancaster since at least 1936. The "peeps and chicks‚" priced at 1 cent apiece, were advertised in several Lancaster newspapers at the time, along with its jelly eggs, hollow eggs, and coconut cream eggs. The original Rodda Peeps (as they were marketed until the early aughts) came in yellow, pink, and white and had two little wings tucked against their backs. They were hand-piped, the still-warm marshmallow painstakingly squeezed out of 15-pound pastry bags by a fleet of women who reportedly went home with hands cramped and swollen.
You’re welcome, America.
What I’m Reading
Richard Carwardine, Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Union (Knopf)