Life After Doom

Brian McLaren has been thinking and writing about the Christian faith and how the faith as we have received it needs to change for many years. He was an evangelical pastor for a while, then became involved in what was then known as the “emergent” movement. That movement has since died, but Brian continues to write and speak about theology and contemporary culture. In 2015 he was named by Time Magazine as one of the 25 most influential Christians in America.

His most influential book was probably A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions that are Transforming the Faith (2011). That was the book of his that most impacted me. Since then I haven’t read much of him, although recently I did read The Great Spiritual Migration: How the World's Largest Religion Is Seeking a Better Way to Be Christian (2017).

Brian is smart, well-read, broad in his perspective and the sources from which he draws. In 2024 he published a very different, unique book, called Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart. The book was recommended to me by a good friend of mine, and in November I attended (online) a group study of the book put together by The BTS Center: Spiritual Leadership for a Climate-Changed World.

This book falls best under the category “eco-realism”. McLaren “engages with the catastrophic failure of both our religious and political leaders to address the dominant realities of our time: ecological overshoot, economic injustice, and the increasing likeliness of civilizational collapse. McLaren defines doom as the ‘unpeaceful, uneasy, unwanted feeling’ that ‘we humans have made a mess of our civilization and our planet, and not enough of us seem to care enough to change deeply enough or quickly enough to save ourselves'.” (cover note)

“We’re passengers on a brakeless economic runaway train engineered by and for a feckless global elite who amass more economic, media and political power every second. No, it’s even worse than that: we aren’t passengers on the train; we – along with the whole Earth – are the fuel.” (3,4)

A small group of people is starting to realize that there is very little anyone can do anymore to avoid civilizational collapse. It might happen soon; it might take centuries. But a process has been set in motion by humans that, unless some revolutionary change in thinking and behavior happens, could well esult in the extinction of our species.

Stop and think for a moment about what you just read. I didn’t say that each one of us is going to die. That is true. All of us believe that. I said that our species could die. That at a certain point in time you will have no more living descendants. There will be no more humans. There will be no one left to do archeological digs to discover what America was like in the early part of the 21st century.

And what is most striking about this – after all, more than 99 percent of all species that have ever lived on the planet are now extinct - is that we humans are the cause of our own demise. This will be a first in the history of the world.

If you stop and think about that for a moment, you will likely feel that everything in you resists that thought. If you are religious, you will say that your theology teaches you that humans are the crown of creation and are, in the end, immortal. If you are not religious, you will say that humans have evolved to such a point that we will be able to solve and resolve every crisis that we face. We will figure it out. There is no way we are not going to continue to exist, and any serious suggestion of our extinction as a species is doomist, crackpot, conspiracy-theory nonsense, along the line of those who filled their basements with spare food, guns and ammunition in preparation for Y2K.

Others of you are just tired and depressed after the last decade of American (western) history. We’re tired of economic up-and-down swings, we’re tired of toxic political partisanship, we’re tired of Donald Trump, we’re tired from COVID-19, we’re tired of political and religious scandal, we’re tired of fighting, we’re tired of all the talking heads. We’re depressed and we don’t need a message of doom. We long for the “joy” of the (failed!!) Harris campaign. Don’t come at me with a book on doom.

McLaren recognizes the tiredness and depression, the feeling that thinking about these things is a first-world luxury problem, only for those who aren’t working two jobs to keep the collection agencies at bay. He recognizes that you might not have the bandwidth for this kind of discussion right now.

“If you are already on the edge of a narrow ledge of anxiety and depression because of personal challenges, grief, or illness, this book is not for you. At least not right now.” (6)

But there’s another group that probably shouldn’t read this book either:

This book “is not for you if you think that problems like climate change, ecological overshoot, economic inequality, racial injustice, and religious corruption are nothing but a hoax…Nor is it for you if you are looking for a book that is primarily religious or theological…This book is written by a human being for you as a human being, whether you consider yourself religious or spiritual or skeptical, because we’re all in this mess together.” (6,7)

My goal in this series of blogposts is to summarize the book for you. That will help me process it, and perhaps introduce you to some of its concepts. It is, in the end, a book of hope, but in order to have realistic hope – not a pie-in-the-sky hope – we need to wade through the rough terrain.

At least, I believe we do.

Join me!