There seems to be quite a bit of chatter about the end of times in the news. Yesterday, I wrote about Peter Thiel hosting a four-day event on the Apocalypse. Then, a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that one in three Americans believes the world will end during their lifetime. Not “might end someday” — ends, with them still around to see it. Researchers at the University of British Columbia surveyed over 1,400 people and discovered that doomsday believers in America now include Evangelical congregations, climate activists, Silicon Valley executives warning about rogue AI, and rural prepper communities stockpiling canned goods. Between 29% and 39% of Americans think they’re currently living in the end times.
This isn’t fringe thinking anymore. It’s statistically normal.
Five Flavors of Apocalypse
Before the researchers could measure anything, they had to solve a basic problem: apocalyptic belief looks wildly different from person to person. A Pentecostal pastor awaiting the Rapture, a climate scientist watching ice sheets disappear, and a tech entrepreneur warning about rogue AI might all believe catastrophe is coming — but for completely different reasons, with completely different feelings about it, and with very different ideas about what anyone can do.
The team built a 25-item scale measuring five distinct dimensions: how imminent the end feels, whether humans or God will cause it, how much personal control someone feels over the outcome, and whether the end is viewed as something dreadful or something to welcome. These dimensions turned out to be psychologically distinct from general pessimism, fatalism, or death anxiety. Apocalyptic belief functions as its own way of making sense of the world.
The main survey drew from six religious groups: Catholics, Mainline Protestants, Evangelical Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and people with no religious affiliation. Participants answered questions about five categories of global risk — economic threats, environmental disasters, geopolitical conflict, societal breakdown, and technological dangers like AI and disinformation. They reported how seriously they took each threat and whether they would support extreme measures to address it, including devoting 10% of U.S. GDP to the problem, instituting martial law, or overthrowing the current government.
When the researchers compared doomsday beliefs against other variables — political orientation, cultural worldviews, personal experience with risk, community norms — apocalyptic belief consistently ranked near the top. It accounted for roughly 15% of the variation in how severely people perceived global threats and about 16% of the variation in how much risk they were willing to tolerate. Political conservatism explained less than 6% of the variation in end-of-world beliefs themselves.
The Specific Belief Drives the Response
Not all apocalyptic thinking points in the same direction. People who believed humans were responsible for bringing about the end — pointing to climate change, nuclear weapons, or runaway technology — were more likely to see global threats as urgent and severe. People who believed God or supernatural forces controlled the end times were significantly less likely to support extreme action to address those same threats.
Those who felt some personal stake in how events unfold, and who viewed the end with something closer to acceptance than terror, were more willing to both tolerate risk and push for drastic responses to it.
One finding stumped the researchers. People who believed the end of the world would ultimately be a good thing still tended to support extreme action to prevent existential threats. If someone thinks the apocalypse is a welcome event, why work so hard to stop it? The team checked whether this was simply ideological extremism, but accounting for religious fundamentalism and conspiratorial thinking didn’t change the result.
Religious group shaped the picture in ways that went beyond devotion levels. Evangelical Protestants scored the highest among Christian groups on perceived closeness to the end, belief in divine causality, and positive emotional valence toward the apocalypse. Muslim participants scored the highest across all five dimensions. Nonreligious participants scored the lowest on perceived closeness and divine causality, though they were roughly in line with everyone else on the belief that humans could cause a global catastrophe.
Younger participants tended to hold stronger apocalyptic beliefs than older ones across most groups. The exceptions: Evangelical Protestants, in whom belief didn’t decline with age, and Muslims, in whom it appeared to increase.
What It Means When a Third of the Country Thinks This Way
The study can’t say whether apocalyptic beliefs cause changes in risk behavior, or whether some deeper trait produces both. And because all participants came from Abrahamic religious traditions in the U.S. and Canada, it’s an open question how the findings would hold across other cultures — particularly those with cyclical rather than linear views of time and history.
What the researchers are willing to say: the stakes are concrete. Beliefs that a COVID-19 vaccine represented the Mark of the Beast fueled vaccine hesitancy in some religious communities. Climate dread has been linked to declining willingness among young people to have children. At a moment when the world’s most serious problems demand coordinated responses across deep cultural and religious divides, knowing what drives some people toward action and others toward passivity may be among the most useful things psychology can offer.
Belief in the end of the world turns out to be a serious variable, not a sideshow.