From the mega-best-selling “Left Behind” novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, to films like 2012 and I am Legend, the end of the world fascinates us. While the idea of apocalypse is ancient, conservative American Christianity has refined it into a gory, glorious epic, then exported it, with implications for the environment and international relations, not to mention the economy. What is it that leads us toward apocalypse? On September 12, Kel Munger will reprise her recent presentation for the Sacramento City Freethinkers, and offer theories, including her favorite: that Armageddon is the True Believers’ big chance to yell “f*ck you!” at a culture they cannot master.

Kel Munger is a writer and editor at the Sacramento News & Review. Her journalism has won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association. She has also won prizes and honors for her poetry and fiction, including a Pearl Hogrefe Fellowship. She is the author of The Fragile Peace You Keep: Poems (New Rivers Press, 1998), and her first novel is currently under consideration at Southeast Missouri State University Press. She is a recovering Jehovah’s Witness.