Episode Details

Brian takes an entirely new and unexpected direction in this latest book: it’s not enough to talk about bringing heaven down to earth, we have to stop creating hell on earth.

Brian MacLaren is widely recognized in the Evangelical community. In fact, in 2015, Time magazine named him one of the 25 most influential Evangelicals in America! But he’s been on a journey through Evangelicalism that whole time, and he recounts some of that history during the first few minutes of our conversation with him. He’s documented the details of that journey in his many books … over two dozen of them. If you’ve read even a few of them, especially the most recent ones, you’d be forgiven for making hasty assumptions about the subject of this next one. But I guarantee you would never have predicted this one.

Life After Doom is about the coming apocalypse …. total ecological and societal collapse. As he put it: “we have created a civilization that, the more it succeeds, the faster it accelerates toward suicide … we’re sucking more resources out of the earth than it can sustain, and we’re pumping out more waste products than the earth can detoxify … we’re destroying our life support system.” After years of fact checking and careful research, he’s not sure if it’s even possible to turn our civilization around, or if the better thing is to let this one fall apart so that something better can be built in the ruins. Many experts feel it’s too late for change.

Brian envisions these two major collapses — of human society, and of Earth’s ecology — interacting with each other, producing four likely outcomes:

• Scenario 1: Collapse Avoidance: civilization destabilizes the ecology, and ecological decline destabilizes civilization; humanity gets its act together and drops in number to a level that Earth’s ecology can sustain (~2.5 billion people); this will be a slow, painful, and costly outcome.
• Scenario 2: Collapse/Rebirth: civilization doesn’t learn fast enough, and essentially collapses; but the ecosystem rebounds in time for a remnant to survive and rebuild that more sustainable (and possibly even enjoyable) existence on the planet, in harmony with the planet
• Scenario 3: Collapse/Survival