“Faith is the strength by which a shattered world shall emerge into the light.”
Helen Keller (1930)
In many apocalyptic narratives, catastrophe is seldom the end point. What emerges in the aftermath—whatever remains of community, meaning, or identity—often depends on the stories people tell and the beliefs they cling to when the familiar world collapses. This special issue explores how apocalyptic settings generate new forms of faith, whether through formal religions, personal revelation, or improvised belief systems that arise in moments of crisis. Although the works we examine differ greatly in style and genre, they share a common interest in exploring how in worlds marked by uncertainty, characters turn to belief as a way to navigate fear, instability and the search for purpose.
Across cultures and historical periods, apocalyptic thought has been deeply entwined with religious imagination. From the Hebrew Bible and early Christian writings to Islamic eschatology, Hindu cycles of destruction and renewal, and Buddhist visions of cosmic decline, apocalyptic narratives have long functioned as frameworks for interpreting crisis and transformation. These stories do more than predict catastrophic endings—they offer moral explanations for disorder, reaffirm communal identity, and promise the possibility of renewal beyond collapse. Because of this, the apocalypse has historically served as both a warning and a source of hope, revealing how religious traditions use imagined endings to explore questions of justice, meaning, and human responsibility. Situating our articles within this long lineage shows how contemporary stories continue to draw on ancient patterns, reinventing them for new cultural contexts.
This theme also speaks directly to the wider concerns of apocalyptic cultures. Apocalypses, whether global, social, or deeply personal, destabilise existing structures—but they also create openings for meaning-making. As old certainties fail, new systems of belief emerge, some reassuring, some misguided, and some knowingly constructed. These shifts invite us to reconsider what belief looks like when the structures that once supported it begin to fracture, leading naturally to a set of broader conceptual questions that frame this special issue:
Why does the end of the world so often trigger a return to faith?
What counts as “religion” when divine authority is absent, unreliable, or reframed?
How do crises reshape the desire for people to believe in something more?
Taken together, these questions reveal a shared insight across all three articles: that when apocalyptic events unsettle the structures that normally organise meaning—whether religious, social, or rational—faith re-emerges as a flexible mode of belief that helps characters rebuild identity, purpose, and community. Rather than treating faith as a retreat into dogma, this special issue argues that apocalyptic worlds compel a turn toward belief because they expose the limits of the systems that once promised stability.
Here, it becomes important to distinguish faith from institutionalised religion. Faith is not merely what remains when religious systems fail. It also stands in contrast to the ideals of modern rationality—efficiency, order, predictability, and secular logic—that underpin contemporary society. In many apocalyptic narratives, it is precisely the collapse of these rational frameworks that makes space for faith to resurface. When the world no longer coheres through reason, characters turn to belief as a way to make sense of uncertainty, reclaim agency, and imagine forms of renewal that logic alone cannot supply.
As a group, we found that ‘faith’ offered a more expansive analytic frame than ‘religion’, allowing us to examine formal doctrine alongside personal conviction, improvisational belief systems, and secular or symbolic forms of meaning-making that arise in crisis. Our three articles answer the above-mentioned questions from distinct angles, forming a coherent conversation about the persistence—and transformation—of faith in apocalyptic settings:
The first article by Sivakumar Abhayaa investigates The Lego Movie, uncovering how a children’s film unexpectedly draws on the full structure of biblical eschatology—from prophecy and messianic calling to revelation and collective renewal. Through Emmet’s journey, the film reimagines apocalypse as an act of creative rebuilding rather than destruction, showing how religious allegory can be embedded in contemporary media to explore hope after collapse.
The second article by Angel Lim examines Philip Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, showing how the novel’s religion, Mercerism, functions not as a path to salvation but more as a structure that gives meaning to suffering, turning collective suffering into a performance of faith and humanity. Even after its prophet is revealed to be a hoax, believers continue their rituals, revealing that religion’s power lies less in authentic prophecy than in the communal emotional needs it fulfils.
The final article by Annie Du turns to Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, reframing Connie’s suburban crisis as a personal apocalypse shaped by Christian symbolism and existential questioning. Instead of cosmic destruction, this text shows an inward unraveling in which pop culture becomes a substitute religion that ultimately fails her. By reading Connie’s collapse through Kierkegaard and Kafka, the article reveals how apocalyptic thinking can unfold in the loss of spiritual direction, even without a literal end-times scenario.
Placed together, these articles illuminate how diverse frameworks of belief—whether religious, symbolic, or improvisational—continue to shape apocalyptic imagination across genres, whether through dystopian ritual, suburban crisis, or animated spectacle. Each text offers a different answer to the central question that guides this issue: when worlds fall apart—externally or internally—why do characters return to belief? By situating these responses side by side, this special issue reveals the surprising resilience of faith at the threshold of the end, and the diverse forms it takes when certainty disappears.